The power of involving stakeholders (and checklists)

Dec 18, 2007

Here's a great New Yorker piece about how a simple checklist can save lives. Peter Pronovost, based at Johns Hopkins, is on a mission to improve health care by having medical staff use a checklist when doing simple actions like inserting a tube.

There are many Good Experience themes here - simplicity, empathy, listening, "the basics," measuring success,... but for the moment, I'll point out that Pronovost's success came in part from involving decisionmakers directly in the process. Quoting, emphasis mine:

Pronovost had been canny when he started. In his first conversations with hospital administrators, he didn't order them to use the checklists. Instead, he asked them simply to gather data on their own infection rates. ... each hospital assigned a project manager to roll out the checklists and participate in a twice-monthly conference call with Pronovost for trouble-shooting. Pronovost also insisted that each participating hospital assign to each unit a senior hospital executive, who would visit the unit at least once a month, hear people's complaints, and help them solve problems.

The executives were reluctant. They normally lived in meetings worrying about strategy and budgets. They weren't used to venturing into patient territory and didn't feel that they belonged there. In some places, they encountered hostility. But their involvement proved crucial.

The project was a big success for all the hospitals that participated.

Involve the stakeholders! This is exactly what I wrote about years ago in The Most Important User Experience Method.

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