Informed awareness is a state of awareness that goes beyond traditional situational awareness. By combining past, present, and future insights, it connects every area and level of your healthcare organization.
With informed awareness, your organization can get to the root cause of its operational issues and fix them, remedying recurring issues and preventing future ones from arising.
A Step Above the Standard
While most healthcare organizations are used to settling for subpar awareness,
Mary Washington recognized the need to elevate their awareness level and align their organization. Their Executive Vice President, COO, and CMO Dr. Christopher Newman spearheaded an initiative to move towards informed awareness.
Mary Washington partnered with Care Logistics to improve their operational efficiency. They combined process-based measures and cutting-edge technology to move past situational awareness and into the realm of informed awareness. It helped align their entire organization, improved their profitability, increased their capacity, and lead them to make more effective decisions for the organization.
Dismantling “Islands of Excellence”
In healthcare, we often see what are called “islands of excellence”, where one area or department might be excelling, but it’s at the expense of the organization as a whole. When you’re relying on situational awareness alone, you don’t have the system-wide visibility necessary to cooperate across departments. You’re stuck in the moment; without the ability to zoom out to see the bigger picture.
While situational awareness might give you insight into one specific department, it does little to extend the view outside of it. This makes it even more challenging for your organization to achieve their overarching goals. Informed awareness provides clarity to the entire organization.
Mary Washington sought to overcome the limitations of situational awareness. Dr. Newman commented on the ineffectiveness of the “before” scenario, stating, “They’re going from one fire to the next and putting out fires, managing the catastrophes big and small of the day, but they’re rarely advancing the organization forward”, emphasizing the ineffectiveness of subpar awareness.
Proactive Decision Making for Long-Term Success
While situational awareness might help with day-to-day decision-making, it does little to extend that insight into long-term sustainable success. In addition to real-time and historic insights, informed awareness also gives you a peek into the future, enabling you to make more accurate predictions about what’s to come. This type of holistic visibility empowers your decision-makers to act strategically and set the organization up for continuous improvement.
This type of predictive intelligence facilitates a shift from reactive decision-making to proactive. Proactive decision-making is one of the most powerful tools that your team has in the fight for operational excellence. Informed awareness unlocks the capability to prevent issues ahead of time rather than remedying them after the fact. Dr. Newman comments how impactful this switch can be, saying, “Problem solving is often very reactive, not proactive. It can be solving the “problem du jour” (of the day), but not anticipating problems, not seeing things downstream and preventing the issues. Where we really want to be is over on the informed awareness side, which is where you’re seeing not just the tip of the iceberg but the whole broader picture”.
By gaining holistic visibility of the past, present, and future of your organization you can formulate much more effective strategies that lead to growth and success.
Alignment and Unification
Achieving organization-wide goals requires alignment across every level and area of the hospital or health system. This means that everyone from the front lines to the executive suite should be working towards common goals. Oftentimes, various levels of organizations fall out of sync with each other, creating disharmony and inefficiencies. An informed awareness approach requires that different roles within the organization gain insight into each other’s contributions to the shared priorities. This insight allows for better communication, coordination, and overall orchestration between decision-makers.
Mary Washington took a hands-on approach to alignment in order to elevate their awareness. Dr Newman details that, “Our executive team are out on the floor, we’re rolling up our sleeves with our CNAs, our transporters, our nurses…What is the problem and how can we all collectively solve it?”. Through this approach, they’ve unified the front-line staff with the executive team toward the organization’s ultimate goal: providing the best possible patient care.
Dr. Newman goes on to emphasize the positive impact of this alignment, commenting, “We’re all in it together and we’re all trying to solve these problems for our patients and for our organization together”. By seeking alignment and unification, Mary Washington has consequentially unlocked a path toward operational improvement.
The Impact of Informed Awareness
In the dynamic healthcare landscape, the importance of awareness cannot be overstated. Seeking an elevated state of awareness results in improvements for virtually every aspect of your organization. When applied to healthcare operations, informed awareness brings the holistic visibility, alignment, and harmony that is necessary for operational excellence.
Mary Washington has applied these principles to their operational strategy and have quickly seen positive results that prove the effectiveness of informed awareness. With this lens, they’ve improved their processes and implemented new technology to further support the initiative.
The results speak for themselves. During this initiative, Mary Washington has increased their capacity despite closing 60 beds, demonstrating how the improved efficiency and coordination has enabled them to provide more patient care to their community with fewer resources. Dr. Newman also details the positive impact that improved operational efficiency has had on their profitability. In the webinar, he explains that Mary Washington improved their margins by about $36 Million, crediting the boost to their enhanced operational efficiency.
Mary Washington’s success is an example of the improvement possible with informed awareness. They’ve set the stage for sustainable, continuous operational improvement. It’s time for organizations to stop settling for “good enough” in-the-moment solutions and start looking at the bigger picture. Informed awareness is the lens through which your hospital or health system can view a brighter future.
Photo: FS Productions, Getty Images
