AHA Quality Part Four – Effectiveness and Efficiency

This is part of my series on the Six Quality Aims set out by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and supported by the AHA. Today, I’d like to talk about talent management’s impact on the aim “effectiveness and efficiency”.

Here again, HR has a huge role to play.

Effectiveness is defined as: “care that is based on the use of systematically acquired evidence to determine whether an intervention, such as a preventive service, diagnostic test, or therapy, produces better outcomes than alternatives – including the alternative of doing nothing”. This premise is the foundation upon which “evidence-based medicine” rests.

So to be effective, everyone involved in treatment must be both qualified and following the procedures defined by their respective professions or specialties and your institution. This is why it is important for healthcare organizations to have the ability to rate each employee on all the competencies and procedures for which they are accountable. HR needs to have insight into competencies and be able to take action in order to drive organizational effectiveness.

Efficiency – The reduction of waste and reduction of administration or production without compromising the patient.

Efficiency is a cultural issue that we can become somewhat complacent about. Goals help employees keep this cultural mandate front and center. If the organization has goals for efficiency and then cascades these down to departments, and employees, making everyone in the organization accountable for achieving those goals, it becomes an organization wide mandate.

Talent management strategies, tactics and tools all have a major role to play when it comes to increasing efficiency in a healthcare organization. For example, should a nurse manager be worrying about administration or patient care? Clearly, patient safety and satisfaction are the top priority so anything that can be done to streamline things like goal management goes a long way.

The good news is that both efficiency and effectiveness are very do-able when it comes to talent management and HR on the whole. Healthcare organizations like CentraSate and Cabell Huntington Hospital have been able to create real ROI for their talent management programs, but more importantly, this means their teams are able to focus on patients and not administration.

Next week we’ll wrap up this series with a look at timeliness and equity.