Page 7 - Christiana Care Focus March 2109

Serving together to deliver better outcomes through care standardization
By To come
| The Christiana Care Way
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By Robert Redden-Huff, MBA, MHA, Operational Lead, Care Standardization, Medical Group
As caregivers, we deliver high quality, safe care and an exceptional experience to our
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As members of a learning organization, we need to be in a state of constantly becoming. We need to be exceptional today and even better tomorrow. We need to be comfortable with discomfort.
Through our work in care standardization, we are making that
Cprogress.
evidence and most current guidelines — and not providing care or interventions that aren’t helpful — we deliver better outcomes for our patients, and we live our values of excellence and love.
Guided by the strategic goals in our Annual Operating Plan, we are implementing highly reliable care standards across all service lines, essential services and the ACO for five chronic conditions: congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, hypertension and substance use disorder. We are tackling these specific chronic conditions because these diseases significantly impact the health of our community, and they also are significant drivers of health care spending.
Care standardization is now a foundational component to workflow development at Christiana Care. Science and emerging evidence continually guide us toward better ways to approach
a particular diagnosis and how to manage an individual in a particular clinical setting. Our caregivers are breaking out of their silos and working across disciplines to provide the best care.
Care standardization requires an appreciation of the whole person. It requires an understanding of how our patients perceive their health challenges and the experience of care. In regard to chronic conditions, patients don’t come to Christiana Care because they want a specific intervention. They come to us because they need help in addressing all the symptoms and complications that come along with those diseases.
We are breaking down barriers between our departments and our professions to create a collaborative care team — because our patients don’t come to us with boundaries around their needs. Care standardization is about meeting patients where they are and giving them a coordinated care plan.
In our Care Standardization Steer and through our Integrated Practice Teams (IPTs), our caregivers are crossing disciplines
co
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mmunity, and ensure that we use health care resources wisely and effectively.
ew
are standardization is the work of delivering the right care, at the right time, with the right people involved, in every patient interaction with our health system. When we focus on providing optimal care, based on the best available
and collaborating with caregivers
they may not regularly interact with
to determine the best course of action for our patients. Caregivers in essential services such as IT and iLead are also stakeholders in the IPTs and provide insight that can lead to optimal health outcomes.
Care standardization is reducing — and in some cases eliminating — unwanted variation in our processes.
Although we currently are focusing on five chronic conditions, coordinated care is making a difference throughout the health system. Through care standardization, we have taken a new approach to caring for newborns who are delivered to moms who have a fever. Previously, those babies would go to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) to have blood drawn and antibiotics administered. Through evidence and adjusted processes, we learned the NICU may not always be the answer for those babies. Since we implemented that change, 80 percent of those babies stayed with their mothers. They didn’t need blood draws or antibiotics. The experience was better and the care cost less, while tWhe outcomes were the same as the babies who went to the NICU.
e serve our neighbors as expert, caring partners in their health. To keep moving forward, we must keep the patient at the center of it all. Patients should feel loved and as though they are
a participatory partner in their care. Caregivers must establish relationships with patients that are less transactional and more relationship-centered. There is not a one-size-fits-all answer to care standardization. It may look different depending on cultural, geographic and economic factors. While the overall concepts
are the same, we are working with the Office of Health Equity to determine the best way to tackle conditions such as diabetes in different segments of our population.
In our environment of dynamic learning, caregivers are partnering with each other and their patients to create innovative and effec- tive paths of care. We aren’t just working to improve the health of people with chronic conditions, but also working to prevent others from developing those diseases. There is still work to be done, and there are other conditions we can and will tackle moving forward. We are advancing The Christiana Care Way. 
FOCUS • MARCH 2019 5