David M. Williams, Ph.D., executive director at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement , writes in Hospital Impact about five things that make for an effective hospital chief quality officer:
- “Create the infrastructure to support quality. To succeed, a CQO must set up a strong quality department, develop strong physician leadership, align staff incentives to quality and link quality with financial goals—including those related to cost reduction, population health and value-based payments.”
- “Understand and design services to meet the customer’s need. One of the central tenets of improvement science is to meet the needs of the customer. CQOs must lead organizations to understand their patients’ needs and translate that understanding into annual and five-year quality plans.”
- “Create breakthroughs in quality improvement. No matter how robust the planning and design process is, there will always be aspects of services that fail to meet customer needs. Quality improvement is not only necessary to fix broken processes, but also to refine and innovate.”
- “Sustain performance through predictable and reliable processes. Once stable processes have been developed, quality leaders must closely manage performance.”
- “Foster a culture that turns every person in the system into an improver. IHI’s framework for high-impact leadership describes a set of behaviors that result from a clear understanding of continual improvement and the leader’s role in promoting it across a system. These behaviors include an unrelenting focus on person-centeredness, the use of transparency as a lever and coaching to develop knowledge. CQOs can start right away on this last behavior by encouraging others to test their ideas.”
To read his entire essay, please hit this link.
