From the President’s Desk

March definitely roared in like a lion!! Cold, wintry weather and a fantastic meeting at the 2014 NAHQ Leadership Summit in Chicago. Gina Reves, AAHQ Secretary; Connie Taylor, AAHQ President-Elect; and I attended the meeting March 7 and 8. The meeting was a full day and a half of information, networking, learning and fun! NAHQ is working hard for quality professionals to ensure we are a sustaining force in the future of health care.

The AAHQ board met in January and has lots of ideas and plans for the future. A special newsletter went out announcing the 2014 board members and I am very excited for the year. It is with regret that I must announce, however, that Sujay Kola resigned from the board in February. Sujay received a fantastic job offer out of state and left the board in early March. The members of the board want to thank him for his commitment to quality and the time and energy he committed to AAHQ. His enthusiasm will be missed!

If you have not heard yet, our Spring Educational Conference will be April 25 at Gilbreath Auditorium at Baptist Health in Little Rock. We have a jam-packed meeting slated for you! If you’d like to share your best practices, we are asking for poster submissions as well. Mark your calendars now. Also, just a reminder the NAHQ Educational Conference in September will be held in Nashville, Tenn., in a new conference setting. Make plans now to attend!

We are working on the application for the Award for Association Excellence. Please let the board members know if you’d like to help with this process. We need help gathering information for the application. Let me know if you are interested in a short-term project that would help toward this application process. Deadline for the application is the end of April.

We will be holding our second board meeting in April. Please let any member of the board know if you have a topic you’d like for us to bring forward for discussion. Those of us who attended the 2014 Leadership Summit plan on sharing the information and ideas that were generated there to help make our association even stronger! Looking forward to spring and fresh beginnings!

Sincerely,
Sandra J. “Sandy” Grinder, AAHQ President

AAHQ’s Member Spotlight and Newest CPHQ: Dalana Pittman

Dalana Pittman, RN, BSN, CPHQ, has 16 years of emergency and trauma nursing experience and first transitioned to quality in 2010 while working at Hot Spring County Medical Center in Malvern. Dalana joined the team at American Data Network (ADN) in 2012 as Manager of Client Services, where she oversees the Core Measures product and national data transmissions. She reports, “Moving into the health care quality field is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. There are so many opportunities to affect change, and it’s such a rewarding and fulfilling career.”

Dalana has a natural knack for project management and process improvement, but most of all she enjoys collaborating with and helping others. Through her role at ADN, she has become a trusted advisor to quality professionals across the country, helping educate and ensure they keep up with ever-changing data requirements. She reports being wowed by their dedication to making meaningful changes that impact patient care.

“Data collection and reporting have exploded over the last decade, and it would be so easy for organizations to become overwhelmed. But in my experience, their commitment to implementing best practices just drives them to get more creative in their approaches and solutions,” she said.

Dalana recently earned her CPHQ. She initially attended AAHQ’s CPHQ review course to get more exposure on the science of health care quality and safety. As she became more serious about pursuing the credential, she created ADN’s first CPHQ study group. Dalana recruited five other interested team members and used NAHQ’s Q Solutions as a guide for her lesson plan. She made reading assignments for all team members, worked in the evenings to prepare weekly lessons and presented one-hour sessions during office hours. The study group engaged in rich discussions, which helped everyone to better understand and apply the concepts to their work. Dalana was the first in the study group to take and pass the exam in December 2013. She is still mentoring the others, and most are planning to test in 2014.

Dalana plans to continue her path in health care quality by pursuing educational opportunities in patient safety and data analytics. She reports, “There is something new to learn every day, and I am fortunate to work in a field that offers so many diverse experiences across the health care continuum”.

When Dalana is not working, she enjoys spending time with family and friends, reading historical novels and biographies, gourmet cooking, watching science fiction shows and playing with her beloved Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Bentley.

Membership Survey Underway

In order to better serve you, all AAHQ members are asked to complete a short, online membership survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/AAHQ. Your input is very important to the board as it plans future membership recognition and mentorship and educational programs. The survey period closes April 14, so be sure to contribute your opinions soon!

