Spear talks about the right info

#IHI09 I ran into Steve Spear at the IHI National Forum. He was autographing copies of his book, Chasing the Rabbit. As always, he has something thoughtful to offer.

Here is a recent article he wrote about what kind of information is useful in process improvement. Here's the key line:

Some organizations undercut their ability to discover their way to greatness by confusing the information needed to see problems with the information needed to solve them. So, they overburden staff with establishing the former and then underarm them in tackling the latter.

I am sure this is the case in our hospital and others. We all have incident reporting systems that collect a ton of data but that might not be particularly useful in providing knowledge to the organization. Then, we might not have enough data to really drill down and solve a particular problem that we see.

Food for thought for your hospital?