Virtua Health

Virtua Health, a non-profit community hospital system of 950+ beds located in southern New Jersey, has successfully deployed a standard process improvement methodology that includes Six Sigma, Design for Six Sigma, and Lean to enhance all aspects of the business and to improve clinical quality and safety processes that effect direct patient care.

Utilizing internal Black Belts and Management Engineers working with cross-functional disciplinary teams, there have been over 100 projects. This approach of having a standard methodology to improving overall patient care has included the following projects: CMS Core Measures (pneumonia, cardiac medication administration, SCIP, normothermia); patient navigation; revenue cycle enhancement; charge capturing for surgical implants; and design of future state processes for health information technologies and new facilities. Project close improvements are all statistically significant in improvement and sustained post project.

Results

• To date project activities have returned a hard dollar savings/new dollars to the organization of $26M+.

***Submitted by Arienne Elberfeld, Six Sigma Champion-Operations Improvement, Virtua Health, aelberfeld@virtua.org.

Published: January 26, 2009