Winter 2014

Yes, I’d be happy to. Yes, I can do that. Yes, of course, yes.

Stepping up to the plate, being engaged, working hard—in a workplace that fosters continuous learning and improvement, these are qualities we prize in our colleagues and cultivate in ourselves.

And, in a sprawling, complex organization like ours, with myriad initiatives and projects, these traits can be our undoing. If we say yes to everything, we wind up spread too thin. Spread too thin, we lose effectiveness. Trying to regain the ground we think we should already have covered, we go faster and faster, start to spin our wheels and—burn ourselves out.

We do it as individuals, and we do it in our unit-based teams, too: Yes, we can do that. Yes, we’ll take that on. And then there’s too much to do and an effort to improve sputters out.

There are lots of techniques for individuals to manage competing demands. As UBTs mature, they and their mentors are getting savvy about the importance of having teams set priorities, too.

Developing teams don’t always have the confidence it takes to say no. In “From Frenzied to Focused,” Denise Johnson, the continuum of care administrator at San Jose Medical Center, notes that we have a tendency to think more is better. She and other UBT supporters are helping their teams map out the path forward, teaching them to discriminate (in all the best senses of that word)—to know when to say “yes” and when “no, not now” is in order.

Fewer, well-chosen projects have a greater impact on Kaiser Permanente’s quality of care, service and affordability. And not being constantly frazzled certainly helps create a better place to work, too.

Improve service scores. Reduce waste. Retain members. Gain new members. Cut wait times. Work safer. Perfect patient safety. Innovate care.

Teams are juggling constantly, trying to meet their own objectives, move forward on initiatives related to facility, regional and national goals, and comply with regulatory requirements—all in a competitive economic environment.

When the curve ball comes sliding in, it can be one thing too many, derailing a strong team or keeping a struggling team at ground level. So a host of unit-based team supporters are turning their attention to strategies to help unit-based teams prioritize competing demands—from personalized mentoring to intensive workshops for co-leads.

“I see my role as taking away the noise and the chaos…to help them figure out, ‘Realistically, how many things can we work on at once?’” says Denise Johnson, San Jose Medical Center continuum of care administrator and a UBT sponsor. “I have to help them not be crazy, because we don’t want a lot of projects that don’t make a difference.”

Here are four strategies for helping teams.

Strategy #1: Planning pays off

Every year, labor and management sponsors at the San Jose Medical Center sit down with their UBT co-leads to develop an operating plan. The plan flows from Kaiser Permanente’s organizational goals as well as from regional goals, facility priorities, and the needs of the department. Each sit-down includes the service area’s UBT consultant and its union partnership representative. Projects emerge naturally from that plan, with teams turning to the Value Compass and a tool called a PICK chart to fine-tune their priorities.

“They have to figure out what’s in their sphere of influence,” says Eric Abbott, the area’s union partnership representative. “What are the things they can change, and of those things, how much time do they have?”

When Johnson became sponsor of one San Jose team, it was immediately clear to her the UBT had too much on its plate. She worked with the team to winnow eight projects down to two.

“In my experience, people get bogged down with the to-do list and sometimes don’t stop and think about what’s really on that list and what effort does it serve,” she says. “They thought I was crazy. They came from a mentality where ‘more is better.’”

Strategy #2: Urgency can be a tool

Two years ago, San Diego’s interventional anesthesia unit-based team was humming along in its performance improvement work when it got hit with the news that co-pays for patients who suffer from chronic pain would be increasing sharply.

The 14-member team responded with a new service project, a multiphase communication plan to help members understand the new co-pay and their options. And then the next wave broke: The team learned it had a matter of days to move into a new specialty services building. It suspended the co-pay project to plan for and complete the move.

One key performance improvement tool—a process map—proved instrumental. The team created a detailed map that laid out every piece of work that needed to be done in preparation for the transition, from changing procedures to adapting to a new phone system to altering workflows based on the new floor plan.

“They simply became a single-issue team,” says their UBT consultant, Sylvia Wallace, of the 2011 move.

With the process map in hand, the team spotted an opportunity to weave communication about the new co-pays together with communication about the move. As a result, it didn’t miss a beat in providing its members with critical information about available financial assistance.

The comprehensive plan helped the unit’s service scores hold steady through the transition—and then increase at the new facility. The moving plan became a template for other departments, which are still moving into the Garfield Specialty Center.

“Everyone participated. All types of ideas were solicited and implemented,” says Grace Francisco, the assistant department administrator and the management co-lead at the time. “Everyone has a role and accountability for each step.”

Strategy #3: Take time to train

Teams stand a better chance of weathering competing demands when they have a solid understanding of partnership principles and processes as well as performance improvement tools and methods.

In Colorado, the UBT consultants used LMP Innovation grant funds to host a two-day workshop centered on two regional priorities. Co-lead pairs from throughout the region learned how best to serve new members and improve the affordability of KP care by reducing waste and inefficient practices. They walked away with a variety of team improvement tools and resources.

“We are trying to set the teams up to be successful by giving them the time to focus on topics that could have a huge impact in the region in the next few years,” says Linda Focht, a UBT consultant and UFCW Local 7 member.

