Start Investing in Yourself today and feel healthier and more in control of your healthcare costs and finances. The first step is to take the Invest in Yourself Challenge. It is time to examine your life and what you term your “comfort zone”. Now ask yourself if your “comfort zone” is good or bad for your overall health. Everyone likes to feel comfortable but have you learned to be comfortable doing things that may be contributing to compromised health. Do you overeat when you are feeling an emotion? Are you comfortable with your present weight? Do you know what your body mass index is and if you are in the normal or risky category? Do you know your blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose levels? Do you know what your family history is? I know alot of questions and why are they so important?

Your lifestyle does affect your health and compromising health costs you money. Hopefully you have health insurance but the average person still needs to pay some of the balances not paid by your health insurance. Do you know the average middle income person who has health insurance and develops a single disease, such as cancer, diabetes or heart disease, approximately 46% of them will have to claim bankrupcy. Yes, it is hard to believe but true. The associated costs of an illness can deplete your savings in no time. But, according to national research the average person is saving o% these days. The average out of pocket expenses are rising as we speak to approximately $2100 per year and that is up from $1200 last year. Healthcare is not going to be getting any cheaper so the only way for you to control and contain these costs is to Invest in Yourself and implement these strategies for life: take time for self,maintain height/weight ratio,motion, life ergonomics, 5 food group menu planner , destress daily and positive body image.You owe it to yourself and your loved ones to be the best you can be. Maintain your independence,optimal health and finances and Invest in Yourself right now. Do not waste another precious moment. Your Life, Health and finances are dependent on it.

Patricia McGowan is a RN,BSN,CSHE and has been a professional nurse for over 20 years. I am a wellness and health professional and certifed in health ergonomics. I have counseled many clients with positive results. I am an author with my partner, Sonia Hernandez, and our first book in our Invest in Yourself series is Invest in Yourself, Health is the New Real Estate. Our website is http://www.investnyourself.com

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The best quality improvement initiatives are driven by data! Why? How are you
going to know how much you have improved if you don’t measure something?

All of you have been exposed to measures in many situations. Most of them were
important. In school, you were graded. Perhaps you own shares of stock; how do
you measure the success of the stockits increase in value, a measurement. How
do you know if your team wins? By its score, a measurement. The fact is that many
daily activities in life have accompanying measures to judge their success.

You might argue that you know if things are getting better; you can just tell. I am
sure that you can. This is not enough, though. In the healthcare field it is
important to measure improvement. One reason to do so is to prove to others that
things are improving. For instance, suppose you are in charge of implementing
electronic health records in a hospital setting. You meet resistance from several
staff members, including a large number of doctors. How can you overcome this
resistance? Collect datalower percentage of wrong prescriptions, for instance
from a pilot program of willing participants and then demonstrate the positive
benefits with your data. With such results in hand, you will overcome many
doubters.

Another reason to measure improvement is to demonstrate the saving of time and
money. With healthcare costing so much today that many find care out of their
price range, it is important to find ways to lower costs. For instance, suppose that
staffing at your facility is very expensive; the payroll costs are way over budget. I
recently read of a lean six sigma project that demonstrated through the use of data
collecting by staff charge nurses that staffing shortages and costs were significantly
reduced. The right staff was present when needed and the facility eliminated the
need for using short-term staffing of nurses through agencies; this saved a great
deal of money. Besides lowering costs, staff morale improved significantly at this
site.

I hope that I have convinced you that to make significant quality improvements, you
should be actively measuring. What should you be measuring? The most common
measurements are costs in providing a service, time taken in providing a service and
various measures of patient health, such as the lung capacity of asthmatics. You
can also measure improved bottom lines. One doctor I know improved his income
38% in 5 years by working hard to adopt quality measures in his solo practice. Many
ER’s now boast of how they have significantly decreased waiting time for patients.
One such local hospital did so well that they were overwhelmed by the increase of
demand for service at their ER. You might want to measure if spending a few more
minutes with patients talking about pursuing good life habits like eating the right
foods leads to improved health, like lower cholesterol.

