Learn 20 different ways communication can help in QI. In 10 minutes!

Whether you’re in healthcare, public health, industry, or academia, quality improvement is part of your professional picture in one form or another. If you want to reach your quality improvement goals, I’ve got good news. Communication can be your secret advantage. More good news? In the next 10 minutes, I’m going to give you 20 different ways communication can help in QI. So you’ve no excuse for not making communication a bigger part of your quality improvement activities.

Hi everybody. This is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, ranked number 20 in the Top 100 Podcasts in Social Sciences. Giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement, experience, and satisfaction since 2017. I’m Dr. Anne -Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator with expertise in communication and education. I’m here to dig into some of what we might take for granted about communication in our professional lives. If you want to strengthen the work you can do in your professional sphere, this is a place for you. Because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make.

I want to start by sending out love to the QI experts out there ’cause you’ve got a tough job. I’ve been directly involved in quality initiatives, and as a consultant, all of my clients are also involved in quality initiatives. And way back in education and higher ed in my past, you might know that those sectors have been subjected to near-constant reform. And dealing with those reforms, thinking critically about those reforms was a significant part of my education at Penn. So I’m drawing on that too, and what I’ve learned from clients and from QI experts. Whoever you are, what kind of organization you work in, I’m hoping this is going to be helpful.

Now the examples are going to be from the health sector, but I’m trying to choose an approach that will apply across contexts because lots of different folks are listening to the show right now, so I’m hoping you’ll see possibilities for your situation reflected here.

When you hear the term “quality,” I wonder what it makes you think, because it can encompass so much. And yes, some of those initial thoughts you had might not have been particularly warm or fuzzy ones. That’s also me. So if that’s you, I still hope what I’m sharing today can be helpful. I’m thinking about QI as encompassing all sorts of activities that promote evidence-based practice and person centered principles to improve quality, improve outcomes, and ideally lower costs.

Everyone’s collecting data to see where they need to improve, and then looking for ways to improve. That’s why communication is so valuable and so helpful. Because whether you’re collecting data to see where improvement is needed, or you’re looking for ways to improve once you know where you’ve got to work on, or both, communication is your friend.

Communication can help with quality improvement in two distinct ways. One, as something to measure. And two, as an action item on nearly anything that you do measure. So I’m going to give you 10 examples for each. Get your thinking, maybe spark some ideas and provide encouragement. As a consultant, a lot of what I get asked to do is capacity building for clients, to help them reach their goals. And I was talking with a former healthcare administrator about this. And he said the quote that’s the title of this episode, if communication isn’t part of your quality improvement, it should be. So I thought there’s a great placeto start this miniseries.

All right, first, when communication is the thing you’re measuring. Here’s 10 different ways you could measure communication. Just to get your thinking, I’ll follow up with some tips as well. Now, most of these have to do with patient/provider communication, but you could think about this as like employee -manager communication as well. Okay, here we go, communication quality metrics:

Okay, a couple of tips for those quality measures. Context matters, right? So any of those metrics you want to tailor to your setting and to your patient population. Also, keep in mind things like the Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services standards, and organizational health literacy from Healthy People 2030, I’m going to go ahead and link to them in the notes as well.

So these are some ways to think about measuring communication, get some meaningful data. And then of course, we need to act.

So that’s the second way communication can really be helpful to you in quality improvement. Regardless of whether you’re measuring communication or something else! Communication can help you improve on any process metric.

How do you do this? Well, here’s 10 resources exclusively from us here at HCP.

This has been 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. Audio engineering and music from Joe Liebel, additional music from Alexis Rounds.

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