This post was authored by Eric Stecker, MD, MPH, FACC, member of the Surviving MI Steering Committee and director of Inpatient Cardiology at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU); Saurabh Gupta, MD, FACC, director of the Cardiac Catheterization Lab at OHSU; and Judi Workman, RN, MS, director of Cardiac Services at OHSU.

Do you leave meetings with your organization’s leadership feeling a push to drive forward the safety, quality, effectiveness and efficiency of patient care? Are you proud of the medical practice of your colleagues and know that they put patient interests first and costs are addressed responsibly? Is everyone you work with dedicated and empowered to identify areas of underperformance and engage effective systems for process improvement? Unless the answer to all of these questions is a definitive “yes,” you have not yet undertaken what might be the most important project of your professional career.

Organizational culture can be defined as the behavioral norms of a group and the shared values that support or reinforce those norms. In health care, organizations that are dedicated to continually refocusing themselves toward efficient and effective patient care will be poised to succeed in the rapidly evolving health care landscape. Those with a disengaged or misdirected culture will risk losing their competitive advantage.

Changing culture is difficult. While each organization is unique and requires different approaches, there are some general techniques that can help start the effort. Among many of the important first steps, perhaps the most critical is to find an advocate and secure buy-in from the executive leadership team. At OHSU, we are engaged in an effort to improve our organization’s culture and process improvement systems through a lean management transformation supported by our executive leadership. Although it has been gratifying to see how dedicated many of our leaders and colleagues are, we still have a long way to go, and nothing can replace disciplined hard work.

We are fortunate that ACC’s Surviving MI program is launching just as our organization’s focus shifts to cardiovascular medicine because we believe that the program will help us apply our culture and process improvement efforts toward impacting cardiovascular outcomes. We are confident that the combination of dedicated leaders, empowered teams and structured quality improvement systems will yield enormous benefits for our patients and institution.

Learn more about the ACC’s Surviving MI quality initiative at CVQuality.acc.org.

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