True North Newsletter
Monthly highlights of our improvement activities
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What is "True North" and why is it important? Please read
here
to learn more.
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Please review our
current
True North scorecard that
continues to serve as one lens into our organizational priorities and performance.
This month's communication focuses on key highlights from the scorecard.
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What are the key takeaways from this month's scorecard?
- Patient Experience & Harm Events: with one month remaining in the fiscal year, we're on the cusp of meeting our IAP goals in both areas. There are a number of units/practices/services who are the brink of meeting their improvement goals, and if a few more achieve them, it will tip the organization into the green. For harm events, we had an exceptional month of May (best month of the year) and while our harm event numbers are similar to last year, our actual rates, which take into account the growth in our patient volumes, demonstrate improvements once again this year.
- Learning Health System: as we move into the next fiscal year, we hope to make visible the key elements of the revised LHS metrics, which will include ways to measure our: 1) learning environment (e.g. Gallup question on Learn & Grow), innovation (e.g., virtual care visits), research (e.g., clinical trial enrollment) and lean transformation. Stay tuned for more on this important pillar, which relates to the others in meaningful ways.
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Ethics Program & Consultation Services
At last month's Quality Improvement Executive Committee,
Sirisha Narayana
(Chair of our Medical Ethics Committee and Chief of the Ethics Consult Service) provided an
annual update
about this multidisciplinary group's work. In addition to providing educational sessions and discussing difficult policies, such as those related to unilateral DNR and brain death, they provide an invaluable resource to our patient and providers. Over the past year, they offered more than 50 consultations that highlighted challenging themes for our providers around limitation of life-sustaining therapies, decision-making for incapacitated patients, and addressing moral distress. Newer themes the past year included the critical role of social determinants in health care (e.g., biases, discrimination, and challenging behavioral management).
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Health Equity Council: Lead | Inspire | Advocate | Influence | Communicate
Over the past year, UCSF Health formed a
Health Equity Council
whose purpose is "
to ensure health equity is a UCSF Health strategic and operational priority that is driven by systematically identifying and eliminating healthcare disparities.
" The council developed a
program charter
and recently
presented
to the senior leadership and clinical chairs about the work ahead, which will focus on 1) culture & awareness, 2) data & analytics, and 3) disparity improvement work. We will share more about these efforts, but we hope it will galvanize a desire to better understand where we have disparities, and how improving them allows us to provide the quality of care our patients (and communities) deserve. The work also aligns with UCSF's recent announcement to embrace the role of an
anchor institution
.
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Tired of Metrics? A Summer Read for You
Given our world continues to get inundated with data, and a desire for more seems insatiable at times, you might consider an interesting read called "
The Tyranny of Metrics
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how the obsession with quantifying human performance threatens schools, medical care, business, and government
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While the tagline is provocative, it made me reflect on how we need to continue balancing the need for meaningful performance data with equally important storytelling of what we do that is less measurable
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Looking for information from a past True North Newsletter? Please access them
here.
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