Healthcare process improvement leaders not only have to be a jack-of-all-trades, but they need to be a master, as well. This is one of the most important leadership roles in the healthcare system with responsibilities that can ultimately end up saving lives, improving the patient experience, improving caregiver job satisfaction, and reducing costs. Although there are many others, these eight skills are the most critical for the efficient, and ultimately, successful process improvement leader: Communication Trust Building Coaching Understanding Process Management Understanding Care Management Personnel Constructive Accountability and Constructive Conflict Resiliency and Persistency Seeing the Big Picture Along with the right training, education, and sponsorship, it’s easy to see why this role blends many elements of art and science.

1. The Top 8 Skills Every Healthcare Process
Improvement Leader Must Have
― JOHN HANSMANN

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The Top 8 Skills Required for Real Outcomes Improvement
Successful healthcare process
improvement leaders need to
operationalize information.
That is, you must be able to take
data and derive knowledge from
it through analytics.
To make a difference in process
improvement, you must move
beyond ideas, toward something
much more practical.

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The Top 8 Skills Required for Real Outcomes Improvement
To illustrate the importance of process
improvement, consider how a mere 0.1
percent inaccuracy in healthcare translates to
107 incorrect medical procedures every day,
and 20,000 incorrect prescriptions every year.

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The Top 8 Skills Required for Real Outcomes Improvement
1: Communication
Communication is the number one skill
required of anyone who works in process
improvement. You must learn to articulate
ideas and concepts verbally, in writing,
and by listening.
Communication is typically defined to
include articulation, verbalization,
coaching and cheerleading, which leads
to trust building.

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The Top 8 Skills Required for Real Outcomes Improvement
2: Trust building
Process improvement leaders ask teams to
change, whether big or small, to do things
different from what they’ve always done.
Build and share the vision for where the team is
going, articulate and communicate it, and
eventually build to where the team trusts the
outcome will be better than where they are now.
They need to trust the leader, think of you as
part of the team, and know you have their back.

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The Top 8 Skills Required for Real Outcomes Improvement
3: Coaching
The successful process improvement leader
is a good coach.
You come from a change management
perspective, so you understand how to help
people grow. This typically means filling a
knowledge or training gap to move from the
current state to future state.
Like a coach of a sports team, you need to
be supportive, but also be able to critique if
something needs to improve or be done
differently. This is a critical success factor.

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The Top 8 Skills Required for Real Outcomes Improvement
4: Understanding Process Management
How does work…work?
The successful process improvement leader
takes a scientific approach to resolving a
problem or situation, or making something
better, as far as an outcome goes.
This means understanding that data—the
right data, in the right hands, at the right
time—is required for every scientific
measure or approach.
With data, you can make informed decisions.

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The Top 8 Skills Required for Real Outcomes Improvement
5: Understanding Care Management Personnel
The successful leader understands the
frontline work processes and has an
ability to work with and through others.
But he must also have an understanding
of the people involved, what the issue is
becoming, and then gauge progress.
A savvy change leader will engage the
right clinical and/or non-clinical personnel.
Getting the right people involved is the
key to improve the overall process.

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The Top 8 Skills Required for Real Outcomes Improvement
6: Constructive Accountability and Constructive Conflict
Creating an environment of
constructive accountability and conflict
will bring about a positive outcome.
By communicating a contrastive
approach with an environment of
accountability and conflict, an energy
will eventually shatter the mold of
“that’s the way we’ve always done it.”
Only then can you design a new
mold to create the new process.

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The Top 8 Skills Required for Real Outcomes Improvement
7: Resiliency and Persistency
Change management is very complex.
Everything won’t always go perfectly and
there will be resistance along the way.
The ability to address resistance and
continue with renewed energy hour after
hour, day after day, and week after week
is the hallmark of a successful process
improvement leader.
The leader has to be persistent and keep
pushing forward to make change happen.
Instead of telling me
why it’s not going to
work, tell me why it
will work!

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The Top 8 Skills Required for Real Outcomes Improvement
8: Seeing the Big Picture
It is very easy for individuals and teams
to “get lost in the weeds” and begin
questioning “why are we doing this?”
But as a leader, it is important to see the
big picture, and to connect the intricate
details to the ultimate goal to help the
team keep moving.
You must manage the step-by-step
details, while also making sure the
compilation of all those tasks are
matching and meeting the ultimate goal.

