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Thoughts and experiences of educators related to quality and change
"The growing demand for healthcare services is not always met by providers; quality and operations management techniques are needed to reduce waste from the healthcare system and streamline processes to bolster supply".'' In 2008, the PricewaterhouseCoopers' Health Research Institute noted that of the $2.2 trillion spent on national healthcare, $1.2 trillion was attributed to wasteful spending.2 The onus to cut the associated costs is being shifted to the next generation of healthcare administrators, the ones who will lead teams to identify and reduce waste in the incoming healthcare system.
This article describes a successful partnership in the spring of 2009 between the master's level health administration class at the University of Pittsburgh and the Veterans Affairs Pittsburgh Healthcare System (VAPHS). This partnership played a key role in the city's bid to acquire one of four new veterans engineering resource centers built across the nation. The project utilized Deming's 14 Points,3 which are available as a framework in the online supplement to this article at www.asq.org/pub/jqp/.
Addressing Concerns
Pittsburgh is a national and global leader in healthcare excellence, a city where approximately 25 percent of the labor force works in the healthcare sector.4 Clinical and administrative healthcare alumni from local universities are scattered throughout the world in myriad roles and responsibilities: small outpatient clinics, large academically-affiliated hospitals, long-term care facilities, private and group practices, health insurance, and government agencies. These early careerists have provided their alma maters with a unified concern: the need to enhance graduate curriculum in the healthcare administration field to include process improvement.
University-level faculty recognized the need to address process improvement while continuing to deliver a comprehensive graduate education, equipping students to solve complex problems when they enter the workforce. The healthcare system faces a hostile environment where constant changes in policy mandate a steep learning curve and a life-long learning commitment from the next generation of leaders. Traditional operations management courses and teaching material that could not be applied immediately to healthcare systems produced sub-optimally prepared graduates.
The University addressed diese concerns by establishing a new healthcare operations and quality management (HO&QM) course with a goal to produce patient-centered leaders while teaching the most up-to-date process-improvement techniques. This emerging field...