Hi, everyone, And welcome to the Becker healthcare
care podcast.
I'm Mackenzie Bean, a vp and managing editor
of Becker hospital review
Today I I'm so thrilled to be joined
by doctor. Eb, Bar, who is the system
chief and regional Chief Medical and quality officer
of base state health
Dr. Bar. Thank you so much for joining
me today. How are you?
Mckinsey, I'm fantastic. Thank you very much.
For the podcast, the invitation and always great
to be part of the bigger Becker family.
Well, we are always so excited to feature
your thoughts and some of the impressive work
that you're doing at base state, and I
know we're going to dive into a few
areas of your core focuses
shortly. But before we do that, I'd love
to have you introduce yourself or folks who
may not have listened to your past episodes
and tell us a little bit more about
your background.
So Abraham,
I am the system chief Hospital medicine and
the regional Chief quality and medical Officer at
Bay deep Health.
My background,
I'm a clinician with Capital C, and
I have training and quality, public health and
health care economics.
Trying to bridge the world of
physician clinicians and how we could do better
serving our patients in the hospital.
And work at Bay to help, Bay is
a integrated academic network in In Massachusetts. We
serve about 900000
patients across our 5 hospitals.
We aim to make sure our
care is
tailored to our patients across the spectrum of
the care delivery.
We have a great team. We
13000
employee
serving our patients day in and day out.
That second part is about
how we can do that from a system
level and,
at the bedside. I e...
Because as you know, I took I took
on this journey as as a Chief Medical
Officer to say,
I could I could save lives
practicing medicine every day.
But if we all collectively
fix the system, fix how we deliver Better
care on the system level, we could
save thousands of lives. And I stand
behind a team delivering to care every day.
Yeah. I'd love to dive into that a
little bit more in terms of
really looking system
systematically
how you can improve care,
and, at the same time, the experience for
your caregivers.
I know clinical efficiency is something that comes
up pretty regularly. When I speaking with chief
Medical officers
in light of increasing capacity issues that health
systems, care demand,
more stress and workload put on clinicians. I'm
curious how are you thinking about clinical efficiency
at base state and
you know, really seeking to improve it.
This is great to and quite timely.
At these states,
we're taking on
newer
approach of how we can
deliver high quality efficient care. And I'm going
to more maybe zoom in
and shared
with the audience,
at least a big project that we're proud
to take on and make sure we are
caring from caring for every patient from the
moment
they come to our door any door in
the system. They will have access to the
same
healthcare, which is that continuum between
emergency department to the inpatient floors. We know
we have much higher demands that we need
to
take care of our patients in terms of
coming to the emergency room, coming to the
emergency departments across the country. We're hearing about
the crowding in the Eds and the delays
in the care, which unfortunately affecting our patients.
I'm working closely with the
chair of
emergency medicine unit based aid Doctor. Jimmy.
And our chief nursing
executive, Doctor. Joanne Miller,
to build that continuum of
care where we can work on the efficiency
by
improving discharges from the
inpatient unit,
to allow more access on the inpatient to
bring the patient faster in the exam room
for the for the emergency visit and then
expedite that journey
from the emergency room all the way to
the right bed to deliver the right care
in the right time on the right service.
Our patients mckinsey, they deserve the highest quality
care and we're able to
advance the mission, our Bmc, our base State
Medical Center, President,
Mr. Sam Sc,
supportive of this executive vision to be able
to
reduce the, length to stay in our hospital
hospitalizations
improve the time to treatment in the emergency
room,
rebuild our team for the care delivery through
ex
more of the discharges and
standardize how we clinicians physicians be able to
get the patient
back home or to their discharge destination
faster and safer.
We're able to reduce link this day, which
we will share with our medical community. I
hope very soon in print.
We're also built more
safety and quality measures around how we deliver
the care here at they state health.
More to come, I think our experience at
these stage is 1 of the many experiences
across the Us and in any integrated network.
We want to learn, we want to show
what we achieved and build on that collective
experience.
Yes. I think that
learning
is such an important part of this right
sharing best practices what peers out as well.
We're all really on the same mission, So
we look forward to hearing
and seeing that publication come out with more
of your results.
For listeners
today,
I'm curious what advice would you share from
them
in terms of, you know, rolling out a
similar initiative or perhaps,
what is a key piece of advice or
lesson that you learned in this journey
towards a higher clinical efficiency.
So this is excellent. And again, I'm gonna
always default to the clinician side of me.
At the bedside.
When we think about modifying processes
to reach the outcomes that we desire, the
the the best outcomes for the patient.
I hear
our senior vice President to Doctor. Du salvador
probably giving me some guidance there.
