Strategic management of an Innovation and Transformation Center to support quality improvement infrastructure and performance excellence

The Problem

John Peter Smith (JPS) Health Network is a major public health care delivery system in Fort Worth, Texas and is the anchor entity for Region 10’s Regional Healthcare Partnership (RHP) plan as part of Texas’ 1115 Medicaid waiver. Many workflows and administrative and clinical processes at JPS were inefficient and unreliable, resulting in wasteful spending of human and financial resources.

Divisions between the silos of administration, nursing, support services, and medical staff have resulted in a multiplicity of parallel and overlapping improvement efforts. No clearinghouse or vetting process for improvement efforts existed prior to COPE Health Solutions’ engagement, and the work of communicating across functional divisions was not assigned to any particular unit.

The Solution

As part of an initial engagement to implement Region 10’s Delivery System Reform Incentive Pool (DSRIP) projects for the 1115 Medicaid waiver, JPS engaged COPE Health Solutions to provide strategic management for a newly created Innovation and Transformation Center (ITC) – a unit that will serve as the central authority for performance excellence and will support the development of critical, organization-wide initiatives across the entire JPS Health Network.

COPE Health Solutions provided strategic management expertise to the ITC by assisting JPS in defining a continuous quality improvement and performance excellence infrastructure, developing a uniform change management approach that utilizes proven methods such as Lean, Six Sigma, and Rapid Cycle Improvement, and outlining budget and implementation planning of the ITC program.

Results

• Gained stakeholder alignment on the role of the ITC through multiple workgroup kick-off events
• Facilitated on-site visits to best practice sites: Group Health and Virginia Mason Medical Center (Seattle, WA) and UCLA Health System (Los Angeles, CA)
• Identified and reviewed best practices for implementation of ITC
• Developed and gained consensus on a preferred vision for the ITC and its capabilities
• Conducted Lean Competency and Gap Assessments
• Recommended optimal methods for deploying and cascading knowledge and capabilities throughout the entire network