Background:
Safety and quality are top priorities at Memorial Hermann Southwest Hospital in Houston, Texas, USA, and methods such as Lean Six Sigma and Work-Out are among the hospital’s strategies to help improve the patient care environment. When the hospital found it had a 12 percent incidence of pressure ulcers in 2004 – exceeding the 7 percent national average – it put a team in place and launched a project to reduce the incidence of hospital-acquired pressure ulcers by half within a nine-month period.
Action:
- Raise customer satisfaction through better skin and wound care.
- Avoid the risk of lawsuits.
- Avoid fines from regulatory agency (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services).
- Reduce specialty bed rental cost by $125,000.
- Reduce length of stay associated with Stage 3, Stage 4 and “unable-to-stage” pressure ulcers.
- Increase International Classification of Diseases coding for pressure ulcers.
- Reduce supply costs.
Read how Memorial Herman Southwest Hospital uses Lean Six Sigma and Workout to address the problem.
