Mastering Commitments — Crucial Healthcare Safety Practice
In healthcare, where the focus is on patient and employee quality care, experience, satisfaction scores, and high reliability, we need to zero in on an often-overlooked Safety Practice — Commitment Management (CM), or, in simpler terms, 'Closing the Loop' as coined by Birgit Zacher Hanson, president of Heads-Up Performance Inc.
The Real Costs of Inadequate Commitment Management in Healthcare
Consider a scenario: A patient scheduled for a critical diagnostic procedure that requires coordination between different departments. The vital imaging machine is shared among units, but the scheduling coordinator fails to communicate its availability to the Nurse. Unaware, the Nurse can't plan the procedure, and the patient, feeling uncertain and tired of waiting, seeks care elsewhere.
Situations like these happen every day in healthcare, often going unnoticed. Just like deadly germs on hands were invisible until Louis Pasteur discovered them, Open Loops (not knowing Who Will do What by When?) are overlooked and not addressed. Once germs were studied, handwashing became a required safety practice. Similarly, the practice of closing Open Loops with Commitments prevents breakdowns in communication and execution.
Therefore, Commitment Management is a critical Safety Practice that, if not observed, comes with deep risks and costs that negatively affect:
- Access and Quality Care
- Employee and Patient Experience
- Safety and Satisfaction Scores
- High Reliability
Failures in getting and managing Commitments contribute to inefficiencies, wasted resources, disruption of workflows, underperformance, execution gaps, lack of accountability, lower morale, and burnout. It may also contribute to lapses in compliance, missed legal deadlines, and lack of innovation and modernization.
In other words, Open Loops are like germs. They are everywhere and will negatively affect the health of your organization. We must commit to closing them before they kill productivity and morale.
While Commitment Management is a practice, Commitment Mastery is a Culture Change. It involves a deliberate and disciplined approach to learning and scaling the practice of managing commitments within a healthcare organization.
To get started on the Road to Mission Critical Commitment Mastery (MCCM) visit HeadsUpPerformance.com or
Call Birgit Zacher Hanson at 813-389-9810.