Standard Work for Digital Health
How to make improvements stick
Happy Tuesday. This week’s note is about sustainment. The work isn’t the build—it’s the operating discipline after go-live.
The idea in 30 seconds
Digital is not a one-time build. Impact sticks when you define standard work: owners, cadence, metrics, change control, and feedback loops.
The framework
Five pieces of standard work:
Named clinical + operational owners
Monthly review cadence (protect it)
Three metrics max: reliability + outcome proxy + balancing
Change control path (request → test → deploy)
Frontline feedback loop (friction + failures)
A quick example
A pathway performed well for 3 months, then drifted when staffing changed. A monthly standard-work review caught the drift early and restored reliability with small updates.
How to measure it
reliability trend over time (drift detection)
time from issue identified → fix deployed
feedback items closed per month (responsiveness)
One action for this week
Create a one-page standard-work card for one workflow: owners, cadence, 3 metrics, change pathway.
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