Establish General Aims

Set general goals and a timeline

Setting a goal is a great way to help your team stay focused and communicate with stakeholders. To give your team clarity of purpose and to get the ball rolling, in the early stages the team needs only to agree on general goals (e.g. reduce cases of hospital-acquired VTE).

The general goal also should be a ‘stretch,’ one that is aggressive enough to mandate a change in design from your current process in order to achieve it (e.g. eliminate preventable cases of hospital-acquired VTE).

In addition to setting a stretch goal, at this early stage it helps also to be clear about the initial and eventual scope of your efforts. Will you eventually focus on medical patients, surgical patients, or both? While hospitalists are likely to have the most control over performance for medical and MICU patients, why be satisfied with just a sub-population of inpatients hospital? Initially it is reasonable and even advisable to bite off only what you can chew by piloting interventions on a small scale (e.g. eliminate preventable cases of hospital-acquired VTE from medical floor 5G).

But think BIG! Serial testing and learning on a small scale can make even very large projects more manageable. Improvement strategies can be spread to other areas (e.g. eliminate preventable cases of hospital-acquired VTE from all medical and surgical floors and all ICUs).

Lastly, your team needs a deadline to hold itself accountable. The timeline should be ambitious but also realistic. For piloting a single improvement intervention on a single medical floor, a timeline of 12 weeks is reasonable. For spreading a series of improvement changes across an entire system, 12-18 months may be more appropriate.

Download the VTE Implementation Guide Snapshot