The CS&E Program is a UT System initiative that concentrates on Quality Improvement and Patient Safety. The program goals are simple: safety and effectiveness will be integrated into the way we do our work every day. We must learn to identify, measure and minimize the variation in all of our health care processes to maximize the quality of the health care we deliver.
Modeled after Dr. Brent James´ Advanced Training Program at Intermountain Health Care in Utah, MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC) first piloted the course in 2005, and UTMB has been participating since 2007. The classroom portion consists of ten sessions over six months, and combines live video streaming of guest speakers from the UT System with in-house speakers on a variety of team-based and process improvement topics.
In the spirit of our Culture of Trust, each of the teams is multidisciplinary, consisting of Sponsor, Physician Champion, Team Leader, Process Owner, and team members. Each team has a Quality Management Facilitator. These teams work together both inside and outside of the classroom to implement the necessary changes to meet the aim of their projects. At the end of the course, the teams present the status of their improvement projects to hospital leadership and previous CS&E graduates to demonstrate the impacts that they have made with their projects so far.
UTMB’s first in-house CS&E program was implemented on January 12, 2012, with two teams focused on:
- Reducing Sepsis Mortality
- Improving Patient Satisfaction for Day Surgery
The second CS&E session began April 13, 2012, with six project teams working towards targeted improvements in the following areas of strategic importance:
- Improving the transitions of care for Family Medicine
- Improving Pneumococcal Vaccinations compliance in the pediatric population
- Ensuring appropriate inpatient transfers to the Echo lab
- Reducing CT wait time in outpatient radiology
- Reducing start times in Cath Lab
- In-Basket Management in the Ambulatory Setting (a tool in Epic that manages patient initiated requests, such as prescriptions, etc.)
The graduating teams were:
Day Surgery Unit Patient Satisfaction
Dr. Marvin Cohen, M.D. - Sponsor
Lisa Farmer, M.D. Anesthesiology - Team Leader
Erika Hernandez, Chief Resident
Emily Bryant, RN - DSU
Kathleen Denke, RN - DSU
Julie Parker, RN - PACU
Aimee Lindsey, RN - PACU
Nathan Lake, RN - Holding
Jan Alsobrook, Billing
Adam Spieker, IE - Facilitator
Angel Male, RN - Co-facilitator
Sepsis Mortality
Dr. Kirschbaum/Dr.Quach, Sponsors
William Whitehead, M.D. Anesthesiology - Team Leader
Marco de Los Santos, M.D. - MICU Fellow
Shawn P. Nishi, M.D. - MICU
Giovanni Geslani, M.D. - MICU Resident
Josette Armendariz, RN - SICU Nurse Manager
Chuck Machner, RN - MICU Nurse Manager
George C Kramer, PhD, Director Research Lab
Kelley Huff – RN - ED
Diana Grimm-Mapp, RN - ED
Cynthia Penta, Inpatient Coder
Melinda Tillman, RN
Srikanth Radhakrishnan, IE - Facilitator
Wayne Fischer, Co-Facilitator