We are cereal boxes awaiting the convenience of providers to decide when they will deem to place us on their shelves....
In 2014 Jess Jacobs, a director in an innovation lab, started blogging about her experience as she received treatment for two rare diseases. Jess was trained as a Six Sigma Green Belt. So unlike your average patient, she described one 12-hour wait in the ER as having a “7% process cycle efficiency.” Likewise, she determined that just 29% of her 56 outpatient doctor visits were useful. She made 20 visits to the emergency room and spent 54 days in the hospital across nine admissions, but her calculations showed that just 0.08% of that time was spent treating her conditions. “Stop wasting my time,” Jess wrote in one blog entry. “Stop wasting my life.”
Jess’s writing was unique, but her attitude wasn’t. Like many patients, Jess felt her providers were delivering very little quality of care when defined by the one metric that mattered most to her: time.
While Jess didn’t get her care at Kaiser Permanente, we are working to improve on this metric. But to do so, we have had to upend traditional paradigms and make saving our patients’ time a part of our standard quality measures.
For example, the average hip or knee replacement surgery in the United States requires a three-day stay in the hospital. This is largely because many hospitals are reimbursed for every day a patient is in a bed, and it’s easier for the care team to monitor the healing process if all of their patients are in one unit. The system was created by and optimized for surgeons and hospitals to provide safe care with good outcomes. But what about our patients?