The UAMS HIM Program and Quality Management Department

A Partnership: Going for the Gold

UAMS has offered the health information management (HIM) associate’s degree since 1995. While the associate’s degree offers only a part-time track, the HIM department will begin a bachelor’s degree in health information administration during the fall 2014 semester. Both of these programs provide students with skillsets needed to lead in the era of electronic health record systems. For those who enjoy the more technical aspect of this profession, the associate’s degree is more hands-on. For others who enjoy working with people and have a grasp on the big-picture, or systems, approach, the bachelor’s degree is a managerial and enterprise-wide focused degree.

Since the beginning of the program, the associate’s degree has introduced students to quality improvement. Now the bachelor’s degree will take the student’s knowledge and develop this further into health care planning and provision, resource allocation, decision-making and utilization of additional skills in computer applications. In the associate’s degree program, the quality class mostly involves content learning or theory of techniques of problem solving and QI tools used in health care.

Professional practice rotations for HIM students has been difficult in the past, as many quality departments in hospitals do not understand what HIM students need to learn when they come to a quality department for a clinical rotation. Our HIM program has over 100 clinical sites, most being hospitals, across the state of Arkansas. We have been sending our HIM students to QI departments for the last 19 years. We have not had great successes in the past as quality departments and staffs are not experienced in what to do with HIM students.

At UAMS, the HIM program teamed up with the quality department several years ago and has since developed a wonderful quality experience for the students. The QI director, Sandra Bennett, first was a guest speaker in the quality class, where she gave a broad introduction to what quality is and how it works in an acute care facility. She then allowed local (those who live in Little Rock) students to rotate to her QI department. She and her team really go the extra mile and she explains what they do later in this article. However, our distance students, those who live around the state of Arkansas in other cities, are not quite as lucky to have Sandy and her team. We need more QI departments across our state that will “go to bat” and explain quality and their love of their jobs to these HIM students. They may even hire an HIM student, like Bennett did.

HIM program and QMD at UAMS – The QI Director’s Perspective

By Sandra S. Bennett, BSN, RN, CPHQ

In 2010, Dr. Trawick contacted me regarding our role with their program. New to my role as QMD director with a background in staff education, I was eager to expand the partnership. In the fall semester UAMS Quality Management serves as one of the clinical sites for the program. We provide two group learning sessions that allows all of the students to count UAMS as one of their clinical sites and then they have a second site somewhere else. During the four-hour group session, I provide an overview of the duties and functions of our department, explaining our role in data abstraction for core measures, monitoring of data for The Joint Commission, peer review and performance improvement. Following the overview and after signing confidentiality statements, I have the students participate in a project. The projects have included consult completion data, moderate sedation and time out documentation. In the project they abstract no more than five elements from 10-20 records with help from a few QA coordinators from the department. They enter their abstraction findings into an Excel spreadsheet that I later merge and create a simple report from. While they are abstracting, we discuss the importance of proper coding and complete record availability. The simple report is then shared with the students to facilitate their understanding of the performance improvement initiatives generated from a simple abstraction project. Students from the group learning sessions then select clinical sites for the spring semester. Each student selecting UAMS is assigned a QA coordinator as their preceptor for the week. Their preceptor coordinates the project they work on with them in addition to any larger projects that I have all the spring students participating on. We attempt to take the students to at least one medical staff committee meeting so they can observe the relationships with other areas of the hospital. I spend time with each student, but try to give the preceptor the primary responsibility of their education experience. Each spring, I precept at least one of the students myself. My goal as preceptor is to show the student how everything we do in the health care setting works together to improve outcomes and better patient care. Last spring, I had my student shadow me to all my meetings for the week just to see if that was helpful. The response was that “Quality touches everything! This is really cool” – so my goal was met.

I truly see hosting students as an opportunity to change the culture of health care to one that more readily recognizes quality and performance improvement. As Dr. Trawick mentioned, one of the HIM students who completed her clinical with me now works as a QA coordinator abstracting and conducting PI projects related to the SCIP measures.

The HIM program, the clinical and the job: UAMS QMD – A student perspective

By Michelle Gilleran, BS, RHIT

The HIM program was very helpful in preparing me for my role as a QA coordinator in the Quality Management Department at UAMS. The quality course provided not only a history of quality, but also an insight to performance improvement in the health care setting. Hearing the different perspectives of quality from guest speakers and onsite rotations helped bring real life application to the job I now do. An understanding of the legal medical record as it relates to patient care from an HIM perspective has been beneficial to the medical record review in our process improvement projects. Knowing the rules and regulations, what should and shouldn’t be in the record, how, where and who documents helps me to efficiently collect the data needed for analysis. Knowledge of ICD-9 and CPT coding has been utilized with physician requests for data and CMS Core Measure data abstraction. As our institution transitions to Epic, my background has been essential in providing feedback during the Epic build.

