View as Webpage

February 2020

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 our mid-year IAP performance.

We've reached the midpoint of the year. How are we doing with our IAP goals?  Patient Experience: we're currently at the threshold IAP level for our "would recommend hospital" metric (defined as % of units, practices and services improving). Outpatient services should be recognized for their notable 68% of areas improving compared to last year. For our "physician communication" metric (same definition for % of areas improving), we're at the outstanding IAP level in both hospital (68%) and outpatient services (70%). Please review the scorecard for additional details but we should be proud of the experience we're creating for patients, despite how busy we remain.  Harm Events: we're currently at the outstanding IAP performance level. Compared to last year at this time, our patients and staff have experienced more than 100 less harm events. The largest contributors are successful improvement work in reducing workplace injuries, adult CLABSI, CAUTI, and HAPIs. With our incredible patient volumes, this too is a reason for mid-year celebration.  Modified EBIDA: we're on the cusp of meeting our threshold IAP performance, but we have work to do in the second half of the fiscal year. There will be increased communication from UCSF Health about our financial health, but in very basic terms, our expenses are rising faster than our revenues, particularly with our capacity constraints that are all too familiar to everyone caring for patients. Complex solutions for a complex problem that are also part of the broader UCSF Health strategic plan (see below).

UCSF Health: Did You Know?

Last month, UCSF Medical Center announced that patients can now see radiographic studies, including X-rays, MRIs, CT scans and selected ultrasounds, on MyChart. This will allow patients to read reports and see images. We are only the 2 nd Epic customer in California and the first University of California hospital to use MyChart to make images available to patients.

News and Announcements

Coronavirus Response & Planning  Needless to say, it's been an eventful time for UCSF and UCSF Health in our planning for the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak (nCoV). We've hosted several virtual briefings, created flyers/toolkits/FAQs, established a website for UCSF and our UCSF Health Infection Prevention Resources , hosted a Town Hall (see video recording ), and built the capacity to safely care for patients with confirmed nCoV. You might also be interested in reviewing a real-time dashboard for the outbreak developed at Johns Hopkins and a nice set of visuals (see below) in the New York Times. The situation remains fluid and trying to manage misinformation and understandable anxiety is a good reminder for all of us to demonstrate acts of kindness and compassion.

Influenza Season: Protect Yourself, Your Patients & Colleagues Despite the intensity of news focus on nCoV, we're still in the middle of influenza season and it's important to continue focusing on important recommendations: 1) Vaccinate yourself and your patients, 2) Stay home if you're sick with respiratory symptoms, 3) Place your patients on droplet isolation if they have respiratory symptoms, and 4) CLEAN your hands often. If you're looking for a few minutes of entertainment, here is a hand hygiene lesson that was featured on the Jimmy Kimmel show during a past flu season.

UCSF Health Strategic Plan: Vision 2025 As we shared a couple months ago, our next strategic planning process is well underway in moving us from UCSF Medical Center to UCSF Health (last strategic plan) to a UCSF Health Network in the future. The strategic plan calls out important themes in health equity, behavioral health and academic alignment as keys to success. Over the past couple weeks, the strategic planning workgroups have convened to share ideas, identify cross-cutting themes, and integrate their proposed plans into our current True North pillars. The goal is to reinforce, redefine, and/or deprioritize certain work to create space for the new work ahead.

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 .