CareScience 2003 Track Descriptions

Leadership and Strategy

One of the greatest challenges for healthcare leadership is balancing the delivery of outstanding quality of care under severe budget constraints. Competing initiatives, capital limitations, and risk tolerance require that quality initiatives deliver both rapid and significant impact to the organization. While it is well documented that good quality is cost-effective, achieving and maintaining good quality is based on successful implementation of a comprehensive quality program. Comprehensive quality programs require leadership, know-how, efficient operations, and good supporting technical infrastructure. This track will provide you with the opportunity to interact with industry leaders and learn how they drive their organizations to build the necessary environment for quality, and achieve significant clinical, operational and financial impact. Expert led sessions will examine the following critical steps:

Enabling the Organization

• Creating a climate for clinical improvement and engaging care delivery staff
• Developing the support infrastructure for broad performance improvement and collaboration
• Partnering strategies to streamline implementation and support organizational capabilities
• Integrating stakeholders - clinical, operational, and Board leadership
• Producing tangible quality and financial outcomes

Generating Impact

• How to overcome barriers and create tangible results through integrated care management strategies
• Evaluating the impact of residents on the care process, and integrating quality management with medical education
• Driving strategic initiatives through benchmarks, reporting, and participation
• Using quality and financial performance indicators to drive change and measure improvement
• Managing organizational change

Measurement and Monitoring: Quality & Performance Improvement

Over the past several years there has been a growing focus on patient-care quality and safety. Even so, increased attention from payors and consumers, demands by regulatory agencies for quality information, the growing availability of public information on hospital and physician performance, and the knowledge that improving quality reduces costs and enhances revenue, continues to challenge quality professionals across the nation. The key issues that performance improvement leaders and managers face in their everyday activities include:

• Turning "data" into information and information into knowledge;
• Determining the best tools and approaches for change management;
• Developing intervention strategies to assure successful improvement;
• Leveraging staff and data resources to meet regulatory requirements; and
• Recognizing the value derived from improved safety and clinical outcomes, reduced costs, appropriate resource usage and improved patient throughput.

Sessions in this track will draw from the experience and success of colleagues and national leaders in translating data into meaningful information used by clinicians to improve care processes, reduce complications, improve compliance with evidence-based medicine and improve information handling. Track presenters will address the following topics:

• Developing an outcomes-focused strategy: measuring and monitoring patient safety, outcomes and care processes to ensure that best treatment choices are made.
• Improving patient safety, clinical and financial outcomes by reducing variations in practice and improving adherence with evidence-based best practices.
• Coordinating care across patient conditions, services and settings over time.
• Tracking and trending of care process breakdowns.
• Linking care process redesign to liability reduction and prevention.
• Providing outcome-specific data to medical staff to evaluate performance and facilitate identification of variations in outcomes and practice patterns.
• Maximizing the use of the Care Management System™ to streamline regulatory reporting requirements.
• Strategies used to improve the reliability of the data in strategic clinical decision support systems and how to benefit from the things an organization uncovers when decision support information is integrated into clinical operations.
• Evaluating and redesigning patient flow to improve patient throughput.

Concurrent Care Management: Blending Care Coordination with Ongoing Improvement

Healthcare providers remain committed to providing high quality services in a safe environment. However, significant challenges associated with meaningful data analysis, feedback, and access, continue to be issues for hospitals across the nation. Additionally, many organizations still struggle with incorporating improvement interventions within their care delivery model and tracking ongoing clinical performance. Effective care management strategies will increasingly reflect a blend between delivery models that address the concurrent needs of individual patients and patterns of care and outcomes associated with patient populations. This track focuses on the application of clinical outcomes data as well as other data that is linked to quality, clinical results, professional liability, patient safety and clinical process redesign. Sessions will include insight from both thought-leaders as well as individuals that have demonstrated operations management and results success. Session presenters will address the following:

• Key success factors and barriers linked to a implementing a collaborative care coordination model.
• Process mapping required for cross-departmental assessment and design of an approach to care coordination that includes quality improvement efforts.
• Physician engagement strategies and considerations associated with concurrent care management.
• Collaborating within and outside the organization around clinical data access and data analysis.
• Regional data sharing models and technology considerations as well as their implications on care coordination.