Perspectives
Dear Colleagues:
I had the pleasure of joining BWH President Gary Gottlieb, Partners CEO and President James Mongan, Board of Directors Chairman Marshall Moriarty and other hospital leaders this month in Washington, D.C., as BWH received the National Quality Health Award from the National Committee for Quality Health Care. This award and the many other awards and recognitions we have earned in recent years are testament to our organizational drive for quality and safety and the excellent care we deliver here every day.
The leadership of Gary, Jim and Marshall and their unwavering commitment to and support of the Brigham’s drive for quality is the envy of many health care systems and hospitals. But our leadership is only as good as our staff, and this drive for quality permeates the Brigham on a grassroots level and unites all of us through a deeply shared sense of teamwork. Everyone on our team shares one common trait: an intellectual vigor to improve care.
With a leadership structure of actively engaged chairs, chiefs and directors and the dynamic relationship between our Nursing staff and professional staff, we are not resting on our laurels. This institution is committed to improving the quality of care even more, and that’s precisely why we continue to solicit and welcome outside scrutiny from organizations like the University HealthSystems Consortium and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. This conscious decision to open ourselves up to scrutiny from UHC, IHI and others is based on the faith our Board of Directors and executive leadership team have in our frontline staff.
We should all be proud of this NCQHC National Quality Award, which is just the latest outside recognition of our commitment to excellence. Just a few months ago, the UHC recognized us as a top performer, and we received the first ever Betsy Lehman organizational patient safety award. While I am confident we will continue to receive appropriate recognition, the awards are but a reflection of our firm commitment to the highest caliber of patient care.
Sincerely,
Andy Whittemore, MD
Chief Medical Officer
Dear Colleagues:
BWH is constantly recognized for delivering quality care because so many of our physicians directly contribute to the institution’s drive to improve. Both the National Committee for Quality Health Care and the University HealthSystems Consortium – two of the latest organizations to recognize BWH for its excellence – marveled at how BWH’s culture is never accepting of the status quo.
In addition to clinical and teaching responsibilities, many of our physicians serve on Care Improvement Council standing committees that focus on patient safety, pharmacy and therapeutics, transfusion, CPR, infection control, tissue and quality outcomes. We have well-attended task forces on epidural anesthesia, atrial fibrillation, sedation management, the code team and more.
Our physicians continue to identify issues and gaps in quality care and work to understand and resolve these problems with innovative technologies. For example, Ramin Khorasani, MD, has been instrumental with helping Radiology go paperless, rolling out our Picture Archives and Communication System (PACS) and broadening the reach of Percipio and its electronic roundtrip and evidence-based decision support. In addition to his duties as a clinical and research fellow in 2002, Eric Poon, MD, MPH, worked with a team of doctors and IS developers to create the results manager function within the longitudinal medical record (LMR).
The successes of Percipio and LMR are extending beyond BWH, as more and more care providers are looking to us for the latest technologies. The continuing rollout of the Electronic Medical Record is another, as approximately one-third of private staff physicians have already or are in the process of adopting it this year.
These are just a few examples of BWHers confronting and defeating the status quo. This innate drive to improve systems is in our culture from the ground up. The thinking of our physicians is not confined by what exists. Instead, we are driven to make it better.
Sincerely,
Steven Seltzer, MD
Chairman, BWPO