According to the American Hospital Association's Hospital statistics, there are nearly 6,000 hospitals and more than five million staff members employed throughout the U.S. to treat and care for the sick and injured.
Iowa City is blessed to have a top-ranked, tertiary care hospital located right here. Donna Katen Bahensky, Senior Associate Vice President of Medical Affairs and Chief Executive Office, talks about University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics:
We just heard the number of folks employed in health care nationally, how many people do you have working at UI Hospitals and Clinics?
We have just over 7,600 staff members and more than 1,300 volunteers.
With so many exceptional staff and doctors - it must be an exciting place to work - What are some of the major initiatives at the Hospitals and Clinics?
We have initiatives around all three of our major strategies of: outcomes, service, and innovative care. One of the biggest innovations we're working on very hard with a lot of staff is our new electronic medical record.
The clinical information system called EPIC is being implemented now and within the next 18 to 36 months, we will have a completely paperless environment with the ability for people to not answer questions over and over again. It will improve communication; it will improve safety, and in the long run, will be better for our patients in terms of their own care.
Let's talk about excellent service first - everyone wants that. How are you working to provide excellent service?
We have spent the last two to three years training our staff about how to be patient-centered; how to really put the focus on service. As an academic medical center hospital, that's an area we weren't nearly as strong in as we are with our outcomes and our innovation.
So we focused a lot on that. We have a new concierge service and guest services program. We've had valet parking now for a few years and we get rave reviews from our patients about that. We just implemented something called CarePages for our adult patients that we've long had for our pediatrics patients, in which people can send e-mails from individuals' home communities directly to a patient here in the hospital. We provide them with a laptop, they can get those e-mails, and in some cases, whole communities have sent messages to patients here.
What about innovative care?
We continue, of course, every year to invest in new technology and this year our capital budget is $90 million of which a fair amount of that is for either innovative facilities or innovative technology. One of those new facilities, which we opened a month ago, is our new Ambulatory Surgery Center, that has private rooms for recovery and private rooms for pre-surgical evaluation. It really is state of the art in terms of patient care, as well as satisfaction.
Many times there's a fear of a teaching hospital - you're almost going to be bombarded with questions, the interns or the students follow the doctors around, or you have to share a room with multiple people, and you stress that privacy is an important factor, is it not?
Privacy is very important. Most of our patients are seriously ill and come here wanting somebody ask a lot of questions about their care. The feedback I get as the CEO is that our patients, who are the sickest, appreciate the residents and the students who are constantly asking, "Could we do this?" "Have we looked into this?" "What other tests could we do to try to find out what is exactly wrong with out patient?" The communication pipeline has to run more than one way. This is top down, bottom up, and across the institution.
And the exceptional outcomes area - what's happening there?
Outcomes are around two areas -- quality of care and safety. We have a new hospital safety program here that has been instituted under Dr. Dan Fick, and in that program, we encourage and educate our patients and their families to become partners in safety. We remind staff members and family members to wash their hands. To ask "Please tell me what kind of medication you're giving me." "Please tell me when the doctor is going to be coming in here again." We think care is much better if the patient and their family are directly involved.
So with all that going on, when will you have time to celebrate National Hospital Week? Do you have events planned ?
We have a lot of events planned for the week. We've got Nurses' Day on Monday, so everybody say thank you to a nurse that you know or a nurse in your own hospital, Tuesday we recognize our Above and Beyond Award winners, and Wednesday is our Community Relations and Physician Recognition Day. Twelve hundred staff members won Above and Beyond awards for excellent service last year. |
