John Harrison is an ASQ senior member and secretary for his local ASQ section. He’s been nominated for chair-elect in the section for next year, and is the current secretary for the Health Care Division of ASQ and has been nominated for the division’s treasurer position for next year. He’s also a registered nurse and manager of quality improvement for the United Community Health Center in Green Valley, AZ.

Harrison is retired from the military where he served as an Army nurse. During that time, he obtained a bachelor’s degree in nursing. Harrison had post-graduate training in burn, trauma, and emergency nursing at the University of Washington. He completed his master’s degr ee in health service administration through the University of St. Francis, Joliet, IL.

More than 35 years ago, Harrison’s dedication to healthcare quality began with his work at a hospital unit as a staff nurse, and later as a charge nurse and supervisor. His experience of quality at that time, he says, was not pleasant, as it was the heyday of quality assurance, filled with a lot of finger-pointing when it came to quality errors.

His vision of quality changed when he retired from the military and began to work as a quality management nurse for a local HMO. During this time, he joined ASQ.
“As a quality management nurse for the HMO, my duties consisted mostly of performing medical office reviews and assessing the compliance of physicians to set standards,” he says. “I found, while reviewing various offices, that I was in a position to share best practice processes that I would observe during my reviews.”

Harrison lost his position when the HMO underwent reorganization, and he let his ASQ membership lapse as he pursued private entrepreneurship. His interest in quality, however, remained.

“I eventually returned to clinical nursing and had a focus on quality as part of my management approach,” he says. “I rejoined ASQ and went to a workshop on IWA-1 and business excellence. The workshop sold me on ISO 9001 and IWA-1.”
“I found the focus that I was looking for,” he adds. “Not just compliance, but a real focus on excellence and system-based management.”

For the last two and a half years, Harrison has been the manager of quality improvement for United Community Health Center, a not-for-profit organization, with clinics serving both commercially insured, the under insured and noninsured population.

“My main challenge is facilitating organizational cultural change to a systems-based culture that seeks organizational excellence,” he says. “I have been doing local and state-level presentations on organizational excellence, systems-based management and the value of the ISO 9000 approach to quality.”
Harrison has also taken the ISO 9001 lead auditor course and the Plexus IWA-1 Train the Trainer course. He says he’s seeing an increasing awareness of the value of systems-based management and ISO 9000 in healthcare. He sees the current moment in healthcare and quality as wonderful steps in the evolution of these industries.

Harrison says with rising costs in healthcare and the on-going notoriety of medical errors causing thousands of unnecessary deaths each year, the industry will have to go through changes related to the effectiveness and efficiency of the processes to improve outcomes both in the clinical and operational areas of the organization.

“The way healthcare is changing will result in more customer focus rather than patient focus, as the population becomes more aware of medical information and insists on more say and control over medical care,” he says. “This opens the healthcare industry to undergo a paradigm shift in how quality influences the daily operations of the provision of healthcare, both on a population basis and on an individual basis.”

Harrison says he also sees quality changing to the realm of organizational excellence where quality tools morph into daily management tools.

“One of the biggest changes will be that healthcare will finally see itself as a service industry rather than a unique industry unto itself,” he says. “The healthcare industry will begin to publish information as to the effectiveness of the care and the efficiency of the care.”