Align quality and medical staff services functions
Aligning or integrating quality and medical staff services functions can promote earlier detection of systemic shortcomings that affect a hospital’s reputation, accreditation standing, and bottom line. Despite these perks, organizational leadership may be reticent to change up existing departments, a process that often demands strategic planning, reallocation of resources, and heavy up-front time investment. To get decision-makers on board with fostering more overlap between the quality department and the medical staff services department (MSSD), those spearheading the effort must demonstrate that the long-term benefits of improving cohesion outweigh the initial expenditures.
“You have to show the value ... to the organization as a whole, the value of improving processes and of being more efficient,” says Teresa P. Sappington, FACHE, MBA, CIPM, CAPPM, CPHQ, CPMSM, an Augusta, Georgia–based consultant who specializes in medical staff affairs and healthcare regulatory compliance. Although the specific return on investment will vary by organization, there are a couple of hospital-wide benefits that medical staff services and quality personnel can highlight.
A quality professional with a clinical background or extensive training in the field will recognize performance patterns that suggest faulty frameworks, rather than individual practitioner failings, says Sappington. For example, high instances of sepsis across the board could indicate the need for a revised protocol.
Integrated expertise can also improve collegiality. When MSSD-driven performance assessments reveal individual and large-scale improvement opportunities, medical staff and quality leaders may be more receptive to the news when it’s delivered by a colleague who speaks the same language—that is, the department’s resident quality professional. “One of the big benefits is the communication from peer to peer,” says Sappington. “If they see something from a physician performance standpoint that may be more relevant to a systemic error or problem that needs to be addressed or processed within the system, then they are able to communicate that more readily and more proficiently and knowledgeably to the quality department, who would then report out to senior leadership.”