Process Improvements Vital to Cost Containment

Mina Ubbing
President and CEO,
Fairfield Medical Center,
Lancaster, Ohio

When you look at patient experience, satisfaction, quality, safety, cost control, and process improvement, they are not mutually exclusive from one another. We have a time right now to be creative. We can make cost controls stick if we get to the right size and realize that, given all the regulations we have—particularly for community hospitals—a hospital like mine can't be all things to all people.

What is the definition of a community hospital anymore? If we can get those pieces of the puzzle well thought through and if we can get some experience and traction about what is going to be, because we are still making rules on the fly, there are some very good things there.

We are going to look at processes. What is not value added to the things we do? And that comes back to the voice of the customer, which comes back to patient satisfaction. Quality and safety and doing it right the first time certainly cuts costs out of your system because you don't have to do it a second time. Mitigate some risk. Some of these things are going to work hand in hand.