Preventive Screening in Specialty Care? - YES We Do!!!

A few weeks ago I was in Washington DC with our Medical Director for Quality and Clinical Outcomes Dr. Michael Kanter and Ruthie Goldberg for a meeting with a few members from both the house and the senate to discuss Kaiser's complete care approach to caring for our members. One of the senators we met with said there was no way we would ever get a specialist or an urgent care physician to care about someone's pap smear.  We all just looked at him as if he was crazy.   Dr. Ted Eytan, from the Permanente Federation and co-host for this day of meetings chuckled a little and said, "Actually, what they are telling you is that the specialists in Southern California and other KP regions are participating in providing complete care." 

Dr. Michael Neri, Riverside Medical Center Urgent Care PIC continues to dispel the misguided myth that a specialist or Urgent Care doctor will never do preventive screenings.   As a challenge to their 55 physician's and support staff Dr. Neri and his Department Administrator, Beth MathWig, created a Golden Glove award to recognize the care team with the highest amount of colon cancer screenings completed within their Urgent Care setting.  The following month they held aPapapalooza contest to see who could complete the most number of paps on patient's that were due for cervical cancer screening.  They celebrated with a papapalooza cake.  Staff have become excited and engaged.  Now they are trying to close as many care gaps as possible.

When we asked Dr. Neri about how he was getting such positive outcomes he explained that they had a mandatory meeting for all physician's where they reviewed all of the care gaps and discussed as a group how they could improve their successful opportunities rate.  There were a lot of email reminders and each month they share unblinded data with their entire staff.  Dr. Neri told me in an email that "one day when the power went out affecting the computers their staff were concerned that they wouldn't be able to tell any of their patient's what care gaps they had due."  Dr. Neri's enthusiasm for closing care gaps is contagious.  His goal is to share his ideas with his counterpart Urgent Care leaders to improve  successful opportunities on members presenting to Urgent Care departments across the region.  With every cancer screening completed, counseling provided, and screening care gap closed Dr. Neri and his staff are saving lives - one at a time.