Making Improvement Simple

The Challenge: Healthcare leaders today are faced with an enormous challenge—to help their teams make sense of multiple initiatives to improve the quality of care, enhance patient safety, deliver an outstanding experience that is patient-centered, and align their behaviors with the organization’s mission and values. And do that efficiently with the highest professional standards! It is no wonder that teams experience initiative overload when asked to make continual changes on all of these fronts.

The Simple Solution: StoryCare® assists teams to improve their performance by using a simple learning paradigm that has roots in how cultures through the ages have engaged people with change. By placing the patient’s experience and safety at the center of your caregivers’ attention, StoryCare is just-in-time simulation training that helps them develop an easy approach to meeting the complex demands that multiple initiatives exert on busy schedules. In fact, it requires less than 15 minutes, and no online or classroom training away from patient care.

Targets for Improvement: Designed to integrate with Patient Experience (HCAHPS), Partnership for Patients and Quality of Care criteria, as well as TeamSTEPPS® (Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety), StoryCare provides a protocol for change that is designed and determined by staff at the team level, thereby maximizing ownership—a key with any effort to drive enterprise-wide transformation. Team members decide what behavioral changes they want to undertake that align with organizational expectations for improvement, and collectively choose which behaviors they’d like to adopt.

Engagement and Flexibility: StoryCare makes use of the natural social reinforcement that occurs when groups come together to reflect on their behavior and performance, and collectively set their sights on accomplishing a new objective. Because StoryCare is integrally linked to an assessment process driven by both patient safety culture and patient satisfaction survey tools, the StoryCare solution demonstrates clear, definable results by giving healthcare leaders a scorecard and a roadmap for future improvement actions. This is a simple, cost-effective, and pre-emptive solution to an accelerating business issue—instituting sustainable change that aligns team performance with escalating satisfaction requirements and safety protocols that are tied to reimbursement payments.