Frequently unintentional silos keep team members and co-workers from collaborative work. It happens in many organizations, including health care. People on different teams, who don’t see one another often or at all, may miss what ought to be obvious chances to work collaboratively.
With a new take on an old adage, making sure the right hand knows what the left hand is doing can make a big difference in providing better patient outcomes, more efficiency and cost savings.
Recently Kansas Healthcare Collaborative (KHC), which offers both PTN and HIIN programs, began applying that from within and recognizing more opportunities for collaboration. We’re finding that some of the tools and ideas developed for HIIN can be easily adapted for use with PTN. The resources we have right here in KHC become opportunities for shared learning and information we can use with both HIIN and PTN clients.
One of the first steps has been to coordinate HIIN hospital site-visits with locations that have PTN clinics. Our quality improvement advisors and HIIN program directors meet together with health care providers. It has given us the chance to bridge some gaps in their unintentional silos, too. By addressing the need for more communication from within, we are learning from each other and helping our clients recognize and act on their own needs for better communication. We are finding that, together, we are better.