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May

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of our recently published book, Performance Improvement for Healthcare: Leading Change with Lean, Six Sigma, and Constraints Management

In today’s competitive and highly volatile economic environment, change is the rule while the steady-state is momentary and uncertain. Change management must be embedded in the technical transformation that is taking place—a process within a process. Successful continuous performance improvement deployments must address change management throughout the deployment process. The devil is in the dynamic details. How to implement a change program successfully is critical when dealing with another confounding variable: the erratic changes of human behavior reacting to changes. The most successful organizations have people who must learn to continuously adapt to change.

Change happens, unabashedly. Whether it is planned or unplanned, positive or negative, change is the new norm. In healthcare, change has transmuted to an oxymoron, a constant: technological changes, regulatory changes, legislative changes, economic changes, demographic changes. Sometimes these changes are not incremental, but are revolutionary, affecting every part of the system. Change is either imposed or it is proactive. When W. Edwards Deming cynically said that “change is not necessary, survival is optional,” it was never more true than it is of healthcare today. When asked to describe the pace of change in healthcare today, a nurse wearily replied, “Change is all there is.”

Proactive change, such as a Performance Improvement for healthcare deployment, is intended to move the organization in a positive direction. Performance Improvement, by design and by definition, is a change initiative. While all change does not lead to improvement, performance improvement inevitably requires change. With the barrage of change that is already pummeling healthcare, performance-improvement initiatives may be perceived by overworked and overwhelmed staff as the next last straw. Thus, change management skills and methods are fundamental to any performance-improvement endeavor. Performance-Improvement practitioners are expected to act as change agents and change leaders. They need to be equipped, empowered, and trained to facilitate and manage change. Any successful performance-improvement deployment will be founded on change management principles and methods.

Click here for a free download of Chapter 1 of our book, Performance Improvement for Healthcare: Leading Change with Lean, Six Sigma, and Constraints Management.