Once you have decided what to measure, you should first measure the variable
(cost, time, etc.) as it is in the state before you begin an improvement initiative.
This is a baseline against which you can measure your improvement. As you begin
and proceed through a quality improvement effort, keep track of the measures and
see what improvements occur. I suggest that you keep the data in a spreadsheet or
database. For short term record keeping you might want to use charts. You will
want to check to see if your means are significantly improving (you can use
statistical tests if you choosethey are more accurate) and if your variation is
decreasing.

Once you have reached your goals, revisit the new processes once in a while and
collect new data on the variables you chose to measure. Doing so, will help keep
you from backsliding to the old ineffective state. Backsliding is all too easy. It is
hard to break old habits, but keeping data will help you. This is, in fact, what drives
the the success of many programs, such as Weight Watchers.

I hope that I have convinced you that data driven change is the best way to approach
quality improvement. It will concretely demonstrate how you are progressing and
will prove to others that your site is doing much better. It will help you earn your
just rewards!

Donald Bryant helps healthcare providers meet their challenges and writes
“Making Good Healthcare Better” a free monthly ezine for healthcare
providers who want to dramatically improve patient health, improve the
bottom line, and make work more rewarding, guaranteed. Go now to his
http://www.bryantsstatisticalconsulting.com to get a free article with tips you can
use to start making improvements immediately and to learn more about Lean Healthcare

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The outbreak of epidemics coupled with the exodus of medical professionals skills make running a hospital a nightmare. The lack of funds to purchase essential equipment only adds to an already bad scenario. Add to this administrations with outdated notions about hospital management and you have an impending disaster.

In a quest to better run their hospitals, many hospital administrators have deployed six sigma process improvements and have started to show such good results that they have converted skeptics to believers. Running hospitals better requires a lot more effort than running a regular business. Here are 7 things that help you to run your hospital better:

1. Critical Illness Care: Facilitate treatment for critical illnesses like cardiac diseases, cancers, brain surgeries etc as these specialized treatments are not possible just anywhere. A good infrastructure, a team of specialized doctors and adequate support staff should be dedicated to these services. The general increase in the successful treatment of these cases should help promote your hospital.

2. Develop A Network Of Physicians: A professional partnership with a network of independent physicians gets you more referrals. Physicians refer their patients to known hospitals when necessary.

3. Good Inventory Of Essentials: Keep every emergency and non emergency essential like oxygen, blood of all groups, medicines and syringes available at all times. Not having to run around looking for essentials not only saves crucial time but also impresses patients and their relatives.
4. 24/7 Service Popularizes Your Hospital: You never know when you need emergency medical attention. A hospital, open 24 hrs and 7 days with all facilities available can save lives as well as gain goodwill. In-house surgeons and on-call surgeons should be able to jump into action in no time.

5. Reduce Process Times: Long process times like accident and ICU admission can prove fatal to patients. Reduction of the amount of paperwork necessary saves critical time. Dedicated, uncluttered pathways leading to operating rooms also saves a lot of time. Trained staff and personnel can handle things better than they always used to do. Computerized documents like case histories should be able to be accessed over a computer network. This saves time, costs and reduces staff fatigue, which can reduce burnout.

6. Separate Administration And Stores From Other Areas: It is crucial that the administration, stores and the front office are far removed from the critical areas where absolute silence is essential for recuperation of patients. A clean and serene environment will have a curative effect on the patients. Provide a separate entry, bypassing the main building, to this area for the use of patients and their loved ones.

7. Simplify Billing And Documentation: It removes the necessity to have additional staff to maintain a mountain of paperwork. Keep only those records required by regulations. Paperwork reduction also reduces the probability of mistakes occurring in billing and other patient documents.

North Carolina Baptist used Six Sigma process improvements to revolutionize cardiac care. By getting heart attack patients from the emergency room to the cardiac catheterization lab faster, they slashed 41 minutes off the hospital’s mean time, and as a result saved lives.

The foundation for all these activities must be a rational thinking and questioning of every process and system as to their necessity, in addition to providing the best treatment to patients. As a hospital, if you aren’t running lean and mean, everything else will fail miserably.

Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solutions - Six Sigma Online ( http://www.sixsigmaonline.org ) offers online six sigma training and certification classes for lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.

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