January 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 key highlights and the meaning behind EBIDA.
What are the key takeaways from our recent month's performance? 

Our patient experience, inpatient mortality, sepsis mortality, and harm events all had near best months since the inception of our True North metrics 3 years ago. It's also important to note that these metrics have steadily improved year over year since we created a focus on them. One of our goals in 2020 is to bring an equity lens across our True North metrics to more systematically identify disparities that we must work to eliminate. 
What does EBIDA mean and why is it important?

Much like clinical medicine, the finance world is also full of acronyms. This year, our financial strength pillar introduced a new metric to the True North scorecard called EBIDA, which stands for Earnings before Interest, Depreciation and Amortization. Our finance team created two nice visuals below to help explain EBIDA. Modified EBIDA is what we highlighted on the scorecard since it best represents "our core income from patient care minus core expenses". The Modified EBIDA Margin measures "our efficiency in providing patient care" and is also an important target (one of our organizational IAP goals) that allows us to optimally borrow funds towards new capital projects, such as the new hospital at Parnassus by 2030.
UCSF Health: Did You Know?
UCSF Health is part of UC Health, which provides leadership and strategic direction for UC's five academic medical centers and 19 health professional schools. UC Health is "committed to nothing less than the well-being of all Californians." They recently released their FY19 Annual Report that is an interesting comparison of the academic medical centers in size and scope. For instance, the total operating revenue for the 5 medical centers was $13.3B, but UCSF Health represents 28% of that number. UC Health is now led by Dr. Carrie Byington who joined in October 2019.
News and Announcements
UCSF Health Recognized for Video Visits
Our Telehealth Program was recently featured during a Vizient webinar as a "best practice" to share with other organizations. Our video visit utilization currently puts us among the top few academic medical centers nationally. We do ~150 video visits daily, which represents 1-2% of total ambulatory volume, but certain clinics have more than 50% of their visits as video. It's estimated that we've saved patients approximately 9.8 million driving miles, $2M in fuel costs, and 200k+ hours of driving. Our patient satisfaction from these visits is also exceptionally high, reinforcing one of many reasons to expand video visits in the coming year.   
Promote your Quality/Safety Improvement Work 
Faculty engaged in "QI work" often ask about whether it's valued as a vehicle for academic promotion. While heterogeneity is described among clinical departments, the Advance system for managing your academic CV does encourage faculty to describe their Quality Improvement activities (see screenshot below). It's a nice way to describe your leadership in quality/safety, outline specific QI projects and their impact, and share how it's a focus of your UCSF career. This important narrative can complement other places in the CV to share more traditional invited presentations, publications, and/or other forms of scholarship.
Health in 2050: Hype versus Reality? 
It's January so the list of predictions for 2020 range from the stock market to the presidential election to the World Series, and everything in between. In case you missed it, UCSF published a great visual (see below) predicting heath in 2050 based on input from faculty and alumni. Take a look at the predictions that are more hype (e.g., smartwatches making instant diagnoses) than reality, but it's an interesting lens into how our provider roles in an increasingly digital environment will evolve. 
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 .