2nd Curve Health Care Organizations

As part of IPAC's "Sustaining Transformation: Building a Resilient Organization" conference that we held on May 31st & June 1st, Dr. Marty Merry spoke about the opportunity to create 2nd curve health care organizations.

His premise is that the complexity of our health care system as outpaced its capacity to deliver safe patient care under the old "craft" model. What is required to move from a 4 sigma (6,210 defects/1 million = avoidable deaths) to a 6 sigma organization (3.4 defects/1 million) is a paradigm shift. Moving to a second curve system that imports the best of management science into the field of health care delivery would move an organization from 4 to 6 sigma. As Dr. Merry noted - what is the rate of preventable deaths that would be acceptable. If we say that we are satisfied with 95% success rate, that means that 50,000 people die from preventable deaths in our system. The only real answer that is acceptable is ZERO!

But how do we get there?

Dr Merry laid out "The Vision: 10 Rules of Performance in a Redesigned/2nd Curve Health Care System" (adapted from the Institute of Medicine, 2003):

1. Care is based on continuous  healing relationships;
2. Care is customized based on patient needs and values;
3. The patient is the source of control;
4. Knowledge is shared and information flows freely;
5. Decision making is evidence based;
6. Safety is a system property;
7. Transparency is necessary;
8. Needs are anticipated;
9. Waste is continuously decreased; and
10. Cooperation among clinicians is a priority.

Dr. Merry spoke about the characteristics of a second curve health care organization that is patient focused.  I could not do justice to his full talk, but have no fear as we will be posting the videos of his talk on teh IPAC website shortly.