Blair Walker, writing in Hospitals & Health Networks, reports on how the CEO of Houston’s Memorial Hermann Health System, Chuck Stokes, has “intensified the organization’s focus on clinical-care redesign.”
Blair writes that “a key objective is to reduce variation in how Memorial Hermann provides care to individuals with specific diagnoses.’For example, if a patient needed open heart surgery, we have to make sure the care that we’re providing is the same every time, no variation,’ Stokes says. ‘What do evidence-based practice protocols say is the highest level and the highest practice of care, every time?” ‘
“A second component of clinical-care redesign calls for having a multidisciplinary team of physicians, nurses and other allied healthcare professions make multiple daily assessments of a patient’s progression through the health care system.”
“The third part is care and case management. ‘They are part of the multidisciplinary team, and are trying to make sure that when the patient gets through the acute-care phase, proper services have already been secured,’ Stokes says. ”
“Clinical-care redesign’s final prong ensures that Memorial Hermann’s staff accurately document what happens to patients during their acute care experience. ‘The reason that’s so important is, when patients move to post-acute care, their primary care physician can go into electronic records and get an accurate indication of what happened during the acute-care phase,”’ Stokes told H&HN.
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