Merging Education and Business Models to Create and Sustain Transformational Change

In 2004, a large Midwest hospital was losing money, patients, employees, and physicians. A business consultant was hired to engage key employees in a process to improve the quality and efficiency of patient care. The improvement was negligible after the first year, so a 3-man consultancy was added in 2005 to engage all employees in an educational process with the same mission. The author was the hospital director of this experimental change project titled Transformation and worked with both the business and education consultants. The opposing models were serendipitously discovered to be parallel and resulted in positive change. The business model was the application of two Six Sigma models, DMAIC (define, measure, analysis, improvement, control) and Ten Step Kaizen. The education model was proprietary but discovered to be a learning process toward self-direction (Taylor, 1986). Interviews were conducted in this grounded theory study to understand the perceived relationship between the 2005 experiment and current realities. Significant improvements were immediate and sustained over time. The hospital is currently making money and attracting patients, employees, and physicians and the emerged theory posits that merging the models creates transformational change, but sustainability requires empowered leaders to manage the process.