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| Northern California KP visits Southern California to share innovations |
Interestingly enough, the work theme for the past couple weeks for me has been all about collaboration. Starting with a meeting with our Southern California Complete Care Leaders where we shared ideas for improving care for patients with rare diseases, diabetes, asthma, etc. The meeting opened with our Southern California Medical Director over Quality and Clinical Analysis and our Foundation Hospital Senior Vice President for Quality and Patient Care Services Patti Harvey who spoke of their appreciation towards this group for coming together to improve outcomes, to improve quality, and improve lives. The collaboration theme was echoed by our Southern California Permanente Medical Group Business Leader, Judy White, who spoke about replacing the competition that we have with each other across service areas to a culture of collaboration to improve care for all patients.
Three days later I met with consultants from Community Partners to go over our plans to deploy our Proactive Encounter program in surrounding community clinics throughout Los Angeles area... work sponsored by our Kaiser Permanente Community Benefits grant program. This work aims to improve the quality of care delivered to patients across our communities by teaching clinics quality improvement strategies, implementing standard workflows, and sharing clinical guidelines. When I was approached by our Community Benefits team last year about the idea of sharing and deploying Proactive Office Encounter (POE) across our community clinic partners I didn't need any persuading to get me on board. "Count me in!" was my ecstatic response.
Wednesday we spent almost two hours on a conference call with Northern California KP explaining how we developed and implemented a Proactive Encounter program for our Obstetric patients that provides prompts in our EHR to remind staff to stage orders for providers so based on what each individual patient needs according to gestational age. If depression screening hasn't been completed, labs are missing, or a RH- patient hasn't had Rhogam given by her 28th week a care gap will remind the staff to place the order. Sharing strategies, programming logic, technologies, and thought processes helps us deliver outstanding care to both the mother and child.
My last call today was with a group of physician leaders from our Colorado region who were in the process of rolling their version of Proactive Care out to their specialties and shoring up the work already accomplished in primary care with a Successful Opportunity Report much like what we use in Southern California to monitor the effectiveness of our Proactive Care program by measuring how often patients came in to our health care system with a care gap and whether that gap was closed within 30 days. I shared with them some of our strategies for engaging specialties and how we used the report to identify areas for improvement and celebrate successes. After the call, I had a side conversation with one of their project leads who had more questions of her own. She thanked me for taking the time to talk with her offline. What they don't get is that this is one of my greatest joys... Sharing successful practices to improve the patient care experience.
I'm grateful every day that I work for an organization that allows open collaboration. Together we save lives... one patient at a time.
"Every day is Collaboration Day when you have friends on Twitter and other social media platforms" KA
"Every day is Collaboration Day when you have friends on Twitter and other social media platforms" KA
We are all on the same KP Team so we should be expected to work in the spirit of collaboration to improve care and service to those we serve. I spent time on a call with NCAL today that I encouraged them to have to share just how aligned we really are in our strategy to decrease readmission. They were very surprised with how much we learned in a mere 40 minutes. Imagine what we can do if we worked together all the time!
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