In summary, we have all heard the old adage, “it takes a village”, but in this case, it just might take a “quality village”. This association is full of quality people, literally! We need to tap into this resource and share the wealth a few hours with HIM students. Our students are across the state and are probably needed at your facility. If you want to know how YOU can make a difference, call me or email me at TrawickKathyC@uams.edu or 501-686-8613.

For more information about the clinical experience or project ideas students have participated in, contact ssbennett@uams.edu or mlgilleran@uams.edu.

NAHQ State Leader Summit Report

By Connie Taylor, RN, BHA, CPHQ

Sandy Grinder, AAHQ President; Gena Reves, AAHQ Secretary; and Connie Taylor, President-Elect, attended a NAHQ-sponsored State Leader Summit on March 7-8 in Chicago.

Marian Savage, the state leaders’ team lead, provided attendees with an excellent agenda.

Linda Kloss gave an overview of the future of the quality profession. Linda emphasized the need to think differently about quality going forward and to keep up with the ever-changing needs of our organization.

Len Parisi provided a good overview of NAHQ to help some of newer state leaders like Gena and I understand better how the national association works.

Matt Santori-Griffith provided a social media review very similar to one we offered at one of our AAHQ conferences in the past. We definitely need to ramp up our social media plan! If you are interested in helping our association grow in the social media arena, please let us know; we would love your help and insight!

There was much discussion about growing state associations to engage and retain members. There was a discussion about webinars, co-led by Denise Weisberg and Marian Savage of Virginia. Would you like to see AAHQ offer educational webinars in the future? I know time and cost restraints are affecting educational opportunities across the state.

NAHQ discussed establishing an informal speakers’ bureau to facilitate conferences at a state and/or regional level. How do you feel about the educational offerings provided by AAHQ? If you have suggestions about topics and or speakers, share them with us – we want to assure that our members are getting what they need.

AAHQ Spring Conference set for April 25

By Terry L. Anderson, RN-BC, MSN/HCA, CPHQ, VHA-CM
Chair, Professional Development Team

We have a great slate of speakers lined up for the 2014 Spring Conference at the Gilbreath Conference Center at Baptist Health Medical Center – Little Rock on April 25. Our keynote speaker is Tony Heath who calls Lisle, Ill., home, where he works as a black belt in Lean and Six Sigma for United Healthcare/Optum.

Tony has designed and completed numerous projects involving the health care industry in both inpatient and outpatient settings, including a project that improved urgent access to psychiatric care and delivered multiple cycles of perfect scores for accreditation by NCQA and URAC.

During his presentation, “Lean Skills for the Quality Professional”, he will take us from the very basics of the Lean process to applying them to multi-million dollar projects.

Following Tony will be Chris Poole with White River Health System, who will offer his perspective of the Lean process as a quality engineer with his presentation, “Applying Lean Tools and Process Improvement Methodologies in the Hospital Environment”.

Elisa White with the Arkansas Hospital Association will then help us understand “How to Create a Lean Culture” within your organization.

Dottie Gann with the Veterans Hospital here in Little Rock will conclude our day with a nurse manager’s perspective on the “Practical Application of Lean in the Inpatient Environment.”

Lunch and snacks will be provided.

Arkansas Association for Healthcare Quality Spring 2014 Conference

EDUCATIONAL AGENDA

“Lean Management-A Model for Change”

Gilbreath Conference Center
Baptist Medical Center, Little Rock
(9601 Interstate 630, Exit 7)

7:45 a.m. Continental Breakfast and Exhibitors

8:30 a.m. Welcome amd Opening Remarks
Sandy Grinder, AAHQ President

8:45 a.m. The Power of Lean in Health Care
Tony Heath, PhD CPHQ, NAHQ Conference Planning Team, Board Chair

10:15 a.m. Break

10:30 a.m. The Power of Lean in Health Care
Tony Heath, PhD CPHQ, NAHQ Conference Planning Team, Board Chair

