Value-based care transformations can seem daunting to healthcare organizations and executives. In some cases, realizing the sheer number of improvements and process reforms that need to be made can become paralyzing to a hospital or health system.

But maybe the answer is to do what your mother told you to do when you were young: start with baby steps.

That was the impetus behind the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) “What Matters to You?” program — a care quality improvement initiative it launched in 2012. The program focuses on promoting culture change and efficiency by exercising patient-centered flexibility.

“Jennifer Lenoci-Edwards, RN, MPH, CPPS, executive director of patient safety for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, shares a story that IHI CEO Derek Feeley likes to tell,” relayed HealthLeaders’ Megan Headley.

“There was an elderly woman who was always getting out of bed, even though she was a fall risk,'” Lenoci-Edwards recounted. “It turns out that the reason she kept getting out of bed was because staff kept putting her rosary beads away in the drawer across the room.”

“They had to figure out what mattered to her,” she explained, “which was having those rosary beads. Having those with her in bed minimized her risk of falls.”

Small, patient-centered steps like asking the patient what matters most to him or her in their care can yield safety-enhancing, satisfaction- and engagement-promoting changes that aggregate into large-scale outcome improvements, Headley reported.

Learn more here, in HealthLeaders.