What’s Possible with Transformation?

June 29, 2015

This week, Scott DeNegre, assistant vice president of Operational Excellence, shares how HSS is using the Epic Electronic Medical Record (EMR) implementation as a catalyst for transforming several major Hospital processes, with the primary goals of improving quality, efficiency and most importantly the overall patient experience.

The healthcare industry is changing, and it’s critical that we respond to these changes and adapt accordingly to ensure our continued success. One of the ways HSS is responding to the changing landscape of healthcare is through transformation. Transformation is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to redesigning care delivery to achieve excellence across the care continuum. It measurably improves quality, creates holistic, patient-centered care experiences, and reduces healthcare costs by decreasing waste, variation and duplication. The Operational Excellence team provides the framework that brings about this redesign through alignment of people, process and technology. The transformation of a healthcare system is a complex endeavor – simultaneously improving patient outcomes, reducing costs, increasing innovation, improving quality, and becoming more effective while delivering an extraordinary patient experience.

While implementing Epic will yield significant efficiency across the organization and vastly improve our ability to measure performance, drive process improvement, and integrate clinical and financial operations, the most important benefit is that our patients will have a much more seamless and coordinated experience across the entire continuum of care. But the implementation of the Epic system alone will not provide the streamlined clinical processes and increased capacity we need to continue thriving in a changing market. In order for HSS to fully realize the benefits of Epic, we need to rethink the way we operate and redesign the system to remove inefficient workarounds, reduce process variation, and decrease documentation duplication. Transformation is really the key to making an EMR work for our hospital – we need to adapt the Epic system and our internal processes so our clinicians can continue to focus on patient care. This means fundamentally altering the way care is delivered, not just automating processes with Epic; the implementation project is a great catalyst for making these changes and a unique opportunity to design from the ground up.

Through our Transformation Initiatives we are striving to increase standardization of the care delivery process so patients and providers will have consistent experiences throughout the HSS enterprise and patients will have easy access to our providers. Additionally, we want to supplement our clinical operations infrastructure to facilitate care delivery and transitions within and between care settings and improve the level of service we provide to our clinical staff.

Transformation projects are currently underway across the entire Hospital – patient access, perioperative process, inpatient care, enterprise intelligence, outpatient, and surgeon office. Below are a few highlights of transformation efforts for our Hospital clinical and financial processes. Additional details about our transformation initiatives will be shared in the July edition of ECHO.

• HSS Patient Access will be reorganized to enable increased flexibility for patients, minimize administrative requirements for physicians and leverage economies of scale to enable sustainable growth and increased access.
• The HSS Perioperative process will be tailored to the unique population of patients that we serve, leverage our elective case mix and align surgeon and Hospital efficiency to increase clinical efficiency and process reliability.
• HSS Inpatient care will be standardized through interdisciplinary clinical pathways to align care with clinical need, minimize delays in service, and eliminate duplicative and unnecessary documentation. Eliminating duplicative efforts and aligning clinical workflow and documentation with established HSS Pathways is expected to increase adherence and reduce average length of stay.

The implementation of Epic in a meaningful way is simply the beginning of transforming care. Over the next few years we will focus on developing the management and technical infrastructure required to support sustainable growth and enable increased efficiency. Once the necessary support structures are in place, the focus shifts to best practice adoption and process innovation. We must continue to work together to use data to improve transitions of care and ongoing quality so we can continue our mission to provide the highest quality patient care and an extraordinary patient experience.

I want to thank everyone who has played a role in developing our plans for transformation. This has been a true interdisciplinary team effort. The work we have done together will help ensure that we continue to be successful into the future and fully realize the benefits of implementing Epic at HSS.

As shared in previous Epic blogs, a different Epic Project Team is highlighted on a monthly basis as a way to get to know who is on the team and the work that they are doing for the Epic implementation. This month the Operational Excellence Team and Transformation Initiative leaders are introduced. Click here to learn more.

As a reminder staff are now able to submit questions related to the Epic project directly from the Epic intranet site. Staff will receive a response from a member of the Epic team and a library of frequently asked questions and responses will be maintained on the site.

For more information or questions about Transformation, please contact Scott DeNegre at DeNegreS@HSS.EDU or the Operational Excellence Department at operationalexcellence@hss.edu.