It's all about harmon standardization and
standardization. We know there's variation in the care.
Our goal
as a community to deliver better care is
to put that,
harmon digitization in a complex system across many
services
and standardize the processes that we
use the tools that we have to make
sure we're delivering the high quality care.
I think my philosophy there is more about
tangible
side
care delivery and and less slides in Excel
sheets and and be able to take on
as as a physician
of how we could do that. And by
all means, I'm I'm the 1 that I
help to take care of our physicians, so
they could do better job
every day better than my probably
throughout throughput. But the goal is to make
sure we we march as a team.
I would like maybe to share with the
audience
the the big learning, I would say,
theme,
it will come down to value,
access and quality. Value is we need to
deliver better care, better outcomes
and with controlling the cost of spending in
healthcare care. Access is what our patients
we'll be asking for is the come into
the clinic coming into the emergency 0 come
into the inpatient and always be able to
serve our patients.
When I hear numbers about left without being
seen or missed appointments,
I take that personal we need to make
sure we're there for our patients When they
knock on our doors,
we
come and help them to solve these medical
problems.
That's our job.
I would like to elevate also the quality
where we know in health care
we still have
long way to to do what we do
better every day. It will come down to
eliminating
medical errors or to errors and diagnostic and
treatments,
how we can do that efficient care with
the understanding constraints of times and resources,
but making sure that the quality of care
that you and I will be asking for
is what we deliver consistently see
and
uniformly
across our patient population,
harmon standardization
standardization,
value, access and quality and
team building in health,
at least in my experience
helped me to
position
my team to be more successful
and they are successful and we can take
care of the patient in that patient centric
models.
Yeah. I know you have quite
bit of experience on the quality and safety
side of things looking at your career
I'm curious within that realm,
what other big project or initiatives are you
focusing on and say, the next year,
to really improve some of those metrics?
So this is excellent. I'm maybe
advance a little bit of the work we're
doing here at base date.
We were able to
centralize the care and and
identify when the gaps
that we all know as a clinicians
do exist. We always look at the system
as
as a rate or
a a number.
I think, to be more efficient, we need
to start from the patient side,
and then build up to the unit and
build up to the healthcare care or the
hospital the healthcare care. So what we've done
and I'm proud to
report this that we're able to build quality
and safety dashboards to measure
all the items that we know, it's it's
the right thing to do while the patient
is
she or here or they with us. We
need to do the better care for them.
We know that
1 cod, 1 cl, 1 fall is not
acceptable. Is 1 too many. And we want
to put the hat off instead of counting
these errors
or
adverse events, we want to be more proactive.
And have a predictive models
to look at how we can remove the
foley before the c to remove the line
before the k, when the patient is not
doing well because healthcare care is complex and
they're becoming deli lea.
We want to make sure we're
applying better here
before that fall happens or provide the environment
so they will not fall within any hospital.
The
intersection between digital health
analytics
and the predictive part of health care, which
we're all learning about with the with now
the introduction more of
Ai in healthcare
is the future. And I would urge all
the audience
not to wait for the event. Let's be
proactive. Let's make sure we're
applying the best care up front and be
able to standardize that and
raise that accountability and transparency. We want to
even tell the team our last
adverse event was 6 months ago. Let me
share with you my experience and have you
also be part of it when you take
it to your unit to your health care
to your hospital to apply the same method.
This is how we can march together the
second part, which I always keep keep an
eye on is when we build the system
that likely in the next
years decade, it will be more tech savvy,
more Ai likely driven more builds and whistles
that We always think about the patient. The
quality of the care is when the patient
says we did the good job,
the surveys that they
report back to us. The the thank you
letter. I... This morning, I was reading a
thank you letter from patient and
it brings satisfaction it bring joy. But importantly,
that the
the quality. The patient experience is also telling
us we've done a good job, and we
need to do it
millions of times because that's how many admissions
we do in the Us every year. 1
admission at the time,
high quality at the time. Let's use that
digital aspect of the care. And let's build
on
each other's experience and share across our community.
Absolutely. I think that's such an important message
for
all all health leaders to be reminded of
Doctor Rec, I thank you so much for
your time and thoughtful insights on the podcast
today, been wonderful speaking with you.
As always thank you and I'm grateful.
And let's share what we have on the
Becker platform. Thank you very much.
Yeah. Thank you as well. And listeners you
can catch more of doctor Var barracuda at
our upcoming clinical leadership forum at the Becker
Ceo of Cfo Round table. Held November 11
support teeth in Chicago.
We still have some limited space available for
attendees and sponsors.
Contact us at agenda team at Becker Health
dot com to learn more.