True North Awards highlight performance improvement CMH recently updated its mission, vision and values as it developed its new Five-Year Strategic Plan (2023 – 2027). The new mission statement is: “We help people live their healthiest lives.” In accordance with that mission, all departments at CMH complete annual performance improvement (PI) projects to enhance CMH’s clinical and administrative processes and outcomes. The projects also meet part of CMH’s Planetree certification requirements. Each year, a project or two are chosen as winners of the True North Award to recognize excellence in process improvement. PI projects from 2022 were reviewed for impact and alignment with the Strategic Plan. Four nominees were selected to present their projects to the Patient Family Advisory Council (PFAC), which chose the winners. Winning projects One winning project, “Acute Care Services Bedside Shift Report,” was completed by Med/Surg and the Critical Care Unit. Kelly Cope, manager, and Whitney Beecham, supervisor, led the project. Brett Byers, Molly Wing, Kristen Moss, Shannon White and Elise Thornton were additional team members. Cope and Beecham knew CMH’s bedside handoff policy was not being implemented 100% of the time with inpatients. The policy requires nurses to meet with each other at a patient’s bedside at the beginning of a nurse’s shift. Completing a bedside report can increase safety and satisfaction for caregivers and patients. To improve compliance with this practice, a survey was distributed to understand what barriers were causing the low percentage. The team was able to address all barriers, and by October 2022, Acute Care nurses reached a 90% completion rate of bedside handoffs. The project also had a direct correlation with reducing patient falls. In the third quarter of 2022, both inpatient units had no patient falls, a big win for safety. The second winning project, “Medication Barcode Scanning,” involved caregivers and leaders from Pharmacy, IT, Business Intelligence and Nursing, including: Amy McKelvey, Judy Geiger, the entire Pharmacy team (especially LeAnne Morvee and Jessica Ganschow), Kelly Cope, Whitney Beecham, Jenna Tarabochia, Katie Allen and Grace Smith. The project aimed to ensure medications were properly scanned in so patients received the right dosages and prescriptions and inventory was correct. Some medications do not work with CMH’s interface, so the team worked to manually check and log every single barcode into CMH’s system. Over a year, the team improved their accuracy by nearly 18%, a definite patient safety upgrade. Other nominees Other nominees for the awards included efforts to reduce patient no-shows and gain more information on patients’ tobacco use. As a result of these projects: ● Patient no-shows for appointments were reduced by 10%, and more than 1,000 additional appointments were completed throughout the year due to efficiencies in scheduling. ● Nearly 80% of Cancer Collaborative patients were asked about their smoking habits, an increase of more than 30%. 6 HEALTH COMPASS LATE SPRING 2023
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