Video Transcript: Model For Improvement (Clip 2)

Let�s think about improving patient satisfaction. To take people from being neutral�or, often times, not real happy�with the services or the care they get to making them happy customers. How do we do that?

We might have a survey that we use on a regular basis. And right now, we see that we�re only getting about 45% of the patients in our outpatient clinic saying that they are �very satisfied� with the care they�ve received. Well, we might say, if we�re developing our aim statement, �How good do we want to be? We want to be at higher than 75%.� How good and by when? �We�re going to do that over the next six months.�

So anytime we write an aim statement, we want to know how good and by when. That is, we�re at 45% that are very satisfied and, within six months, we want to elevate that up to 75% that are very satisfied.

Now, the measures; we want to look at an outcome measure. The outcome measure might be the percent marking �Very Satisfied.� That might just be a simple measure of the outcome. But we also then need to have process measures�maybe it�s the wait time in the clinic, maybe it�s the availability of an appointment. These would be two very useful process measures because those processes will in fact influence the outcome that is satisfaction. Then what changes are we going to have? Well, the changes might be that we�re going to have early pre-registration. That might be an idea. We might allow people to send in information via the Internet or fax in their request, and we might have a tickler system where we call them back to remind them of their appointment.

So now, we�ve combined the three questions: our aim, our measures, and our change concepts. We�re then going to go out and do that. Starting next Monday, we�re going to empower the team and start doing these changes and see if the satisfaction survey results actually start tracking. And then what we�re going to do is we�re going to track Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., and we�re going to track the percent saying �very satisfied� and we�ll be able to start making a chart. We�ll mark where we instituted one of the changes and then we�ll see if in fact it had the desired effect of moving it upwards.

So by combining the three questions with the PDSA cycle, we�re setting ourselves on a very good path to give us guidance and direction with the Model For Improvement.

The Model for Improvement was developed by Associates in Process Improvement