Message from the President:
What we’re doing to be the best in patient care
(and why it matters)
To fellow members of our university community:
The recent announcement of plans to build an ambulatory specialty care center in League City, along with our plans for a new specialty tower on campus, have placed our Health System in the spotlight. I wanted to take a moment to share information about other supporting activities that are under way to help make UTMB an employer of choice for health professionals and a provider of choice for patients.
Although the Health System is just one of our mission areas, it provides crucial support to our educational and research endeavors. It is a source of more than half of our annual revenue but, more importantly, it provides the real-world settings where we train students, develop new models of care and translate research findings into new treatments.
Likewise, you and your fellow employees are important to the Health System—whether you provide hands-on care or not. As an employee-patient, you can help call attention to needed improvements in our hospitals and clinics—improvements that will benefit all of our patients and potentially others beyond UTMB. And, you can be an advocate for the Health System, spreading the word when you’ve received great care here.
The Health System has a strong and wide-ranging team working to enhance service across the clinical enterprise. Individually and together, they are taking creative approaches to ensuring that the UTMB patient care experience matches the quality of care our Health System provides. Led by Dr. Karen Sexton, interim executive vice president and CEO of the Health System, and Dr. Garland Anderson, executive vice president and provost, and dean of medicine, they are already seeing results from this work, and they have my full support in their continued efforts.
A few examples include:
- The new Access Center, which includes a dedicated number employees can call (772-CARE) for appointments or to resolve issues with their care
- Improvements in the Patient Services process, including a current staff of five patient advocates who have assigned floors and meet every new inpatient at least once, to ensure that each patient has the best possible experience while in our care
- Facility improvements throughout the campus hospitals and
clinics, to provide an inviting, healing environment for patients
and employees alike
A program to empower outpatient service associates to “Just Say Yes” when scheduling appointments - Programs such as Crew Resource Management and model infection-control procedures to make UTMB’s one of the safest health systems in the nation
Another effort that may be less visible but is nonetheless critical to our success is our long-term partnership with The Studer Group, a company that has demonstrated tremendous success in helping health institutions improve service for patients—and the work environment for faculty and staff—in a sustainable way. They do this by providing clinical managers the tools they need to bring out the best in themselves and those they supervise.
Our clinical leadership and managers began working with Studer Group coaches last year to create and maintain a culture of service and accountability at UTMB. The first step is to establish measurable goals so that we can track results and ensure we have the necessary resources to achieve them. The ultimate goal is to learn the behaviors that have been proven to ensure patient and employee satisfaction and to make these behaviors second-nature for everyone involved in our clinical enterprise going forward.
Some of the techniques already learned through this process—including regular visits by managers to their employees throughout the Health System, regular visits to patients to make sure their needs are being met, and calls made to check on patients who’ve been discharged—have already resulted in significant, measurable improvements in patient satisfaction.
You’ll be hearing and receiving additional information on these and other efforts in the coming weeks and months. But in the meantime, please remember that whatever our role or position, we all represent UTMB to our patients and their families, and we all share a charge to make UTMB a welcoming place for people seeking care here. Our collective success depends on each of us committing to doing and being our best. Together, we will make UTMB the desired health care destination for faculty, staff, students and patients.
The work has begun, and we’re making good progress toward our goal of providing patients the service and quality they expect, and providing the ideal work environment for our employees. Thanks for being an active participant in these important efforts.
Sincerely,
David L. Callender, MD UTMB President