In San Diego, regular UBT summits bring co-leads together for intensive sessions on given topics. Service area and local union leaders play a major role in structuring the agenda, so the team development matches up with high-level strategy. The joint planning creates a full picture, one that resonates better at the front line and sets up teams to work on projects that make a difference to KP’s reputation.

“Leaders see a lot more than what we see,” says Jenny Button, director of Business Strategy and Performance Improvement in San Diego. “Leaders see what is going on with the competition. They see across all of the different metrics we are working toward. They see at a broad level where our biggest gaps are.”

Strategy #4: One-on-one attention counts

At San Jose Medical Center, sponsors like Johnson and Hollie Parker-Winzenread, an assistant medical group administrator, are coaching UBTs one on one in performance improvement tools to help them set priorities.

 “Teams like to jump to the solution,” says Parker-Winzenread. “But they struggle with the process….The gain falls apart, because the process is not strong.”

San Jose’s clinical laboratory UBT is a success story, jumping from a Level 1 to a Level 4 in less than a year after new co-leads worked together to reach joint agreement on the department’s priorities. The team started with tests of change that made strides in attendance. Today, it has moved on to complex projects that require shifting schedules to accommodate demands for getting lab results earlier in the day.

Guidance from their sponsors has helped keep team members on track.

“We’d come up with all of these ideas and projects, and they made suggestions and really helped prioritize what we worked on so we didn’t bite off more than we could chew,” says Antoinette Sandez, a phlebotomist, the team’s union co-lead and an SEIU UHW member.

“You have to help teams to believe in the process,” Johnson says. “As a sponsor I can’t rush the process and say harder, faster, move, move, move. That won’t get us what we want in the long run. Because we’re looking for sustainability.”

On one level, the pediatric clinic at Georgia’s Panola Medical Center Offices is like any other pediatric clinic. Babies squawking and squealing are part of the soundtrack—and under that, there’s the murmur of parents and nurses cooing to get the little ones to stop crying.

But the Panola clinic’s unit-based team stands out. Its members work at one of the several pediatric clinics in KP’s Georgia region that have significantly improved preventive care and screenings for their young patients, who range in age from newborn up through their teens.

The pediatric teams have achieved these goals in the midst of competing demands by staying laser-focused on a handful of quality measures in the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set, or HEDIS.

“Our projects are usually HEDIS-related,” says Panola’s labor co-lead, Sheryl Boyd, a licensed practical nurse and member of UFCW Local 1996. “HEDIS is so measurable.”

The work is a good example of how, instead of driving an agenda from the top down, achieving a goal can be inspired by engaging frontline teams in understanding how they contribute to KP’s brand promise of total health.

“The teams are not ‘being told what to do,’ but rather they see the big picture and see what they can do to affect it,” says David Jones, MD, Georgia’s physician co-lead for UBTs. Dr. Jones says he and his labor and management LMP counterparts stay abreast of Georgia’s regional goals and priorities, then work with UBT consultants to communicate those to frontline teams.

“We incorporate UBTs as a lever to execute our clinical goals,” says Dr. Jones, creating a vital loop of communication and support.

Collaboration pays off

One of the Panola UBT’s successes has been to increase the number of girls getting the human papillomavirus vaccine (HPV) by their 13th birthday. The vaccine can help prevent a virus that increases the risk of cervical cancer.

The project kicked off in October 2011. At the time, the team wasn’t tracking how many of the girls in the target population had received the vaccination, which is delivered in a series of three shots over six months. The team’s initial goal was to get 5 percent of the girls eligible for the shot vaccinated. In the first six months, the team succeeded in getting 10 percent of the target population started on the series—and by October 2013, nearly 20 percent had gotten the complete series, a significant achievement. While it has yet to reach the national HEDIS average for the vaccination, the team is steadily closing the gap.

Team members achieved these results by working with the clinic’s information technology staff to get a list of patients—11- and 12-year old girls—who needed the vaccine. They contacted parents and made appointments. In the exam room, nurses discussed HPV and the importance of the vaccine with patients and their parents.

And they worked with their IT colleagues again, modifying the computer system so they could book appointments six months in advance. That allowed them to act on a crucial step—scheduling visits for the two follow-up booster shots right then and there.

The parent education was extremely important, says Erica Reynolds, the charge nurse and management co-lead.

“Some parents think we want people to come back in for appointments because we want the co-payments,” she says—but in fact, if the shots aren’t completed in the proper time period and the immunization series needs to be started all over, it requires even more visits. To avoid that, she says, “Scheduling a nurse visit for the second and third vaccines has become a part of our workflow.”

Hard-wiring success

That kind of hard-wiring of successful practices is the holy grail of performance improvement.

As labor co-lead Boyd puts it, “Our projects are not ‘projects.’ They are ongoing.”

In addition, Dr. Jones says, the integration of partnership and performance is taking place at all levels in the region.

For example, he says, physician leaders “integrate the Labor Management Partnership and performance improvement into existing meetings so it is not viewed as outside those discussions.”

As a result, when Georgia earned a five-star Medicare rating in fall 2013 for the first time—bringing all of KP’s regions into that rarified club of health care excellence—Rob Schreiner, MD, the region’s executive medical director, specifically credited UBTs and the culture of continuous improvement for the achievement.

Driven by those two engines, says Schreiner, “We’ll improve quality, service and affordability at a tempo that exceeds that of our competitors.”