BWFH experts present at Healthcare Quality and Safety 2017

Healthcare Quality and Safety 2017, a recent Harvard Medical School CME course offered by Brigham and Women’s Hospital under the direction of David W. Bates, MD, MSc, and Allen Kachalia, MD, JD, was designed for professionals who plan, manage or support quality and safety initiatives. Among the many faculty members who presented during the two-day course were several experts from Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital.

Director of Service Excellence and Performance Improvement Kae Santos and Performance Improvement Consultant McGuire Kelly teamed with BWH’s Analytics Planning and Process Improvement Lead Consultant Jonathan Baum for a double session. “Our presentation was titled ‘Process Mapping: A Path to Spotting Problems in Your Area,’” says Kelly. “During our 90-minute workshop we taught various healthcare professionals different tools and techniques to create a current state process map and analyze it to identify problems worth solving. The attendees watched a video of a typical check-in process starring the BWH and BWFH Performance Improvement team members and applied what they learned during the session to a real-life situation. Nearly 100 people attended the session and left with the ability to use process mapping to identify improvement opportunities for processes that take place in their daily work!”

Karl Laskowski, MD, MBA, from Brigham and Women’s Primary Physicians at BWFH participated in a panel discussion titled “3 Innovative Strategies to Involve Providers in Improvement Work” alongside BWH’s Senior Director of Quality Jennifer Beloff, RN, MSN, APN, and Mass General Hospital’s Pediatric ICU Intensivist Brian Cummings, MD. Dr. Laskowski says, “We’re really proud of the work we do to support process improvement and clinical innovation. Our clinicians and staff are really impressive in the many ways they seek to improve the care we deliver to patients. I always enjoy sharing this work with audiences outside Brigham Health. People really seem to get energized hearing about what we’ve learned along the way, and we get some great questions and feedback about how we might further improve our own programs.”

Senior Performance Improvement Consultant Claire Massero partnered with Kristen Sampson, her counterpart at BWH, for a presentation titled “How to Identify Waste to Increase the Value Delivered to Your Patients.” Massero describes the presentation as, “Intended to help attendees understand value versus waste in healthcare and identify waste in the workplace, change how we see the work we do and begin to generate ideas on how to address waste. The talk included an interactive activity which was well received by the session attendees, who spent time working together in small groups and reporting out afterwards.”

In addition to Kelly, Laskowski and Massero, many other experts from BWFH took part.