Preparing for Continuous Quality Improvement for Healthcare: Sustainability through Functional Tree Structures

This book provides a set of detailed instructions to help you construct your departmental, divisional, or organizational functional tree structure (FTS) and work towards world-class service. Preparing for Continuous Quality Improvement for Healthcare: Sustainability through Functional Tree Structures outlines a method that will enable your organization to set a stable base for future improvements that are sustainable and create breakthrough improvements in service, quality, and costs.

More importantly, the FTS method outlined in the book will provide you with the tools to build processes tailored to your customers’ specifications and standards. It will enable you to improve your department, division, and entire organization and edge ahead of your competition.

The book explains why organizations steeped in process improvement need to re-evaluate and re-establish their procedures—especially if initial outcomes have not met expectations. Illustrating key concepts with examples, case studies, and flow charts, it provides you with a clear understanding of organizational functional structure and how to document current organizational and departmental functional tree structures.

Describing how to identify a department's functional deficits, shortcomings, and waste, it explains how to select the best course of action for your organization. After reading this book, you will be able to create a pictorial representation of your organization's current functional structure and select the best course of action for achieving sustainable advancements in service, quality, and costs.

The book will help to convert your managers from a people-management mentality to one of process management—transforming leaders to educators and not guards.

About the Authors

Reza Ziaee, MA, MSE, MBB, PhD, FHIMSS is currently the transformational care director at Catholic Healthcare West in Las Vegas where he trains department leaders and staff on Lean and Six Sigma concepts and tools. He has over 22 years of administrative and internal consulting experience in healthcare and has completed over 100 projects focused on healthcare operations redesign/innovation and quality improvement. He is a Six Sigma Master Black Belt and a Lean expert. He holds a PhD in applied statistics and quality engineering from Wayne State University, a MSE in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Michigan, and an MA in economics from the University of Detroit. He is a frequent speaker for the Healthcare Information & Management Systems Society.

James Bologna, MBA is currently a vice president of the Business Research Group where he guides strategy development, brand awareness, campaigns, product and service expansion, pricing, service quality, and product development. He has over 25 years of experience in healthcare market and economic research, consulting, education, and project management and has proven success in feasibility studies of multiple hospital acquisitions, service offerings analyses, and development of merger strategies. He holds an MBA from Wayne State University with a concentration in operations research and a BS degree in industrial engineering from the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on issues on consumer-directed health plans, product design process improvement, and economics.