KaiNexus Talks Healthcare Quality Improvement at Texas Association for Healthcare Quality Conference

Oct. 17, 2012 - PRLog -- DALLAS – KaiNexus, a web and iOS-based software company that “makes improvement easier” for nine healthcare organizations across the United States, announced today that two members of their management team are presenting at the Texas Association for Healthcare Quality (TAHQ) annual member meeting and conference in Austin, Texas on Thursday, October 18, 2012. Additionally, TAHQ will be the first conference to use KaiNexus software to facilitate real time improvement for the benefit of its attendees.

The purpose of this year’s TAHQ conference is to explore how innovation, regulation, and education will impact the future of healthcare. Gregory Jacobson MD, the CEO and a co-founder of KaiNexus, will be presenting alongside Mark Graban, the company’s chief improvement officer, talking about their experience with staff engagement and quality improvement in healthcare.

Dr. Jacobson said he is “thrilled to participate with the TAHQ, an organization that is committed to helping its members throughout Texas provide the best possible care to the residents of our company’s home state, Texas.” He added, “We are happy to share our experiences about the ‘kaizen’ model for improvement and how our technology directly facilitates these important efforts.”

Graban added, “We are looking forward to sharing the experience of our Texas-based customers and discussing process and quality improvement with the attendees and other speakers.”

The KaiNexus software platform, which is based upon the proven improvement principles of “kaizen,” has been proven to assist in an organization’s continued innovation and improvement efforts by identifying and implementing a large number of small, low-cost, low-risk ideas that are identified and implemented primarily by front-line staff.

In an innovative twist, TAHQ will be using a live instance of KaiNexus to improve the conference in real time. Conference staff and volunteers will use KaiNexus to identify improvements that they can implement, to the benefit of this year’s event (or future events). TAHQ attendees will also be able to log into KaiNexus to share suggestions and “opportunities for improvement” as they are called in the KaiNexus platform. As far as we know, this is the first time a healthcare quality conference has taken this approach for the improvement of their event’s quality.

Kaizen is a core part of the “Lean” management philosophy, based on the practices of Toyota, that has been embraced by leading healthcare systems around the world. The concepts are presented more fully in Graban’s book Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Continuous Improvements.

The KaiNexus software platform is intended to reduce unnecessary costs accrued by the United States health care system, which squanders $750 billion a year – roughly 30 cents of every medicinal dollar – through unneeded care, byzantine paperwork, fraud and other waste, according to a report published earlier this month by the Institute of Medicine. KaiNexus is also currently pursuing deals with health systems in Europe, as the cost and quality problems faced by the American health system are also a major issue in other countries.   

To learn more about the TAHQ, visit their website at http://www.txquality.org/. For information about the member meeting and conference, see http://www.cvent.com/events/2012-annual-conference-member....

About KaiNexus
Founded in 2009, KaiNexus “makes improvement easier” for healthcare by facilitating communication throughout the entire organization with its web-based technology.  KaiNexus helps initiate, manage, and spread ideas that come from clinicians and front-line staff, streamlining the management process required for continuous improvement to thrive.  It is built for the realities of today’s complex healthcare organizations, helping better facilitate staff and physician-driven continuous improvement efforts.

The KaiNexus platform has been in use by multiple departments throughout the Vanderbilt University Medical Center since early 2011, after they participated in the development of early versions of the software, starting in 2005.   KaiNexus is now in use in nine healthcare organizations, including University of North Carolina Health Care System, University of Michigan Health System, Presbyterian Healthcare Services (New Mexico), Cook Children’s Health System, and Centra Health.

For more information, visit http://www.KaiNexus.com or find KaiNexus on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.


Note to Editors

Gregory Jacobson MD, Co-Founder and CEO of KaiNexus, graduated from Washington University in St Louis in 1997 with a BS in Biology.  He attended Baylor College of Medicine from 1997 to 2001.  From 2001 to 2004, he completed a residency in Emergency Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center where he then stayed on as faculty.  Starting in 2004, it was his observation and research of operational inefficiencies and unrealized improvement opportunities that resulted in the creation of a rudimentary software tool at VUMC and, ultimately, the founding of KaiNexus. Jacobson is co-author of “Kaizen: A Method of Process Improvement in the Emergency Department,” published in the journal Academic Emergency Medicine.  

Contact Information:
Gregory Jacobson, MD
Website: www.KaiNexus.com
Email: info@KaiNexus.com
Phone: (469) 454-8055