“During my first meeting about Leapfrog, a physician told me she didn’t believe in the score and that we didn’t need to work on it,” Dr. Sharieff told Becker’s. “Another physician then spoke up and said he had been asked at a party why one of our hospitals had a C and didn’t have a good answer. That conversation turned the tide. After that meeting, two physicians came up to me and said they wanted to work with me on this because they agreed that our quality was better than what our scores reflected.”
From that conversation came the model that would change not just the hospitals’ LeapFrog scores, but improve patient safety and outcomes across the system: sprint teams.
Each sprint team consists of a COO, a physician operating executive, an information services team member, a quality department member and a representative, which is often a frontline worker, from each of the five hospitals. The teams are tasked with conducting evidence-based reviews, creating checklists to ensure best practices and piloting that list at a hospital before rolling it out systemwide.
Previously, leaders set arbitrary reduction goals, such as reducing infections from 30 to 10. But frontline workers didn’t understand why or how those numbers were picked or the value of changing.
The first sprint team was created to improve LeapFrog scores across the system. And within a few months, six more sprint teams were created for:
- Catheter-associated urinary tract infections
- Central line-associated bloodstream infections
- Methicillin-resistant staph infections
- Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease readmissions
- Heart failure readmissions
- Total joint and knee surgery complications
Within the first fiscal year of sprint teams working, they completed all their checklists and rolled out for all seven areas. Their goals and successes are installed on visual boards on every unit so patients and staff can see real-time data.
“That constant visibility reinforced accountability,” Dr. Sharieff said.
The results
The sprint teams have seen monumental success. Since 2020, the system has seen a
- 67% reduction in surgical site infections
- 41% reduction in central line infections
- 63% reduction in catheter-associated urinary tract infections
- 25% reduction in Clostridioides difficile infections
“We also closely track each case that falls out of compliance,” Dr. Sharieff said. “If a patient develops an infection or is readmitted, we go back and analyze whether standard procedures were followed. If not, we educate the team on what went wrong.”
Want to repeat their success?
For leaders, creating sprint teams is as simple as “set the vision and let the team do the work,” Dr. Sharieff said. “Give them the timeline and the goal, but don’t micromanage. Trust your frontline staff — they do this work every day and often have better solutions than leadership would come up with. When something isn’t working, we adjust and try again. That’s the mindset we’ve instilled in our sprint teams.”
Most importantly for leaders, there are two major pitfalls to avoid: complacent — thinking you’re doing “well enough,” which stalls progress — and perfection, which is trying to make everything flawless before rolling it out and leads to analysis paralysis. By trusting your teams and setting the clear vision, leaders can avoid these traps.
For sprint teams, expect hesitancy at first. Many may feel it’s too much work, but once the task force begins, those involved will see how rewarding it can be.
Don’t be afraid to be flexible, too. Some sprint teams at Scripps have turned into ongoing task forces for complex issues. Meanwhile, others like the hand-washing sprint team, dissolved in only a few months because their work was complete.
Also, give staff the opportunity to rotate in and out of teams.
“We have new participants joining all the time, including physicians who want to step outside their usual specialty,” Dr. Sharieff said. “One trauma director joined the pressure ulcer prevention team because he wanted to understand how early interventions could prevent complications in critical care.”
All of these aspects build a culture of ownership that empowers staff to make changes.
“While we know we’ll never reach zero infections — some criteria make that impossible — we can continually improve by focusing on process and accountability,” she said.
