Our three key, strategic priorities use communication to improve the patient experience and benefit our hospital partners’ metrics:
1. Prioritize Clinical Quality and Patient Safety. At TeamHealth, delivering best-in-class clinical quality and patient safety are our top strategic priorities. While great quality and outcomes are the end game, we recognize that the patient experience is critical to those results. We know that how we communicate, and the experience we create for our patients, plays an integral role in keeping our patients safe and providing them with the best possible clinical outcomes. Our teams understand that effective communication makes them better clinicians. They understand that earning the patient’s trust is an essential skill that leads to improved patient adherence and has proven to result in better patient outcomes.
2. Engage and Develop Your Clinicians. Clinician engagement is another strategic priority. The communication expertise that we teach our clinicians translates into essential skills for allowing them to grow personally, professionally and as leaders in their hospitals and their communities.
We also recognize that as clinicians improve their communication skills, their job satisfaction improves, their resilience increases and the risk of burnout diminishes.
Lastly, we are sensitive to the impact of malpractice litigation on clinician satisfaction and burnout. When our clinicians build trusting relationships with patients, the risk of malpractice claims, and the associated emotional and financial stress associated with them, is reduced.
3. Shared Goals Leads to Shared Success. Supporting the success of our hospital partners is a third strategic priority. Our expertise and focus on the patient experience directly affects value-based purchasing (VBP) performance and allows our partners to differentiate themselves in a competitive market, to improve patient loyalty and to expand market share.
Our dedicated focus on the alignment of the patient experience with our hospital partners’ success is achieved through an emphasis on leadership and culture to ensure our teams are patient-centered and service oriented. As a learning organization, we ensure that continuous improvement is a central feature of our culture.
All of our teams are led by a local facility medical director (FMD) and a regional medical director (RMD). The FMD and RMD take ownership, accountability and responsibility for both creating a culture that promotes an exceptional patient experience as well as achieving the targeted results and scores. Our FMDs and RMDs undergo formal leadership training, including training focused on leading patient experience. They are trained and mentored on how to create the right culture, how to use data to manage performance and how to support and manage low performers. Placing skilled and highly-trained physician leaders in our programs is a key component of our consistent performance on patient experience.
We also know that some challenges require additional expertise. The TeamHealth Hospitalist Services Performance Improvement (HSPI) team is a dedicated team of national experts who serve as a resource to all of our local teams. The HSPI team exists to support our hospitalists in achieving best-in-class performance and brings additional “boots on the ground” bench strength to our continuous improvement efforts.
You can learn more about our hospital partnership services at www.teamhealth.com/hospitalmedicine or contact us at business_development@teamhealth.com.