THE VALUED VOICE

Member Quality Spotlight: UW Health, Madison

Breaking down the silos! Driving improvement through collaboration

UW Health encourages improvement work in many areas in response to data, but as an organization has been siloed. Given the synergy between staff satisfaction and a culture of safety and patient experience, a cross-functional work group was needed to break down the silos and make improvements. A cross functional group was developed to evaluate data, understand variation and develop a process to promote process improvement work.

This cross-functional group played a vital role in educating UW leaders on how to incorporate process improvement into their daily routines. Over the course of just over a year, process improvement education sessions occurred through various venues, including all level leadership and frontline committee meetings. Each leader and area were tasked with submitting improvement work using the A3 problem solving tool pertaining to any of the survey data that was available to them. 

After the year, there had been more than 250 A3’s in round one and 204 A3’s in round two submitted and reviewed by the cross functional team. The group encouraged cascading process improvement so uplines and downlines were aware of process improvement that was occurring in their areas, with the ultimate goal of director-level leadership being able to coach managers and others through the A3 process.

See the poster presentation here.