Welcome to Becker healthcare care podcast. I'm Mariah
Taylor, assistant editor, and I'm thrilled to interview
Peggy Dug, Executive Vice president
chief physician executive and Chief Medical Officer at
Tampa General Hospital on the podcast today.
Peggy, thank you so much for joining me.
I'm excited for our conversation because you're 1
of our upcoming panel at our Ceo Cfo
conference and we're excited to get the sneak
peek into some of your thought leadership. But
before we dive in, I'd love for you
to introduce yourself and tell someone anyone bit
about your background?
Sure. I'm super excited to be here as
well. My name is Doctor Peggy Dug. I'm
the Executive Vice President, and chief physician executive
at Tampa General. I've been here for about
3 years, just a little over 3 years
now.
As the physician leader for the organization,
it's a very dynamic place, and we're doing
a lot of exciting work here.
Prior to coming to Tampa general, I spent
about 22 years in the mesh Uber system,
and with the Cmo at 1 of their
hospitals
prior to joining T h. So really excited
to be here and have been in physician
leadership now for about 25 years.
That is an impressively warm career, 25 years.
So in your
long career in leadership, what has been 1
of your most successful projects or initiatives?
And what did you do? And what were
the results?
So I have a couple I'd like to
touch on, but 1 of the more exciting
ones is. We've done a a lot of
work at Tampa general
around what's called regional visualization. So a lot
of hospitals
just based on the way things are designed,
have, you know, based nurses and based pharmacies.
So the same team is on the serve
on the floor on the regular basis. But
the patient may be distributed in a way
that the physicians are kinda going from floor
to floor. That limits the ability to really
communicate with the team. So this year, at
Tampa General, actually, it's been over the past
18 months. We started in our critical care
units and really doing 2 things. 1 is
regional the physician. So assigning physician coverage,
or advanced practice provider or resident or learner
coverage
to the Icu, and those team members stay
in the unit and tear for those patients
during their shift and work with the same
team kind of over and over so that
we get
physicians,
nurses,
physical therapist,
pharmacists and all the other people who care
for our patients at the bedside, working together
toward the same goal.
That's been an
incredible
opportunity for quality safety,
decreases risk improves
all of our metrics, including
know, central line infections and urinary tract infections
because the team is working together and focused
on what is that patient need
today, you what can we remove or not
use today and can we move that patient
to a lower level of care are they
ready? And so that's been incredibly impactful.
We've also then taken... And this is more
in a
advanced work phase,
but taken our hospital medicine teams and started
to assign them to you it as well.
And are really seeing patients satisfaction
improvements,
decreased in infections and falls within injury and
improved scores in our patient experience. So just
having really good experience.
It's a lot of work, and it's really
hard to get people on board initially. But
once they do it, they really feel great
about,
developing these physician nurse
and other clinical teams to really move the
needle for our patients.
That's amazing
kind of along those lines, looking ahead, what
do you think is the biggest challenge you
expect to face in the next year? And
how are you preparing for it?
So I think Tip general, it's biggest challenge
is similar to lots of academic medical centers.
How are we creating the access to care
our patients deserve and need, when we are
also
seeing an increase in number of patients in
our emergency departments and really
quite busy.
So we've done a lot of work on,
what we'll call access and length of day,
and 1 of the things and we've seen
this in a couple of other articles that
I've been involved with is we focus on
as much as we're focused on efficiency. Right?
And trying to progress the patient's care so
that we can be as efficient as possible,
and move the patient to the next level,
creating capacity for other patients in our system.
We measure those things, but where we're talking
about it, We're really talking about care delivery.
What does my patient need today? Are they
getting what they need today? Because if they're
not,
then we need to fix that problem so
they can progress through their care.
And we provide that care in an outpatient
setting,
and how do we coordinate that, so the
physicians have the confidence the patients get what
they need. And can we be sure that
the patients get follow up in the system
so that they don't get... We admitted to
the hospital. They, you know, they continued their
care in their new level. So we have
a system wide
initiative
where, lot of initiatives are working, but the
primary goal is to make sure patients are
getting what they need when they need it
in the lowest acuity setting.
Fascinating.
I love how hyper focused you and your
system are on getting those patient satisfaction
and experiences
so everybody's really enjoying this. Like, being at
the hospital because as you know, it's not
a grand place to be when you're the
patient.
It's super motivating for our physicians and our
nurse is to have that focus. I mean,
that's 1 of the things we really love
is our teams are motivated because really, what
they come to work to do every day
is care for our patients.
Absolutely. I love that.
As you mentioned in your little introduction, you
have been in, like, chief leadership for a
long time. So In your experience, how have
you seen the chief medical officer role evolving?
Yeah. I think that chief Medical officer role
is a role that can be different based
on the needs of the
organization. And so traditionally, right, Chief Medical officers
are response before utilization of resources that's very
usual,
quality safety risk patient experience. Those are the
things that fall into a traditional,
Cmos bucket along with
physician relationships and medical staff credentialing, which is
a big
bucket gonna work.
What I see is different over time is
in order to achieve those goals,
chief medical officers are most successful when they're
involved in and capable of doing,
hospital operations.
So it's really hard to drive quality.
If you don't understand how the operation works.
So 1 of the things I've done and
1 thing I would recommend any Chief Medical
officer do to spend a lot of time
with the operations team and really motivating them
to
drive quality based on the operations work doing.
And that... Again, that's super motivating for people
who are caring for patients. But the operations
team working with the Cmo with our clinical
teams. Really is the most powerful way to
drive improvement at age.
I love that.
And what kind of advice do you have
for people who aspire to be a Cmo
1 day?
Yeah. 1 of the things I think a
successful Chief Medical officer does is understands the
impact of the work. And what I say
that I need, when we do good work.
You also
by and large in the vast majority of
time, you're actually creating cost savings.
So 1 of the things I've done early
in my career here, particularly Tampa general because
we have a really,
engaged and wonderful chief
Financial Officer,
we partner all the time to show that
the highest quality care also drives efficiencies in
his
save cost. So we have a unified discussion.
And so I think that's 1 thing is
I were starting again as a Cmo.
Getting involved with the financial team and getting
involved with operations as early as possible,
understanding their worlds,
and being able to speak their language
will definitely help you move the needle in
improvement in patient care. And it's great to,
work as a team. And so I've really
got 1 of our vice presidents, our senior
Vice President for Finance
has become very expert at judging
whether proposals are gonna drive a quality improvement.
And so we've really worked together, to train
each other on the importance of our world.
And crossing over to be successful.
Excellent. That's some really good advice.
Well, This has been amazing in a very
informative discussion, so thank you again for joining
me on the podcast.
If you wanna catch more of Peggy, you
can find her at our up coming clinical
leadership form at the Becker Ceo and Cfo
round table, which happens November eleventh through fourteenth
in Chicago. We have a limited number of
space 4 attendees and sponsors. So if you
want to learn more contact us at agenda
team at becker healthcare dot com.