Using Concept Mapping to Improve Health Care Decision Making

Health and human service organizations, both public and private, engage in planning for a wide range of voluntary and mandated reasons. One of the most daunting tasks facing any working group in the health care setting is how to come up with a common framework that can guide their work as a group. Whether you’re doing strategic planning for a hospital, creating a new training program for medical practice staff, or attempting to improve the performance of your workforce, you need to have a better way to bring together the different stakeholders in your organization and help them rapidly form a shared vision for what they will do. How do most health care organizations do this today? By way of seemingly endless committee meetings that end up with walls covered by flip chart sheets or post-it notes. And the result? Reports and plans that are, more often than not, ignored. Concept mapping presents a different way to value the input and knowledge of stakeholders and uses state-of-the-art technology and processes to create a common strategic vision. In about four hours time participants brainstorm a large number of ideas in a facilitated meeting or over the Web from anywhere in the world. Participants then sort and rate the brainstormed ideas. A powerful software program groups the ideas into the “big picture.” This picture, or concept map, illustrates graphically all the ideas in a series of idea “clusters.” These clusters or groupings of ideas can then be used to encourage better team decision-making. Using concept mapping has enabled many different kinds of health care organizations to prioritize ideas, assess consensus, determine gaps and develop more effective action plans. It is really a better way to put ideas in action.