Leading Health System Executive to Evolve High Reliability Solution, Advance Innovative Framework

Healthcare organizations continue to be tested in their ability to provide safe, effective and efficient care. Rising costs, strained resources, exhausted teams and increasingly sick patients represent just a few of the interconnected obstacles standing in the way of consistent, high-quality, high-value care.

Effectively managing the complexity of these multifaceted issues demands a fresh perspective and innovative solutions.

"Healthcare is facing unprecedented cultural, clinical and operational pressures and doubling down on the same tactics that got us here won't progress us forward," said Katerie Chapman, senior principal for Vizient Safe and Reliable Healthcare. "We need to be thinking and responding differently."

High reliability offers a holistic way to transform healthcare organizations so they are prepared to tackle many of the issues that exist today and anticipate and respond to those challenges still emerging.

"To become a high reliability organization (HRO), there must be cultural and operational change, that includes a mindset of continuous improvement and learning, shared accountability and mutual respect," Chapman said. "When organizations become highly reliable, they have the foundation to manage complexity and reduce clinical and operational risk more effectively, limiting unintentional and avoidable harm along with unwarranted variation. This makes their cultures healthier, their workplaces more efficient and their performance exceptional."

Vizient Safe and Reliable Healthcare partners with providers to build the necessary cultural and improvement infrastructure for high reliability programs to flourish. At the core of all Vizient Safe and Reliable offerings is the Framework for High Reliability Healthcare – a comprehensive blueprint for healthcare organizations committed to a high reliability journey. The framework was developed to support high reliability transformations, and it represents the latest thinking in how to become highly reliable in practice.

"Culture, clinical and operational performance are all incredibly interconnected," said Gena Futral, executive principal for Vizient Safe and Reliable Healthcare. "Through our decades of research, we know organizations who have achieved and sustained performance excellence have embedded high reliability principles throughout their organization. When healthcare organizations have healthy cultures and transparently use data and experiences within local self-reflecting and continuous improving learning systems with engaged leaders, performance excellence is achieved and sustained. High-performing organizations may not call-out high reliability as a strategy but when they describe their cultures and how they operate, they are describing the principles of high reliability."

Expanding Vizient's high reliability offerings

The Framework's innovative approach and its potential impact on healthcare organizations' high reliability journeys is one reason why Chapman joined Vizient in May — after a 23-year career at Virginia Mason Medical Center, most recently as president. During Chapman's tenure at the health system, she played an integral role in transforming the organization into a highly reliable, award-winning destination medical center for patients across the country.

At Vizient, Chapman leads the reliability and management systems team, focusing on the framework's outer ring – management systems – which creates the organizational infrastructure where culture, knowledge, learning systems and leadership all intertwine in service of achieving and sustaining organizational goals.

"An organization's success with high reliability starts with leaders," Futral said. "Katerie can speak to that imperative and provide first-hand experiences and insights into the effective strategies she's practiced and implemented in her previous executive role. She understands the unique challenges and opportunities facing healthcare leaders as they manage the ever-increasing complexity of achieving and sustaining performance excellence."

Chapman will help Vizient Safe and Reliable Healthcare enhance its offerings, using her experience as a former healthcare executive to engage and partner with healthcare leaders and teams to mitigate their cultural, clinical and operational challenges.

"It's important that we continually listen to our providers and partner organizations — understanding their needs and challenges and how the evolving healthcare landscape is impacting them," Chapman said. "It will inform our continued evolution and help us accelerate the pace of effective, meaningful transformation within those organizations we serve."

Learn more about the history and culture of Vizient Safe and Reliable Healthcare online and through additional Vizient stories.