The Continuous Improvement Approach in Healthcare
"We upended the status quo."
A recent article in The New England Journal of Medicine details the use of continuous improvement by the NYU Langone Health system to understand what was working—and what wasn’t—in patient outreach. In its first year, the continuous improvement cycle paid for itself by identifying ineffective programs and revealing costly system errors.
“By learning that many of the interventions we had regarded as routine are not working, we can iteratively test until they become effective, or, if appropriate, we can reassign staff to perform different interventions that are more effective,” they write.
The continuous improvement team at NYU Langone Health emphasizes that a support structure—like the Proving Ground network and team of analysts—is crucial to success and enables improvement to be rapid and relevant.