thequalitypostGreetings from Cat, Saj, Ari and Jenica Welcome to the 118th edition of The Quality Post! In this issue, we share DHM QI news, remind you about specifics of what you can do to help us meet our QI goal to improve care of patients with alcohol use disorder; provide a Provider Dashboard Tip of the Month; and share our True North Metric performance for FY21. inthisissue
New Medicine UBLT Medical Director and A3 Thinking Training Opportunities
Collaborate Effectively Even When Working Remotely
Improving Care of Patients with Alcohol Use Disorder
Provider Dashboard Tip of the Month
FY21 DHM True North Metric Performance Medicine UBLT Medical Director and A3 Thinking Training Opportunities Happy new year to everyone, and thank you to all who are making a huge difference in the care of patients and supporting all of our broad divisional missions. As the new year begins, we are excited to announce two things: 1) Congratulations to Armond Esmaili, who was selected to be the Medicine Unit Based Leadership Team (UBLT) medical director. In this role, he will provide leadership in managing the day-to-day operations and setting the strategic plans for the UBLT, which is a group of inter-disciplinary team members consisting of nurses, case managers, social workers, physicians, and staff members from 14M, 14L, and 15L. The Medicine UBLT and the DHM QI group work closely to collaborate on shared improvement goals around our True North pillars and metrics, including improving communication with patients with limited English proficiency and improving screening and treatment for alcohol use disorder. Armond was also recently selected to participate in the third cohort of UCSF Health's Learning Health System program, where he will receive intensive Lean training and provide Lean coaching to colleagues across our organization. 2) A reminder that Sujatha Sankaran will be leading two A3 thinking workshops that will focus on improving clinical health equity. The A3 framework is a methodology for problem-solving that is centered on the patient's perspective and is widely used in improvement work at UCSF. Sujatha recently obtained her Lean Champion certificate through the Learning Health System program, and these workshops will a be a great resource for all, no matter if you have no prior experience or do have some experience in Lean A3 thinking.
Please email Sujatha if you are interested in participating and you will receive a Zoom link.
Collaborate Effectively Even When Working Remotely Collaboration is especially difficult right now when many are working remotely. But there are steps you can take to ensure your team is effectively moving ahead in accomplishing group goals. Use existing meetings to brainstorm, set vision, align roles, or have other creative and strategic discussions. Set an agenda in advance, assign someone to facilitate the meeting to keep the group on track and focused on decision-making. Also remember that not every communication needs to happen in a meeting. When you can, use shared documents that can be updated and tracked by multiple people asynchronously, and set clear deadlines for the team to review. You can also encourage people to work virtually "side by side" to push forward a shared project. They might get on a video call to work together, so that they can easily stop and ask a question or request feedback. Working together well from afar is difficult, but it's possible, with intentionality and focus. This tip is adapted from "4 Tips for Effective Virtual Collaboration" by Elizabeth Grace Saunders Screen, Identify, and Treat: Improving Care of Patients with Alcohol Use Disorder As previously described, every year, our residents choose a QI project to work on, and this year's goal is to improve the care of patients with alcohol use disorder (AUD) through three main aims: 1) Screen all hospital medicine patients for specifics of alcohol use and document this information in the alcohol section of the APeX Social Determinants of Health wheel that can be found at the bottom of the patient banner. The specific questions listed in the alcohol section are from the AUDIT-C screening tool, which is a validated tool to screen for alcohol use disorder. 2) Identify patients with AUD using DSM-V criteria. This criteria can be accessed through the ".alcoholuse" dotphrase. The dotphrase also contains other useful just-in-time information to help guide clinical decision making, patient counseling, and linkage to community resources (please do consult social work to help with linkage!). This information can deleted from your progress note to prevent note bloat. 3) Treat patients with AUD via behavioral counseling and pharmacologic therapy, which can be ordered through the Alcohol Use Disorder Order Set. If there are any questions, you can reach out to the substance use disorder advice service at 443-6272. Our goal is to get to 75% screening for alcohol use and 30% of patients with AUD receiving a prescription for pharmacotherapy by June 2021. This is also one of our Division's True North goals for this year, and we greatly appreciate your efforts in helping us meet our important goal! The DHM Dashboard DHM Dashboard Tip #3 bit.ly/dhmdashboard - bookmark this! The bar graphs at the bottom of the splash page give you the actual numbers for your performance data (as opposed to the normalized score from the radar graph), and helps you see where you stand compared to your peers and divisional targets (or medians). Navigate to the "About the Metrics" page using the drop-down menu on the left to read more about the metrics and how they are calculated. Please email Logan (Logan.Pierce@ucsf.edu) or Saj (sajan.patel@ucsf.edu) with any questions, and check out the DHM Wiki Dashboard Page for more info! |