Hospital and
Healthcare Cross
Functional Teams
An effective - if not the most effective -
means of implementing high impact and long term hospital and healthcare process improvements is
through the use of cross-functional teams. The term cross-functional means
people from various parts of the process working together to define and
implement changes and improvements. The processes addressed by
cross-functional teams are, by definition, those that cut across
hospital and healthcare organizational lines and ones that have a large impact on a number of
parts of the organization, as well as the organization as a whole. These
high impact processes are not addressable by an individual manager and
their organization. You can't address these processes using the reporting
structure on the organization chart.
Hospital and
healthcare key patient care and administrative cross-functional
process improvement team projects can yield high payoff
improvements in quality, safety, cash flow, and patient satisfaction when
all the right people are on the team. For
example, if patient / customer satisfaction is to be improved, the
administrative and clinical care departments must be involved, plus any
other organizational entity or function that affects product or service
performance or has any interface with the external customer.
Much time is wasted by organizations trying
to learn how to manage hospital and healthcare cross-functional teams by using a trial-and-error
approach. The most effective cross-functional team is one that insures the
participation of staff from all areas of the process and is led by
experienced leadership. Many teams that do not have good leadership and
comprehensive representation fall short of their process improvement goals
and never achieve the essential staff buy-in required for lasting, long
term change and improvement.
Characteristics of successful hospital and
healthcare cross-functional teams include:
- Equal and active participation is
encouraged from all team members - all ideas are welcomed;
- Teams practice effective time
management, using valuable team time to focus on the critical and high
impact areas of process improvement;
- Cross-functional teams use experienced
facilitation to keep them on track; and
- Teams are results oriented, wanting to
use their knowledge and skills on implementing improvements that will
make a difference in the quality of patient care and operations.
Not only have Shaw Resources consultants
led over 150 hospital and healthcare cross-functional team projects, but they have also trained
team leaders within the organization to become effective group leaders. An
additional 200 plus teams have been launched and led by Shaw-trained
hospital and healthcare team
leaders. An experienced Shaw consultant guides a cross-functional process
improvement project from process identification and selection through the
achievement of the initial improvements. The project can then be turned
over to an internal team leader who has received on-the-job training by
the Shaw consultant. The initial improvement in the selected process may
be so cost effective that the improvements will offset or exceed the cost
of the consultant.
Shaw consultants approach hospital and
healthcare cross-functional
team projects with a proven methodology and a high level of confidence
that only comes from experience and knowledge. The cross-functional team
support toolbox is deep, and Shaw consultants have authored a number of
papers and articles on cross-functional team methods. Use the Shaw
patented method - Customer-Inspired Process
Deployment® as the foundation
for your process improvement program and its cross-functional teams.
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