Success is Built on Relationships
November, 2019 | Scott Nygaard, M.D., MBA, COO
As Dr. Antonucci reviews the successes of our 2019 fiscal year, we recognize that success is not measured just in numbers, but also in the relationships we continue to build with our partners and community. Strong relationships with you and your staff have allowed us to serve our community for more than a century. Together we have worked to meet the ever-growing needs of our community.
Much of last year’s success resulted from the great work by the Clinical Collaboration Council and the associated Clinical Consensus workgroups. Many of you volunteered your valuable time to help improve patient care, safety and satisfaction across our health system. Guidelines and benchmarks established by the Council have helped to reduce hospital-acquired conditions (HACs), moving our CMS star ratings to 4- and 5-Star levels on a number of the individual indicators. We’re extremely proud of the CLABSI and CAUTI improvements achieved with your help. But also the strides with C. diff, which has produced a >50% reduction in hospital-onset C. diff since the inception of the new GDH/Toxin methodology.
Physicians continue to bring forward concerns, as well as a desire to help find solutions, prompting additional workgroups in the areas of sterile processing, hypothermia, inpatient glucose protocols and lab stewardship. The Coordination of Surgical Care and Recovery CCG continues to report outcome improvements through ERAS and SSI, and plans continue for the introduction of these processes to additional surgical specialties and procedures.
With data readily available – not only to physicians but the public as well – the data stewardship subcommittee is working to help physicians understand and improve their performance on reported data. Recently, we offered a CME program concerning publicly available data and potential solutions to improve performance metrics.
To improve patient flow and capacity throughout the health system, the Lee Health Transfer Center, located at Lee Memorial Hospital, was expanded to the new Global Patient Station (GPS). The GPS will continue inter- and intra-facility transfers for patients into and throughout the system, and now serves as the hub for patient flow and throughput for Lee Memorial Hospital. Multidisciplinary team members now work side-by-side to facilitate and coordinate patient movement throughout their stay. A new position was added to prioritize and coordinate inpatient diagnostic procedures in collaboration with the diagnostic team as well as the unit nursing staff. The vision is to adopt similar models for inpatient flow at all hospital campuses of Lee Health.
Meds to Beds, our bedside prescription delivery service, is helping to improve our patients’ medication adherence. As you know well, without this bedside service, patients often waited days or never picked up their prescriptions, which could cause serious health consequences and often readmissions to the hospital. Not only do many patients now leave the hospital with their medications in-hand, they also receive a comprehensive education about the medications and how to take them properly.
As Dr. Antonucci mentioned in his column, there are many more accomplishments and operational wins we can share, but we wanted to highlight a few. These achievements are testimony to the power of us working well together, and we appreciate your support, partnership and leadership to make a difference to the patients and families we serve.