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Education and Training Required
Good process improvement
professionals are always thinking like
process improvement professionals:
you always look for a better way to do
something.
Process improvement methodologies
are very teachable to anyone who is
willing to listen and learn.
There is formal training available:
Lean Six Sigma, scientific method,
engineering and analytics, that can
help acquire these skills.

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The Science and Art of Process Improvement
Process improvement leadership is
a very teachable science, but those
who are very successful, fill in
between all the mechanical steps
with an art component. That’s
where the super success lives.
The science piece is very specific
and detailed, but the art part is how
it’s applied.

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The Science and Art of Process Improvement
There was a time when Total Quality
Management (TQM), Continuous
Quality Improvement (CQI), and
Continuous Quality Management
(CQM) training was sufficient.
Now this new approach, which is
very similar, but with a few different
tools, has the fundamental process
analysis methodologies that one
needs to understand to help dissect
situations and develop solutions.

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The Healthcare System Process Improvement Leader
To give process improvement leaders
credibility for what they are trying to
accomplish, they should be embedded
within operations, reporting to the COO,
CNO, CFO, or possibly CIO.
In some organizations, this function
resides within the Quality department,
which is responsible for regulatory and
compliance reporting, medical staff
committee support, and other duties.
The process improvement function
should have its own identity.

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The Healthcare System Process Improvement Leader
Sometimes a departmental construct
limits the position from being able to work
with medical staff or someone else within
the organization.
So, the position needs to be high enough in
the organization to garner clout. But, at the
same time, the position cannot be viewed as
the right hand of administration, parroting
what administration wants.
The process improvement leader needs the
autonomy to challenge overall processes.

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The Healthcare System Process Improvement Leader
The process improvement leader needs the
knowledge of, and access to, the resources
required for improvement.
Sometimes, this is like being between a rock
and hard place, but that can also provide a
nice foothold for pushing up to bigger and
better things.
Ultimately, it depends on the specific situation
to determine whether this position should sit
at the hospital or corporate office level.

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Executive Sponsorship
Much of this business is about being in
the right place at the right time and
having an executive sponsor who really
believes and understands the intent.
Sometimes, the best person or group of
people are in place, but without the right
support, the results may never show. On
the flip side, an average person given
the right tools, support, and latitude may
be very successful.

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Right Leader at the Helm
There are countless examples within
our industry of dysfunctional processes
or clinical outcomes. This is why
healthcare needs to be more perfect
than it currently is.
There are so many opportunities to
make something one step better.
Processes can always be improved
and improvement always continues.
Process improvement leaders are
undeniably critical to meeting these
opportunities.

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Right Leader at the Helm
Technology everywhere is beckoning
to improve hospital operations, the
patient experience, and healthcare in
general.
A lot of health systems now have an
enterprise data warehouse and
accompanying analytics tools that
inform operational and clinical process
improvement discussions and sustain
these improvements over time.
These tools just need the right process
improvement leader at the helm.

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For more information:
“This book is a fantastic piece of work”
– Robert Lindeman MD, FAAP, Chief Physician Quality Officer

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How to Sustain Healthcare Quality Improvement in 3 Critical Steps
Cherbon VanEtten, Education, Director
Link to original article for a more in-depth discussion.
The Top 8 Skills Every Healthcare Process Improvement Leader Must Have

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John Hansmann, MSIE, FHIMSS, DSHS joined Health Catalyst in October,
2015 as a Sr. Director. He has over 30 years of healthcare experience in
operations, productivity management, strategic and IT analyses. Prior to coming
to Health Catalyst, John was the Senior Director of Labor Management &
Productivity for Tenet Healthcare Corporation. Prior to Tenet, John worked for
Intermountain Healthcare as the Urban South Region Manager of Management
Engineering. He has expertise in the development of standardized nursing care models and
staffing practices, optimizing patient throughput, work redesign and leading workflow
analysis. John is a Fellow of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society
(HIMSS), a senior member of the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) and Diplomate within
the Society for Health Systems (SHS.) He is a past Board member for HIMSS and past
President for SHS. He currently serves on the Advisory Board for the school of Industrial
and Manufacturing Engineering (IME) at North Dakota State University (NDSU.) He
received his BSIE and MSIE from NDSU.
Other Clinical Quality Improvement Resources
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