Process Improvements Vital to Cost Containment

Jack Kolosky
Executive Vice President and COO,
H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute,
Tampa, Fla.

If we look at it as just cost reduction, then I would put the other two— patient experience and clinical quality and safety—as the two higher priorities. At Moffitt we think that process improvement, what we are calling clinical transformation, really can lead us to all of these things: cost reductions, improved safety, and improved patient experience.

We think that there are various points in the system that are not value added. Indentifying those points is probably the easy part—where there are additional steps in the processes whether because of paperwork, or people double-checking something, or a lack of automation. Those are also frustrations for the patients, particularly for our cancer patients. One of their most precious commodities is time. They don't have time.

We can't cut costs and reduce the amount of patient safety. We know we have to increase it. We know that the process is one of the biggest problems in patient safety. So how do we improve the process and reduce those opportunities for errors on a going-forward basis? It's the same thing with the patient experience.