Primary Care Practice Redesign Newsletter
Cohort 1 | Issue 1
November 14, 2018
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Welcome to the first edition of the
Primary Care Practice Redesign Newsletter
, a biweekly newsletter focused entirely on keeping you and your colleagues up to date on Mount Sinai’s practice redesign efforts. Stay informed about what’s happening in the practices in your cohort, read up on what you can expect to learn and do, and understand how you can leverage resources such as Practice Facilitators to support you and your practice throughout this transformation.
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Learning Collaborative Recap
Focus Areas for Redesign
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At the October Learning Collaborative Kickoff meeting,
Dr. Roy Cohen
,
Director, Mount Sinai Primary Care Institute,
explained that primary care practices need to take the lead in managing patient care in order to achieve population health management goals in the shift to value-based care. We understand that adding more work without adequate resources has unintended consequences, including high rates of provider burnout negatively impacting the health and wellness of both practitioners and patients.
Working harder isn’t the answer. We have to work smarter, and that’s why Mount Sinai is supporting its front-line primary care practices with resources, tools and training to achieve better outcomes.
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The five focus areas for primary care redesign:
- Evaluating care team satisfaction
- Creating a transitions of care workflow
- Optimizing huddles for panel management
- Implementing standard learning for process improvement (Green Belt Lean)
- Ensuring all practices have expanded patient access
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Your satisfaction matters!
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We asked
Lisa Renaud, Practice Manager
,
Mount Sinai Doctors Faculty Practice, 1090 Amsterdam Avenue, what practice redesign means to her. Here’s what she said.
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“To me, practice redesign asks us to consider how we can seamlessly improve the level of services we deliver to our patients — by looking at areas of waste and elevating the practice managers, the staff, and the doctors to work at the top of their licenses. In order to move forward as a brand, what do we want patients to think when they think about Mount Sinai?
We want them to know we care about our patients, are driven to excellence, improve constantly, and practice state-of-the-art medicine
.
This is extremely exciting to me because I am part of the process. It’s not a group of people sitting in a room and telling me what needs to happen. It’s a group of people asking me what I think is possible, knowing that I live and breathe this every day. I am asked to come along and help get the practice to the end goal. This can only be done through a deep dive into the practice. So here I am, rolling up my sleeves and getting down and dirty in the trenches with the goal of making my practice and all the other practices and Mount Sinai successful. It’s a lot of work, but it’s good work.
The energy and drive of the redesign team is contagious and it makes me willing to work harder to get where we need to go
.”
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Understanding Practice Facilitation
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What is a Practice Facilitator?
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) points to a growing body of evidence supporting practice facilitation as an effective strategy to improve primary health care processes and outcomes through the creation of an ongoing, trusting relationship between an external facilitator and primary care practices. Mount Sinai is bringing this supportive service to its primary care practices for a period of six months to help support practices in reaching incremental and transformational improvement goals.
What does a Practice Facilitator do?
- Observe patient and team flows
- Set time with core redesign team for bi-weekly meetings
- Re-train staff on process mapping, ensuring they have the right tools
- Support initial work around huddles
- Capture practice wish list – what do you want to accomplish?
You can expect your Practice Facilitator to complete an in-depth assessment of your practice over the first three weeks and to work very closely with the core redesign team at your practice, guiding work around huddles and training on Lean principles. The Practice Facilitator and core redesign team will then implement major improvement projects to improve access, transitions of care, or other high priority clinical transformation efforts at the 60- and 90-day marks.
What does your Practice Facilitator expect from you?
We ask that you be as honest and open as possible about competing demands, priorities, and ideal timing before beginning quality improvement efforts; this conversation can inform their ability to best support the practice’s quality improvement goals.
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Your Practice Facilitators
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Dr. Stella Safo, Senior Medical Director of Clinical Transformation, Population Health, joins
Dr. Robert Fields, Chief Medical Officer, in the latest episode of the Mount Sinai Health Partners podcast to discuss transforming primary care for population health. Motivated by the connection between social justice and primary care, Dr. Safo’s work addresses the question of how to survive in primary care in a way that’s sustainable. She and Dr. Fields discuss some of the stresses of primary care, goals of clinical transformation, and physician burnout. She also shares her vision on the art of medicine.
This episode and all previous episodes are also available
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Lean Training Targets Waste
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Find it and eliminate it!
Lean is a method and philosophy of process change that focuses on eliminating waste in order to maximize value to the customer (patient).
As part of practice transformation, your practice will undergo training and you will achieve Lean Green Belt certification.
Two main pillars of Lean are respect for people and continuous improvement. The motto is “work smarter, not harder.” Learning valuable Lean skills will help you achieve improvements in your practice such as increasing efficiency in patient registration, improving access to care for your patients and achieving successful huddles. Lean does not happen in a bubble – it involves getting various stakeholders
around the table to understand interdependencies and where bottlenecks are so that the team may come up with solutions.
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Stay in Touch!
Cohort 1 Primary Care Practice Leadership
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We hope you had the opportunity to meet and network with your colleagues at the October Learning Collaborative Kickoff meeting. Below are the eight practices participating in Cohort 1 and contact information for practice leads. We encourage you to stay in touch with your colleagues to share both the challenges and wins of practice redesign.
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Williamsburg
Dr. Elizabeth Enschede, Co-Medical Director
Dr. Danya Reich, Co- Medical Director
Amber Grossman, Practice Manager
23rd Street
Dr. Sam Altstein, Co-Medical Director
Dr. John Chuey, Co-Medical Director
Jermaine (Jay) Molina-Powell,
Administrative Director
Sam Friedman
Jason Kindt, Medical Director
Molly McNeil, Practice Manager
Brooklyn Heights
Dr. David Coun, Medical Director
Michelle Bekman, Ambulatory
Operations Director
Marie Figueroa, Practice Manager
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Ansonia
Dr. Mark Gorny
, Medical Director
Christine Cate
, Practice Manager
1090 Amsterdam
Dr. Stephanie Wang
, Medical Director
Lisa Renaud
, Practice Manager
85th Street
Dr. Jennifer Kent
, Co-Medical Director
Dr. Carlos Rios
, Co-Medical Director
Tabitha Deynes
, Practice Manager
IMA
Dr. Marybeth Fishman
, Medical Director
Sheila
Whitaker
, Practice Manager
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