High Reliability in Health Care is Possible 

A Practical Framework for Improvement

High reliability means consistent excellence in quality and safety across all services maintained over long periods of time. This high level of performance, which includes the elimination of major quality failures, does not exist in health care today.

Based on its knowledge of health care and through studying the features of industries that have achieved high reliability, The Joint Commission International uses a framework that health care organizations can use to accelerate their progress toward the ultimate goal of zero harm. The framework is organized around three major domains of change:

1. Leadership committed to the goal of zero harm.
2. An organizational safety culture where all staff can speak up about things that would negatively impact the organization.
3. An empowered work force that employs RPI tools to address the improvement opportunities and drive significant and lasting change.

JCI offers many programs, from leadership change management training to high reliability assessments, to help you launch, promote, and support transformation to high reliability.

Trust is the foundation of a safety culture. Trust promotes transparency and enables employees to report unsafe events and identify opportunities for improvement. When leaders respond positively to these opportunities, employees are further motivated to report, which in turn results in more improvement and builds even greater levels of trust.

JCI can help you strengthen trust within your organization. These include programs that define acceptable behaviors and empower your employees to speak up about safety risks and report errors and near misses.

Safety problems in health care persist because they are complex. Unless we understand the true reasons why something isn’t working, we will constantly struggle to improve it. RPI helps you get to the root of the problem and discover the best solution.

Health care organizations can benefit from process improvement tools and methods to address common safety failures and rare adverse events that harm patients and employees. RPI, a combination of Lean, Six Sigma and change management, is a potent set of tools to address safety and quality problems.

• Lean is a set of tools and a philosophy of employee-empowered improvement that identifies and removes wasted effort from processes without compromising the quality of the outcome.
• Six Sigma tools focus on improving the outcomes of a process by radically reducing the frequency with which defective products or outcomes occur.
• Change management is a systematic approach, used alongside Lean and Six Sigma, that prepares an organization to accept, implement, and sustain the improved processes that result from the application of Lean and Six Sigma tools.

This set of tools provide methods to help health care organizations to achieve major improvements in faulty processes.