A Toolkit for Redesign in Health Care: Final Report

Forces Which Compel System Redesign/Transformation

There are many reasons which compel all health care systems to embark on process redesign/system transformation. These include:

• Continued rise in hospital costs.
• Concerns about patient safety and quality.
• Little change in the core health care processes over decades.
• Silos of care provision.
• Little application of knowledge from other industries.
• Enormous redundancies in care delivery processes.
• Numerous patient handoffs.
• Major workforce shortages.
• Employee dissatisfaction.
• Resident work hour limitations.
• Limited involvement of the patients and their families in hospital care.
• Patient dissatisfaction.

Although the impact of each one of these factors may vary from system to system, all of these factors impact every health care delivery system to some degree. At Denver Health, of most concern at this point in time were the following: costs, safety, quality, lack of change in processes through the application of tools from other industries, redundancies in processes, and workforce shortages. This led us to focus on tools which addressed these major concerns.   It is critically important for the leadership of a system to articulate these forces and how they necessitate change. 

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