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December 2019

True North Newsletter Monthly highlights of our improvement activities

Achieving our True North

What is True North and why is it important? 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 and unveiling of our LHS pillar metrics.

What are the key takeaways from our recent month's performance?  Our patient experience and physician communication performance continue to excel through the first quarter of the year as we're achieving organizational goals in both. Our ambulatory quality metrics are also performing well, but it's a good time to reinforce the importance of influenza vaccination for us and our patients. We've also updated our data to identify where we may have disparities across certain metrics, a continued area of focus this year. Our harm events are also off to an outstanding first quarter of the year and well ahead of last year. While the improvements are in many areas (e.g., adult CLABSI, CAUTI, CDiff and HAPIs), our workplace injuries are a significant source of the noted improvement.

What's new with the Learning Health System pillar? We're unveiling a new approach and set of organizational metrics for the LHS pillar this month. You'll note the four domains highlighted: Learning Environment, Innovation at Scale, Lean Transformation, and Research Engagement. Each of the domains is associated with metrics for success. We encourage reviewing the LHS pillar rounding guide for more information and how this might translate to your local True North boards.

UCSF Health: Did You Know?

While at a recent meeting, a discussion ensued about our History of UCSF website that is full of interesting factoids about our university. For instance, the origins of UCSF Medical Center date back to April 1907 when the first teaching hospital on the Parnassus campus was founded in the wake of the 1906 earthquake and fire.

News and Announcements

UCSF Health Strategic Plan Launched UCSF Health officially launched its next Strategic Plan with a town hall last month and a series of related communications. The full deck is provided here, but the highlights are a continued evolution in moving us from UCSF Medical Center to UCSF Health (last strategic plan) to a UCSF Health Network in the future. The strategic plan also calls out important themes in health equity, behavioral health, and academic alignment as keys to success. Many workgroups are actively working on the specific tactics and measures of success that will get communicated further in early 2020.

UCSF Health Leaders Participate in DEI Training Last month, more than 45 UCSF Health leaders participated in a full-day diversity, equity and inclusion training, sponsored by the School of Medicine's Differences Matter Initiative. It was a meaningful day of conversations and one that will catalyze both additional training needs, and work towards a more diverse and inclusive leadership (and workforce) at UCSF Health.

Pinnacle Award for Patient Experience At Press Ganey's National Conference last month, UCSF Health was recognized as one of the recipients for the Pinnacle of Excellence Award for sustained outstanding patient experience. Below is a visual that shows our patient experience performance, demonstrating the steady improvement year over year in our hospital setting.

Suggestions for future items to highlight? Please contact Niraj Sehgal, Chief Quality Officer. Looking for information from a past True North Newsletter? Please access them here .