The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare and its participating organizations use Robust Process ImprovementTM (RPI) methods and tools to improve the quality and safety of health care. These include Lean Six Sigma, change management process and other change management methodologies and tools for high reliability.
Lean Six Sigma is a business process philosophy that focuses on the customer and increasing value and improving quality, safety and productivity.
Change management is a set of principles designed to increase the success and accelerate the implementation of organizational change efforts. It addresses how to create a shared need for the change; understand and deal with resistance from key stakeholders; and build an effective influence strategy and communication plan for the change.
One of the important advantages of employing process improvement tools such as DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) is that they provide a systematic approach to solving complex problems. Specifically, they guide improvement teams to examine why processes fail to achieve their desired results. It is this systematic search for causes of quality and safety problems and the assessment of the relative contribution of each cause that gives these improvement tools a great deal of their effectiveness. Experience with the application of the tools of robust process improvement in health care is consistent with that of other sectors of society.