Quality

Collaboration in quality is happening across UF Health campuses.

By: Kelly Gray-Eurom, M.D., M.M.M., FACEP

Sasha Grek, M.D., the new chief quality officer at UF Health Shands Hospital in Gainesville, recently spent a full day on the Jacksonville campus. He wanted to learn from our successes and failures and discuss ways the two campuses can better collaborate on quality initiatives.

It was a great day of brainstorming. Ideas around care variation, standardization and bicampus pilot projects were all part of the mix, as was a collaborative, long-term approach to quality strategic planning. More discussions with others working on quality projects on both campuses are in the works. Not everything in Jacksonville will work in Gainesville, and vice versa, but we can definitely benefit from each other’s wisdom.

Information Technology Services is heavily immersed in quality initiatives. The chief data analytics officer in Gainesville is working on an interactive dashboard for enterprise quality metrics. This dashboard will give team leaders the ability to access real-time global metrics. It would be viewed as a “finger on the pulse” from a quality perspective.

Predictive analytics tools

Cross-campus teams are working to develop predictive analytics tools in Epic. Validation pilots are investigating a tool that could identify additional risks for sepsis patients, as well as a new tool that could help identify readmission risks unique to our patient population. Understanding specific readmission risks could help care teams and case management proactively prevent future readmissions.

Infection Control, Infectious Disease and lab personnel are creating a reflex urine culture protocol to decrease the number of false-positive urine cultures. Nephrology, Dialysis and Infection Control are investigating a better way to cap dialysis catheters. Meanwhile, UF Health North has begun holding numerous quality meetings in every area of care.

Quality improvement is an ever-moving target that doesn’t have an endpoint. Folks at UF Health understand this and have jumped on board in the best possible way.