Team-Tested Practices

• Hosting a short-term special clinic for post-transplant patients, enabling them to get all their follow-up care in one visit
• Creating an Excel spreadsheet of post-transplant patients and their follow-up needs
• Making outreach calls to patients with care gaps

What can your team do to fill patient care gaps? What else could your team do to proactively meet patient needs?

• Reconfiguring routes and bringing contracted routes in house
• Hiring an additional employee to reduce overtime and outside courier costs on the weekends
• Purchasing new technology for central dispatching that enables better tracking of packages

What can your team do to evaluate where savings can be found? What else could your team do to be more productive and not have to use contractors?

• Creating “Pass Free Zone,” to discourage staff from directly handing needles and other sharps to one another
• Educating staff on how to handle used needles, and employing face-to-face conversations
• Issuing fliers with the count of needle-stick, injury-free days posted throughout the medical center

What can your team do to decrease injuries in your area? What else could your team use to encourage each other?

• Making a joint commitment that when there is a KP HealthConnect® notification that a patient is due for a health screening, team members follow up by offering to schedule the patient for the screening or asking the necessary questions to fill in missing information in the patient’s medical record
• Creating a script to help staff members talk to patients about updating their health needs and posting laminated cards on computers to serve as reminders
• Reporting the weekly screening numbers to staff members so they can track their progress and recognize where they missed opp

• Collaborating on “hand-off” messages between Physical Therapy and nursing staff
• Writing specific messages about daily therapy sessions on a board in the patient’s room
• Standardizing information placed on the boards

What can your team do to encourage better communication between team members?

• Tracking individual items sold monthly  
• Comparing previous distribution of items and loss of revenue  
• Inputting data into Excel spreadsheet to see projected results 

What can your team do to ensure Kaiser Permanente continues to be affordable for all members? 

• Logging each redo in a tracking book
• Creating a unit “redo monitor” and a lead optician position, to troubleshoot service gaps and help team members close those gaps
• Coaching employees on new protocols in HealthConnect to identify possible factors contributing to lens problems, on collaborating with optometry and ophthalmology in problem solving, and on counseling patients about eye health as well as manufacturing warranty limits 

What can your team do to identify potential problems in your workflow?

• Training a group of master trainers who coached peers about the importance of copay collection and the process
• Educating inpatient nursing and frontline staff about the importance of copay collection and financial counseling availability for patients
• Hiring a financial counselor who answered patient questions during the admitting process and interviewed those in need of financial assistance

What can your team do to ensure team members have the skills to have difficult conversations?

• Reviewing the department's budget together
• Researching the costs and benefits of different types of needles
• Self-monitoring to reduce usage of butterfly needles

What can your team do to identify areas or products where savings can be found? What else could your team do to cut expenses?

• Brainstorming ways to encourage use of email system, including instructing and coaching one another on the system
• Diversifying its communication methods, including the creation of a communication board with information about the projects the team is working on, notes from UBT meetings and a copy of the department’s weekly e-newsletter, “Heads Up”
• Changing from a representative UBT to a general membership UBT with regularly scheduled meetings throughout the region, so that all employees are able to participate​​

What can your team do to g