News and Events

Expert Panel Member, Les Beitsch, MD, JD, Honored at the APHA Annual Meeting

Tuesday, November 25, 2014- Our esteemed Expert Panel member, Dr. Les Beitsch, received the Excellence in Health Administration Award during the 2014 APHA Health Administration Section Social on Tuesday, November 18.

This award honors someone who demonstrates creativity, innovation, and leadership in advancing the field of health administration; demonstrates significant contributions to or impact on the practice; and improves the practice of advancing knowledge, motivating others, and creating a positive environment.

Congratulations on this incredible achievement, Les!

The Deadline for QI Innovator Award Nominations is Approaching!

Wednesday, November 19, 2014- The deadline to nominate your peers for the QI Innovator Award is approaching! The QI Innovator Award honors QI practitioners and recognizes their hard work in championing a QI effort and culture. Winners will receive a special feature story on the PHQIX website and in the QualityMatters newsletter, a commemorative plaque, and a letter of recognition and appreciation. Peer nominations will be accepted until December 12, 2014 and can be found here. Click here to read more about this amazing opportunity!

Register Now for NACCHO's Next Performance Improvement Webinar!

Thursday, November 13, 2014- NACCHO's next performance improvement webinar, "Let's not reinvent the Wheel: How to Leverage National Initiatives as you Conduct Performance Improvement Activities," will take place on Tuesday, December 9th at 3:00PM ET. This program will feature the stories of three local health departments (LHDs) taking advantage of national resources and connections. While there are many resources available to LHDs, several national activities have received increased interest recently due to their value in accreditation preparation and community health improvement planning. Join NACCHO for this FREE 90-minute webinar featuring representatives from local health departments in North Carolina, Florida and Massachusetts who will share their work on these initiatives and provide insight into how it has helped them improve health department performance and community health outcomes. Space is limited, so sign up now!

QI Innovator Award Nominations Now Being Accepted!

Thursday, November 6, 2014- We are excited to announce the second round of QI Innovator nominations! The QI Innovator Award honors QI practitioners and recognizes their hard work in championing a QI effort and culture. Winners will receive a special feature story on the PHQIX website and in the QualityMatters newsletter, a commemorative plaque, and a letter of recognition and appreciation. Peer nominations will be accepted until December 12, 2014 and can be found here or under the Community tab on the PHQIX website. Follow this link to read up on previous winners and take this opportunity to honor a QI Innovator who inspires you!

New Ways to Share PHQIX Information

Thursday, October 30, 2014 - Find a QI Initiative or Community Forum Topic that you’d like to share with your colleagues? Now you can quickly share PHQIX hyperlinks via e-mail, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media applications by clicking on the new sharing buttons in the top right corner of each web page.

Give it a try!

Kaizen Article 4 of 4: Labor Time and Waste Reduction

Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - How do you remove the waste in your work process? How do you provide your services in less time with greater quality? 

Written by PHQIX Expert Panel member Chris Bujak and his business partner Pam Vecellio, of Continual Impact LLC. Visit the Ask an Expert page for more advice from PHQIX Expert Panelists.

The COPPHI Kaizen Event Program recently completed foundational QI and kaizen training, coaching, and co-application of kaizen events at 10 health departments.  The program was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), and managed by National Network of Public Health Institutes (NNPHI); training and expertise was provided by Continual Impact LLC.  Kaizen utilizes methods and techniques to observe the current work process and analyze the value and waste in every step. This process provides the team the understanding to redesign the work process for improved efficiency while staying focused on the work process’s customers and objectives.

Kaizen simply means “change for the better.”  A kaizen event is a team-based approach that enables improvement to be made by stepping through all phases of the improvement cycle effectively and rapidly. Before the event, a kaizen-appropriate problem is identified along with goals in areas such as customer satisfaction, cycle time and labor reduction, and error elimination. The team is then mobilized and a kaizen event begins. A typical event uses a systematic process to identify waste in the targeted work process, enable the team to understand and analyze the root causes, identify and test solutions, learn, install improvements, and create a system for ongoing improvement. As the event progresses, numerous QI and change management methods and techniques are applied. The event enables the team to accomplish all this work quickly, typically in 5 days with full benefits achieved within 1-3 months!      

Participants commented:

Several of the kaizen program sites targeted improvements in the efficiency of their processes. Take a look to see the amount of positive change made in a brief time by finding the waste and implementing solutions!

DOH-Seminole County realized savings of $7764 for goods and services from price negotiations during the first quarter following a Kaizen event – almost double the goal set by the QI team. Other improvements in the requisition process included a 38% decrease in process time, in addition to increases in the approval rate for submitted requisitions and the rate of correctly completed forms. The overall result is a much more efficient process that procures goods and services at significantly reduced costs.

Johnson County Department of Health and Environment used a kaizen event to improve the supply ordering process cycle time and increased the order placement and delivery accuracy for all programs in the department. The results included decrease in cycle time – total ordering process time per order from 93 to 16.5 minutes,( 82% ) time and improving the order and delivery accuracy to 100%. This means staff can focus on more value added activities and get the needed resources faster. During the 5 day kaizen event the team worked to understand the problem, identify and root cause the issues, develop, test, and begin installing the solutions. The process was re-sequenced and redesigned to eliminate unnecessary steps, recycle loops, wait time and other wastes. Key process aids were developed such as creating a standard vendor list (by category), creating a list of items than cannot be ordered, training members and distributing P-cards to heavy orderers, shredding non-preferred vendor catalogs, providing budget visibility and codes, creating 1 standard order form, creating a share point site to access the order form and store all ordering documents, creating delivery location rules, granting orderers access to vendor web sites, 5S’ing the one storage room, establishing a Kanban ordering system to decrease inventory and standardize ordering, and lastly moving the ordering process from as needed to monthly.

By streamlining their internal computer drive, creating an internal framework for its use/upkeep, and training staff on the efficient and effective use of the computer drive, the Three Rivers District Health Department has increased staff productivity.

Fall Website Drawings!

Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - Yep, you read that right. We are launching TWO website drawings starting right now! Keep reading for all the details!  

Submit a new QI initiative by January 15, 2015 for a chance to win one of three scholarships to the NNPHI Open Forum for Quality Improvement in Public Health on March 19-20, 2015 in San Antonio, Texas. You must register on PHQIX to submit a QI initiative. By submitting your QI initiative on PHQIX, you will receive many benefits, including an AMA-style citation in phqix.org that you and others can reference. Your initiative can help inform similar initiatives being conducted by other PHQIX community members and contribute to the evolving science of public health quality improvement. You will also receive excellent feedback from Expert Panel Members. Click here to learn more about how to submit a QI initiative and click here to submit a new QI initiative. Email us at contact@phqix.org if you have any questions or concerns.

If you aren’t able to submit a new QI initiative, don’t fret! Simply comment on a QI initiative or Community Forum post by November 14, 2014 for a chance to win one of TEN $35 Visa gift cards. That’s right – we’ll randomly select TEN winners in our next drawing, so you’ve got a great chance to win!