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In This Issue:
Graduates of the BW/F Lean Practitioner Program and BWH leadership during the Jan. 14 graduation ceremony.
During a three month period, the Bone Marrow Transplant B team, staffed by physician assistants at BWH, showed the impact a relatively minor change can have on reducing medical costs while maintaining a high quality of care. As part of a BW/F Lean Practitioner Program project, the group studied how dispensing a certain medication orally rather than intravenously to a subset of stem cell transplant patients could potentially save more than $12,000 in drug costs for the program in one year.
“Our goal was to improve the quality of care while reducing cost, and we selected a physician assistant team because PAs and RNs provide consistency. The next step will be to see if we can roll this out across other inpatient services,” said Deborah Yolin-Raley, PA-C, MS, director of the PA program at Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center.
“Not only did we find that it could reduce medical costs, but this approach has other benefits, including decreasing line access, which reduces the chances of a line becoming infected,” said Katie Fillipon, RN, nursing director of 7AB, who led the project with Yolin and Anne McDonnell, PharmD, BCOP.
The BMT team was among 12 others from across BWH and Faulkner Hospital that presented findings from their process improvement projects to hospital leaders and staff at a Jan. 14 ceremony commemorating the seventh graduating class of the Lean Practitioner program, which started in November 2008.
Other projects included reducing wait time for patients, reducing patient falls, providing a safe and efficient way to administer IV medications, streamlining billing processes, improving the Occupational Health Services clearance process for new employees and implementing a new adult respiratory care scheduling system and a more efficient inventory management system to maintain the Blood Bank’s optimal levels of supplies.
For the Blood Bank team, the opportunity to participate in this program was highly rewarding, said Gretchen Griffin, MT (ASCP), who worked on the project with Sandra R. Boehler, MT (ASCP) and Denise Fountain, MS, MT (ASCP) SBB.
“It provided a new language and set of tools for addressing improvements in the department,” Griffin said. “I believe the skills we learned will help us with this project and also many others going forward.”
There are 148 Lean Practitioner graduates from the previous six graduating classes, with a total of 66 completed projects.
“The quality of the efforts and the breadth of topics addressed by all of these projects is impressive, particularly how they align with our overall areas of organizational focus,” said Michael Gustafson, MD, MBA, senior vice president for Clinical Excellence. “Graduates of this program will lead their respective areas as we continue to provide the highest level of care to our patients and their families.”