Deconstructing Chief Quality Officer's Role in the Modern Corporate World

By: Dr. Upasana Arora, Director-Yashoda Super Specialty Hospitals

There is always a demand for better quality and assistance and even safety by payers and the public from healthcare which is directly affecting the rise in the number of CQO’s or Chief Quality Officers in the domain. More often than not, there is nothing that these C-executives can not do.

The rise in the number of chief quality officers is a stepping stone for health systems to operate in a better space and optimize patient care, elevating quality levels and healthcare offerings. It is also a step towards uplifting the status of C-suite. The critical criteria is the selection of the right CQO resulting in high quality care and better service execution. 

The role of chief quality officers broadly depends on the organization they work for. It has been widely seen that the role of a CQO is often attached to quality assurance and regulatory compliance which are outdated streams of work as the CQO means much more than just these segments of work. Through a wide lens, CQO or Chief Quality Officers achieve their feat through continuous, planned, optimized and systemwide improvement. 

To understand the role of a CQO better below are some milestones that define how a CQO can work and deliver better:

Creating an infrastructure that supports quality delivery the primary leveler for a CQO is to build and sustain a strong quality department especially in domains of healthcare wherein aligning the staff, strong physician leadership, quality delivery and assurance linked to employees along with financial goals would help them directly to succeed. Beyond these, factors related to service cost reduction, better and assured quality and care and even value based service can help CQO notch higher standards of management. CQO can also consider important management structures or programs like IHI-Quality Improvement, Lean or Six Sigma to improve processes or set better stages for quality service, delivery and management. Through these process setup, which shall be aligned for the entire strength, standards of delivery and service can be maintained thoroughly. It is also the fact that choosing one single stream of operation to help fellow colleagues will perform better on any given day rather than setting up distinctive operational measures to measure success and quality or even delivery. The CQO, in order to put these principles to play should be the voice that can lead into the future with assurance and promise. The vision of the CQO should be clearly in relation with the purpose.  

Understanding what the customer wants: It is imperative to put the customer on the forefront of the entire process setup. This is the central pivot point of the entire setup wherein the customer requirements are understood clearly and addressed in a way that the customer feels comforted or elated in terms of service offerings or just delivery and care. As mentioned, customer satisfaction is right there on top when we speak of quality assurance since these factors directly affect the relation of any customer with the brand they are associating with. It is dependent on the CQO about how they manage to understand these critical aspects and form service lines and put the word forth about how important this science is and how it will affect their long term planning and execution. The process would have direct customer impact and hence it should have clear and firm decision making to avoid lapses which could affect the overall performance or customer handling. Also, the patients/customers will have direct association and impact alongside direct inputs about this setup and it often leads to long dialogues for resolution of certain services, requests and much more. Hence, the CQO must be someone who is open to feedback and can resolve concerns at the bat of an eyelid understanding or keeping customers at the prime position. 

Setting milestones in quality improvement: It is a fact that even the best of planned processes at times fail to meet the customer needs or requirements and even the best of design processes fail to live up to customer expectations. This is where quality improvement led by robust innovation and refinement is important. The CQO is at the centre of this and should handle this with utmost care and consideration, thinking on the lines that process improvement is even more important and crucial than deployment. What comes next after a certain pattern is of viable importance for the role of a CQO managing a healthcare setup. These footnotes along with the understanding of the importance of organizational goals can help sustain quality improvement processes for longer terms. Quality improvement begins from the basic daily work charts or roster to a learning system for a better future of the entire organization coupled with process integration into daily work along with an improvement scale.

Culture and predictable process sustenance: It is again of viable importance for a CQO to understand the culture building in an organization wherein fostering a culture can turn every person into optimizing their performance which directly affect factors of organization goals, customer service and much more. Quality leaders must always manage performance at all levels and look for ways to better it with standard work flow coupled with clear lines of communication for top to bottom hierarchy. 

These factors will result in continual improvement and also affect the leader directly making their roles clear and promoting culture and practices across the systems or teams or even the organization beyond customers.

Creating a robust and practical work culture is a result of customer centric processes where the communication and resolution theory works at its best. The CQO alone can do little hence the entire team(s) working with them ensure these kinds of resolutions are not just on paper but actually put to practice and the resultant is always greater good.