HealthGate Articles

No End in Sight for Committee Overload as Quality Improvement Programs and Technology Implementations Surge Ahead

Do you consider spending 120 days each year in meetings to be a good use of your time? We think not, and the 60 hospital leaders who participated in our recent research study on committee work and efficiency in healthcare agree.

Completed in January 2007, the two-month long study was conducted on the premise that the volume of committee work in which healthcare providers are asked to participate is growing, but the effectiveness, efficiency and economic burden of such work is poorly understood, documented and articulated.

The purpose of the study was to determine and document the “healthcare committee-work landscape” by gathering qualitative information about and assessing:

• Involvement in healthcare-related committee work
• Satisfaction with current approaches to team-based interaction and decision-making
• Technologies and resources that are deemed most useful for collaboration and committee-related activities
• The greatest challenges related to committee work

Study participants

Participants in the study:

• Were affiliated with 60 hospitals or health systems within 27 states
• Represented institutions of varying size (bed sizes ranging from 218 to 3,453 with an average of 627)
• Held the following positions:
• Chief Medical Officers (CMO) or Chief Medical Information Officers (CMIO): 40% of participants
• Vice Presidents of Medical Affairs (VPMA): 18% of participants
• Medical Directors: 10% of participants
• Other senior hospital executives (Chiefs of Staff, Chief Executive Officers, Corporate Compliance and other officers): 24% of participants

Use of collaboration technologies (e.g., document management systems) can reduce the burden of time-consuming activities conducted during face-to-face meetings. Coupled with the use of process and task-management systems, productivity and meeting effectiveness can be increased by ensuring that action plans and activities spearheaded during meetings are appropriately documented and followed up on.

Study participants expressed that collaboration technologies are not a suitable replacement for face-to-face interaction where non-verbal cues and body language are equally important in assessing buy-in and support for activities. However, they did indicate that such resources would be valuable for activities that can be more effectively and efficiently handled outside of the formal meeting structure, such as reviewing and editing documents.

Figure 1

Technologies currently used for collaboration

The majority of study participants indicated that the Internet and their intranet are the technologies most commonly used for collaboration (see Figure 2). Almost a quarter of participants indicated they were using shared computer drives as part of their efforts to collaborate with respect to activities like standardizing order sets or building consensus for new policies and procedures. While more than half of the study participants indicated they use e-mail to facilitate collaboration, most of those interviewed said that face-to-face meetings were still the preferred vehicle for building consensus, reviewing documents and getting approval for activities.

Synchronous collaboration technologies (e.g., Web-, video- and teleconferencing) are increasingly being used to facilitate meetings where scheduling, geographic separation and limited availability are of concern. Asynchronous collaboration technologies (e.g., document and task management systems) are at the initial stages of use throughout hospitals and healthcare systems. As hospitals move toward implementation of CPOE, EMR and other health information technologies, the volume of documents, tasks and requirements for systematic consensus-building will continue to grow. It is likely that the need for collaboration and management tools will increase as these movements continue to gain momentum.

Figure 2


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