Continuous improvement, business intelligence and user experience for health care quality

Abstract

Long-term health care organizations are facing increased complexity to provide new, high quality services (required by regional laws) keeping costs under control. They have to deal with many internal/external procedures involving outsourced services. We develop a BI solution with a “global” approach to face different issues due to: deep impact on processes, systems, organization’s structure and job roles. We propose the combination of different methodologies as Balanced Scorecard, Change management, Lean tools, User Experience with classical Data Warehouse design and development cycle. This new approach can: create “cascading improvement process” for all Departments (medical, administrative); allow timely and easy access to providers’ information; bring to governing institutions a considerable saving in time and accurate control of social services’ quality. Furthermore, it can develop a new culture towards processes and no value activities to increase overall quality and efficiency. The method has been applied to organizations in north of Italy.