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 page 2 updates.

Adult Hospital Launches Tier 3 Huddle

Multidisciplinary efforts to improve our throughput continue to focus on communication, real-time data, daily problem-solving, and anticipatory planning. Recognizing that new inpatient beds aren't a short-term solution available to us, improvement efforts include adapting effective strategies from other organizations. An example is the recently launched Tier 3 huddle that achieves the above goals by bringing leaders from inpatient areas (e.g., ED, acute care, ICU, perioperative) and support services (e.g., IT, hospitality, facilities) for a 30-minute structured discussion each morning. Issues range from quality/safety events, patient flow issues, staffing needs, and review of our real-time capacity management dashboard that serves as air traffic control. It's still early in the pilot but the goal is removing barriers for patients moving through their hospital experience more efficiently, and providing support for areas and providers that need them on a given day. The Tier 3 huddle follows the Tier 1 (e.g., single ICU) and Tier 2 (e.g., all ICUs) huddles that precede it . 

Health Equity Data Access for UCSF Health

Last month, we shared our inaugural Health Equity report. We will continue to highlight foundational work that supports our need to systematically identify and eliminate healthcare disparities. In the last month, our Equity Data Taskforce achieved a significant milestone. We've developed a framework for taking the 34 unique ethnicities captured in our instance of EPIC so that a race-ethnicity standard can now be applied to existing (and future) data warehouses and dashboards. This will allow improvement teams to begin raising important questions around differences that are noted in their performance metrics, and tailor interventions if disparities are present.

Publishing Your Improvement Work

A common question that comes up in academic health centers like ours is what type of approval do we need to publish our QI work? If you've followed this debate over the past decade, it's an interesting story. Fortunately, UCSF was an early adopter of CHR guidelines for QI work. There are still areas that create uncertainty, particularly in our EHR era of data availability, but it's a helpful resource to review. For those looking to publish your QI work, the SQUIRE guidelines are also a useful resource in crafting a manuscript.  

Looking for information from a past True North Newsletter? Please access them here .