Creato announced today that Freeport Regional Health Foundation (FHN) in Freeport IL has agreed to deploy the COMPASS Quality Management System as part of a comprehensive, system-wide effort to implement quality control and performance improvement programs across the enterprise. COMPASS is Creato’s proprietary quality management system designed specifically for healthcare organizations. The decision by FHN to implement COMPASS follows from a commitment made by the organization’s leadership to embrace empirically based methods for improving the quality of services they offer.
The COMPASS system was designed based on a successful product created originally for the manufacturing industry and now in use across over 4500 users in over 150 companies. The design philosophy behind both products is to create a line of sight between management and individuals responsible for improvement work. The application also includes robust tools to support Lean, Six Sigma and related performance improvement initiatives.
“We are excited to add COMPASS to our growing capabilities in performance improvement,” notes Mark S. Gridley, Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer at the hospital. “This application will help us to expand the capabilities of our people to take our organization to the next level in quality improvement and patient care.”
As part of the deployment, COMPASS will be made available to the organization’s Performance Improvement staff, management, and select individuals who will use COMPASS to identify and prioritize improvement opportunities, and to access online tools to satisfy the demands of improvement projects. COMPASS will also be used to fully leverage recent training that FHN has conducted for individuals to learn and apply Lean methodologies.
About FHN: FHN, a not-for-profit organization with nearly 1,400 employees, is an award-winning regional healthcare system committed to the health and well-being of the people of northwest Illinois and southern Wisconsin. Named one of the top three hospitals in Illinois for safety by the world’s largest independent, non-profit product- and service-testing organization and among the nation’s 100 Top Hospitals® for 2007 by Thomson Healthcare, FHN has also been honored by VHA with a Leadership Award for Clinical Excellence in its treatment of acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) in 2008, and a Leadership Award for Clinical Excellence for its treatment of cardiac patients in 2006. Organized in 1995 as an integrated healthcare delivery system, FHN is comprised of FHN Memorial Hospital, the Leonard C. Ferguson Cancer Center, 13 family healthcare centers offering primary and specialty medical care, Hospice, occupational and chiropractic health services, dental care and outpatient mental health services. An average of 1,500 people come to FHN daily for their healthcare needs. For more information about FHN, please visit www.fhn.org.
About Creato: Creato Performance Solutions has been providing technologies and training to support corporate performance improvement for over 20 years. Today, Creato is a leading provider in the U.S. of Lean and Six Sigma deployment, and Project Portfolio Management products including the COMPASS® Quality Management System. Their combined classroom and online training programs are available a variety of other channel partners across the U.S. A recent study of 150 projects completed by Creato clients over the past 10 years revealed an average return on investment of 7:1.