By: Adrienne Brott, SVP, Quality, Interventional Segment & Central

Inspire Quality is our multi-year journey towards best-in-class healthcare quality. For BD, this means a full redesign, simplification and harmonization of our 120+ Quality Management Systems (QMS) into a right-sized, robust and compliant process across all businesses and regions. This week at the annual American Society for Quality’s World Conference on Quality & Improvement in Philadelphia, PA, we’re presenting our insights in an educational session that can be applied across the industry from our Inspire Quality journey. Here’s three best practices and one lesson learned that has helped us simplify our QMS at one of healthcare’s largest, most diverse and innovative MedTech leaders.

1. Know your goal

Before embarking on the challenging endeavor of simplifying over 120+ QMSs, we first needed to align on our vision for the future. Our BD 2025 strategy set the foundation for us as aligned towards our company-wide goal of simplification. For our redesigned QMS of the future, this meant that procedure and process reduction, greater consistency across businesses and regions and ease of communication across multiple businesses for sites that service multiple product families was paramount. Getting everyone to agree to this premise, that our goal was to simplify our Quality Management System while ensuring continued compliance and reducing enterprise risk, has grounded us and set the program up for success from the start.

2. Define your approach

Quality people are process people by nature, it’s part of what makes us great at what we do! Our approach to simplifying our QMS—the how of reaching our goal—was equally as important. BD is a collaborative organization and top-down directives are not part of the company culture. We knew that simplifying our Quality Management System across a such a large, diverse, innovative MedTech leader required active co-creation across all our businesses to be successful. Said simply, a top-down approach is not right for us. It’s harder, but it’s the right way to do it for BD. To drive successful co-creation, we created a network of Global Process Owners accountable to the entire process and engaged representatives from businesses, segments, regions and other functions throughout the element blitz process. These blitz teams were instrumental in creating a process and procedure that all could align to and were responsible for driving change management at their local level. We’re extremely proud of our approach which helped generate buy-in and engagement.

3. Change for the long-term

At the start of any global, company-wide program, there’s always the anxious trepidation and cautious question of, “will this change really stick?” To ensure Inspire Quality wasn’t just another “flash in the pan” we had to engage our network of change ambassadors to champion the program as a realization that this is not a short-term project; this is a sea change to how we conduct business moving forward. Creating sustainable change by keeping our procedures current once redesigned and launched, quickly implementing to the new procedure standards and striving for continuous improvement in everything we do to fulfill our best-in-class healthcare quality vision. Realizing that compliance to the new procedure means ongoing continuous improvement and healthy maintenance, creates a sustainable, compliant future QMS for years to come.

Lesson Learned: Celebrate the successes

On a multi-year transformational journey such as ours, it’s critical to celebrate the successes along the way! We’re confident we have the right goal, the right approach and the right people driving change for the long-term and that’s a lot to be proud of. We’ve made a point of celebrating our wins quarterly and communicating these broadly. To date we’re celebrating a 50% average reduction in procedures, and a 70% average reduction in associate training! These wins point towards the fact that we’re well on our way towards our #1 goal: simplifying our Quality Management System. Thank you to the across BD driving us closer to our vision every day. You are truly advancing the world of health!