Honors Program

University Honors

Date of Award

5-2017

Thesis Professor(s)

Jennifer Hunt

Thesis Professor Department

Health Services Management and Policy

Thesis Reader(s)

Colin G Chesley, Jeanna M Maczka-Johnson

Abstract

Shifting payment models from fee for service (FFS) to pay for performance (P4P) have fundamentally changed the environment of healthcare administration in the United States (Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS), 2011). Due to this shift, there has been an increase in demand for tracking and improving quality measures to ensure not only patient safety, but optimization of utilization. Constraints on resources and capacity, coupled with increasing safety measures has developed a new study of patient flow (Miró, Sánchez, Espinosa, et al., 2003). Decreasing patient room turnover times has the potential to maximize utilization while ensuring patient safety and quality (Dyrda, 2012). LEAN and A3 Methodology were applied to create a process improvement initiative at a 500-bed regional medical center (RMC). Using a Rapid Improvement Event (RIE), efforts were made to identify gaps and improve processes to address issues which prevented patients from being in the right place, for the appropriate amount of time, and patient rooms cleaned in a timely manner. These gaps prevented adequate patient flow in the RMC. After tracking the implemented improvements for a year, the RMC ceased following the newly designed process. This study examines the original RIE, factors that changed since the event, and additional process improvements made two years post-RIE.

Publisher

East Tennessee State University

Document Type

Honors Thesis - Open Access

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Copyright

Copyright by the authors.

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