12:00 p.m. Lunch and Business Meeting

1:00 p.m. Applying Lean Tools and Process Improvement Methodologies in the Hospital Environment
Chris Poole, Quality Engineer, White River Health System

3:00 p.m. Break

3:15 p.m. Creating a Lean Culture
Elisa White, Vice President and General Counsel,
Arkansas Hospital Association

4:15 p.m. The Practical Application of Lean in the Inpatient Environment
Dottie Gann, RN-BC, CPHQ Nurse Manager, Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System

5:15 p.m. Evaluations and Closing Remarks

Our sponsors

ARKANSAS FOUNDATION FOR MEDICAL CARE

 

 

 

Julie Kettlewell, RNP, AVP of Quality Programs 1020 West 4th Street, Suite 300
Little Rock, AR 72201 Phone 501-212-8740
E-Mail jkettlewell@afmc.org Website www.afmc.org

The Arkansas Foundation for Medical Care (AFMC) was incorporated in 1972 as a private, nonprofit educational organization dedicated to the evaluation and improvement of health care. We are the federally designated quality improvement organization (QIO) for Arkansas. Our staff includes physicians, nurses, statisticians, educators, communicators – professionals with widely varied expertise, at various stages of life and career, who have been on both sides of the health care system. We work with staff in every health care setting and offer free tools and resources, such as educational materials for patients and providers and help with Medicare and Medicaid issues. We review certain types of health care paid for by Medicare and Medicaid to ensure high-quality, cost-effective care and to resolve beneficiary concerns. We help find evidence-based ways to improve preventive care as well as treatment and management of specific illnesses and conditions. We are also a health information technology regional extension center (HITREC), federally funded to provide technical assistance to health care providers as they make the transition to electronic health records. Our roles and responsibilities are constantly evolving, but they all serve the purpose of building support systems and partnerships, and helping focus the efforts of the health care community, agencies and organizations toward common goals. Together, we’re working to make health care safer, more effective and more efficient.

BANCORPSOUTH INSURANCE SERVICES, INC.
Tom Hesselbein, CPCU, Executive VP, Healthcare (Ramsey, Krug, Farrell & Lensing)
8315 Cantrell Road, Suite 300 Little Rock, AR 72227 Phone 501-614-1134
Email Tom_Hesselbein@rkfl.com

AMERICAN DATA NETWORK
Jamie Walden, Public Relations Manager
10809 Executive Center Dr., Searcy Building Suite 300 Little Rock, AR 72211 Phone 501-225-5533
Email jwalden@americandatanetwork.com Website www.americandatanetwork.com

 

Founded in 1994, American Data Network provides clinical, quality, safety and financial data applications and services to healthcare executives, allowing them to better manage costs and care quality, influence physician practice patterns and meet demands for public accountability and disclosure.

 

2014 Board of Directors

President
Sandra Grinder
501-257-6187
501-257-6179 fax
sandra.grinder@va.gov

President- Elect
Connie Taylor
501-380-3291
501-380-2342 fax
cstaylor@wcmc.org

Secretary
Gina Reves
870-262-1925
870-262-1050 fax
greves@wrmc.com

Past- President
Susan Hapner
501-202-4999
501-202-6469 fax
susan.hapner@baptist-health.org

Action Team Leaders

Protocol
Nancy Lowe
501-364-1778
501-364-4655 fax
lowenj@archildrens.org

Professional Dev.
Terry Anderson
501-257-6166
501-257-6179 fax
terry.anderson3@med.va.gov

Membership Srv.
Karen Donaldson
870-382-7657
870-460-3597 fax
kdonaldson@deltamem.net

 

Finance
Louise Hickman
870-541-7773
870-541-7204 fax
hickmanl@jrmc.org

 

Communication
Janie Ginocchio
501-212-8644
501-374-2826 fax
jginocchio@afmc.org

AHA Liaison

Cindy Harris Cook
501-224-7878
501-224-0519 fax
charris@arkhospitals.org

Editor: Janie Ginocchio
Arkansas Foundation for Medical Care Little Rock, Arkansas

NAHQ Award for Association Excellence

 

2001 Bronze Level Award Winner

2002 Silver Level Award Winner

2003 Gold Level Award Winner

2007 Gold Level Award Winner

2006 NAHQ Award for Support of CPHQ Certification