Enhancing organizational health literacy in a rural Missouri clinic: a qualitative case study.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a collaborative effort between a health care organization and academic institution to strengthen organizational health literacy. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: The intervention took place at a rural, federally qualified health clinic in Missouri between May 2009 and April 2011. Qualitative interviews of key informants were conducted before (n=35) and after (n=23) the intervention to examine program implementation and success in effecting organizational change. FINDINGS: Intervention activities helped establish a comprehensive understanding of health literacy. The project achieved moderate, fundamental and sustainable organizational change. The program successfully integrated health literacy practices into clinic systems and garnered leadership and organizational commitment, helped the workforce improve interpersonal communication and embedded practices making health education materials more accessible. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: The study points to programmatic, conceptual and methodological challenges that must be addressed for organizations to improve health literacy practices, and suggests change management strategies to advance organizational health literacy.

Becoming a health literate organization: Formative research results from healthcare organizations providing care for undeserved communities.

Background Integrating health literacy into primary care institutional policy and practice is critical to effective, patient centered health care. While attributes of health literate organizations have been proposed, approaches for strengthening them in healthcare systems with limited resources have not been fully detailed. Methods We conducted key informant interviews with individuals from 11 low resourced health care organizations serving uninsured, underinsured, and government-insured patients across Missouri. The qualitative inquiry explored concepts of impetus to transform, leadership commitment, engaging staff, alignment to organization wide goals, and integration of health literacy with current practices. Findings Several health care organizations reported carrying out health literacy related activities including implementing patient portals, selecting easy to read patient materials, offering community education and outreach programs, and improving discharge and medication distribution processes. The need for change presented itself through data or anecdotal staff experience. For any change to be undertaken, administrators and medical directors had to be supportive; most often a champion facilitated these changes in the organization. Staff and providers were often resistant to change and worried they would be saddled with additional work. Lack of time and funding were the most common barriers reported for integration and sustainability. To overcome these barriers, managers supported changes by working one on one with staff, seeking external funding, utilizing existing resources, planning for stepwise implementation, including members from all staff levels and clear communication. Conclusion Even though barriers exist, resource scarce clinical settings can successfully plan, implement, and sustain organizational changes to support health literacy.

Advancing organizational health literacy in health care organizations serving high-needs populations: a case study.

Health care organizations, well positioned to address health literacy, are beginning to shift their systems and policies to support health literacy efforts. Organizations can identify barriers, emphasize and leverage their strengths, and initiate activities that promote health literacy-related practices. The current project employed an open-ended approach to conduct a needs assessment of rural federally qualified health center clinics. Using customized assessment tools, the collaborators were then able to determine priorities for changing organizational structures and policies in order to support continued health literacy efforts. Six domains of organizational health literacy were measured with three methods: environmental assessments, patient interviews, and key informant interviews with staff and providers. Subsequent strategic planning was conducted by collaborators from the academic and clinic teams and resulted in a focused, context-appropriate action plan. The needs assessment revealed several gaps in organizational health literacy practices, such as low awareness of health literacy within the organization and variation in perceived values of protocols, interstaff communication, and patient communication. Facilitators included high employee morale and patient satisfaction. The resulting targeted action plan considered the organization's culture as revealed in the interviews, informing a collaborative process well suited to improving organizational structures and systems to support health literacy best practices. The customized needs assessment contributed to an ongoing collaborative process to implement organizational changes that aided in addressing health literacy needs.

Addressing the research-practice gap in healthcare management.

Recently, renewed attention has been drawn to the gap between research and practice in disciplines within schools of public health. This article addresses the research-practice gap within healthcare management, a key discipline in schools of public health. Barriers and solutions are presented across four stages for converting research to practice-discovery, translation, dissemination, and change. Foremost barriers include low credibility of academic research, inadequate research dissemination, neglect of practitioner concerns, and lack of external pressures for adopting researched practices. Key solutions include educating practitioners about research, collaborative studies with practitioners, adapting research to practitioner needs, and holding organizations accountable for adopting evidence-based change.

Transforming hospital board meetings: guidelines for comprehensive change.

Does the following remind you of a hospital board meeting you attended recently? The meeting starts late, the PowerPoint presentation on hospital operations is too detailed to understand, 20 minutes are spent discussing parking, one or two trustees do all the talking, others check their PDAs or scribble on the agenda, and you try to keep your mouth shut while yawning. Hospital board meetings are often described as ritualized, unfocused, rambling, mindless, and inconclusive. Experts agree that board meetings in many hospitals are dysfunctional and need restructuring (Knecht 2001; Perrine 2003; Orlikoff and Totten 2002). Recently, St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, California, employed consultants and invested much effort in making its board meetings productive (Perrine). More such endeavors are needed for better hospital governance. In the last 5 years, several books and articles have focused on reforming board meetings. In this article I draw on them to discuss key problems of board meetings and how to make the meetings more effective.

A summation of online recruiting practices for health care organizations.

Worker shortage is among the foremost challenges facing US health care today. Health care organizations are also confronted with rising costs of recruiting and compensating scarce workers in times of declining reimbursement. Many health care organizations are adopting online recruitment as a nontraditional, low-cost method for hiring staff. Online recruitment is the fastest growing method of recruitment today, and has advantages over traditional recruiting in terms of cost, reach, and time-saving. Several health care organizations have achieved great success in recruiting online. Yet awareness of online recruiting remains lower among health care managers than managers in other industries. Many health care organizations still search for job candidates within a 30-mile radius using traditional methods. This article describes the various aspects of online recruitment for health care organizations. It is meant to help health care managers currently recruiting online by answering frequently asked questions (eg, Should I be advertising on national job sites? Why is my Web site not attracting job seekers? Is my online ad effective?). It is also meant to educate health care managers not doing online recruiting so that they try recruiting online. The article discusses the salient aspects of online recruiting: (a) using commercial job boards; (b) building one's own career center; (c) building one's own job board; (d) collecting and storing resumes; (e) attracting job seekers to one's Web site; (f) creating online job ads; (g) screening and evaluating candidates online; and (h) building long-term relationships with candidates. Job seekers in health care are adopting the Internet faster than health care employers. To recruit successfully during the current labor shortage, it is imperative that employers adopt and expand online recruiting.

A call for board leadership on quality in hospitals.

A national agenda for health care quality is unfolding but there is concern about inadequate progress on improving quality in hospitals. The 2003 Institute of Medicine report calls for transformational leadership in health care organizations to change systems and processes underlying quality. The key question is: Who will provide leadership in hospitals? A natural choice is the board of trustees on account of its legal responsibility for quality and its authority over medical staff and administration. This article describes several barriers to board leadership on quality and suggests strategies by which boards can lead the campaign for quality. Barriers include trustee ignorance, trustee insecurity, board inattention, poor board-physician communication, fragmented information on quality, traditional medical staff structure, lack of professional management of quality, and lack of investment. Strategies for hospital board leadership should include preparing to lead, self-education, visible participation in quality activities, activism, role clarification, increased informal dialogue with physicians, medical staff reform, creation of a quality management department, instituting high-quality standards, and external quality audit. Boards face a historic opportunity to transform hospital quality backed by a strong legal mandate.