Leading High-Reliability Organizations in Healthcare

The Institute of Medicine, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, The Joint Commission, and other regulatory and accrediting bodies all agree that hospitals must be transformed into places where each patient receives quality care, every single time. In other words, zero defects. Helping to ensure quality at every level, high-reliability methods offer healthcare leaders the tools they need to achieve this noble goal.

Leading High-Reliability Organizations in Healthcare details the attributes and practices that help high-reliability organizations (HROs) excel in the service they provide to their customers. Explaining what it takes to achieve high reliability in healthcare settings, it defines reliability as much more than just being safe, it describes how to measure reliability and paves the way to higher reliability.

The book presents proven tools, concepts, and skills that leading healthcare organizations are using to improve safety and quality, including mistake proofing, Lean Six Sigma, and reliability engineering.

It details the roles and responsibilities of the two key organizational components involved in achieving high reliability: leadership and the reliability ＂engineers＂ who apply reliability methods both technically and socially throughout the healthcare value stream.

Rick Morrow, executive in HROs and now System Director of Quality, Safety, and Process Improvement at CHRISTUS Health, one of the largest non-profit healthcare systems, identifies the necessary infrastructure, methods, and analytics required to achieve and sustain higher reliability. He also suggests applications of high reliability concepts that have proven to work well in healthcare settings.

The book includes numerous case studies that illustrate success stories of healthcare organizations achieving higher reliability, some achieving zero defects for years. It also contains case studies that examine examples of failures, so you can avoid making the same mistakes.

Rick Morrow is a consultant with more than 25 years of senior leadership experience in the healthcare, aviation, construction, automotive, and high tech industries. Morrow leads the quality, safety, and high reliability unit of Healthcare Performance Partners, a MedAssets company. He has authored Lean Six Sigma performance excellence courses and taught and deployed programs internationally for Eaton Corporation, SKF, Motorola, United Airlines, The Joint Commission, and Healthcare Performance Partners.

Morrow is the author and leader of HPP’s Six Sigma consulting. He wrote and leads the Belmont University Lean Healthcare Certification Program for Supply Chain Professionals, which is a blend of The Toyota Production System, Six Sigma, and Change Leadership. Morrow also wrote and taught The University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Medicine Leadership and Performance Improvement courses. He authored the Lean Six Sigma Program at The Joint Commission and steered its Center for Transforming Healthcare, where he and his team led collaborations improving patient care and safety with major academic medical centers including Cedars-Sinai, Johns Hopkins, Mayo Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare, North Shore Long Island Jewish, and Stanford University.