Signature Initiatives Steer Network’s Momentum
Partners HealthCare’s ongoing mission is to provide the right care in the right place at the right time. Achieving that mission means continuously improving the quality of the care provided and using resources as efficiently as possible. Partners has launched five Signature Initiatives through which to coordinate care across Partners HealthCare, investing in next generation clinical information systems and standardizing best practices for quality improvement and efficiency.
Thomas H. Lee, MD, Network President, Partners HealthCare System, and CEO, PCHI, oversees the five initiatives, which include:
1. Investing in Quality and Utilization Infrastructure
Team leader: Cindy Bero, PCHI Director of Information Systems
Why: Information systems have been inadequately applied to health care.
Goal: Deploy a more fully developed electronic medical record (EMR) and computerized provider order entry systems (CPOE) across the system, reaching physician penetration of 80 percent for EMR and 100 percent for CPOE after three years.
2. Enhancing Patient Safety by Reducing Medication Errors System-wide
Team leader: Gregg Meyer, MD, medical director, MGPO
Why: The IOM has reported as many as 100,000 patients a year die as a consequence of medical error.
Goals: Establish uniform electronic error reporting in all Partners acute care hospitals in the next year; increase standardized error-mitigating technology; decrease drug errors; and implement critical clinical data transfer from acute to non-acute care sites in the next year.
3. Enhancing Uniform High Quality by Measuring Performance to Benchmark for Selected Inpatient and Outpatient Conditions
Team leader: Elizabeth Mort, MD, MGH associate chief medical officer
Why: Proven, effective medical interventions are not uniformly applied across health care settings.
Goal: Sustain and enhance position of national leadership in performance of best practices in clinical conditions of Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI), Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) and Diabetes.
4. Expanding Disease Management Programs by Supporting Activities for Certain Patients with Chronic Illnesses
Team leader: Timothy Ferris, MD, medical director, MGH Chelsea HealthCare Center
Why: Programs that improve coordination of care and can reduce hospitalizations for patients with complex conditions are not widely utilized.
Goals: Double enrollment in Partners Cardiac Service Line CHF disease management program from 310 to 675 (approximately 25 percent of the target population) and implement call center program for highest risk one percent of patients, enrolling about 700 patients from pilot program.
5. Improving Cost-effectiveness through Managing Utilization Trends and Analysis of Variance
Team leader: Jessica Dudley, MD, medical director, Partners Human Resources
Why: The rising costs of pharmaceuticals and radiology testing are outpacing increases in health care costs.
Goals: Reduce pharmacy rate of rise from 22.5 percent to 17 percent and support at least eight Radiology utilization management pilots.