As the VP for ambulatory operations, I’m proud to share news of a significant improvement in our performance during the past year. The improvement is that we have received a four-star ranking (out of five stars, with five being the best), up from our previous three stars on our Vizient Ambulatory Quality and Accountability Scorecard.
This progress could not have happened without all the staff and providers of the department working together. Because this is a big achievement for the practice, I wanted to take a moment to celebrate you, to explain what this means, how we achieved it and why it’s important.
The star ratings are based on the ranking of the ambulatory practices that are part of academic medical centers around the country. Of the approximately 50 practices in the country, we achieved sufficient points to move us up into the lower ranks of the four-star performance as shown by the yellow bar in the graphic below.
The graphic below shows the five domains and how many points we scored in each. As you can see, we excelled across four areas and have work to do in the area of quality.
These results are not an accident. This past year we committed to moving from three stars by gaining a deeper understanding of what the metrics mean and how we can impact them. We studied our performance and found that our data needed cleaning up in terms of how we were measuring against the benchmarks. We looked for specific areas where we could improve and brought together team members from the Lean department, clinical experts in various specialties and care teams from throughout ambulatory to look at specific interventions for specific diseases to test that would improve our outcomes.
We made dramatic improvements in our Continuum of Care domain, specifically with diabetes outcomes, and this raised our performance to nationally best practice levels and raised us to four stars.
The most important part of this story is not the ranking or the stars. The most important part is that by working hard – and working together – we improved patient care, built relationships and established a shared vision. UTMB is stronger today and our patients are better off thanks to your hard work and dedication to excellence. I am immensely proud of you all.
Thank you,
Pete Gutierrez
Vice president, Ambulatory Operations