Physician Partnering
Improving healthcare process performance must necessarily
involve medical staff - including referring physicians. Their expertise, buy-in and
leadership is a key success factor. Medical staff can serve in many roles sometimes two
roles simultaneously. A referring physician, for example, can be a supplier of critical
care as a process step and at the same time a customer of other processes. That creates a
win-win opportunity for processes to supply high quality outputs to physicians and, at the
same time, benefit from increased referrals from satisfied physicians.
The Shaw method involves medical staff
from the get-go. Medical staff are enrolled as process managers and as team leaders. Other
medical staff act as team members and as sources of expertise. A "Provide Emergency
Services" process improvement team will have emergency physicians involved in some
way as they cannot succeed without the expertise of the physician, yet still recognizes
the role of the physician as a customer for the process. Outputs supplied to emergency
physicians range from convenient, well stocked areas to provide care to timely triage and
registration of emergency room patients.
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