ACC CV SUMMIT - PRE-CONF: Team Based Care and Profitability

Thursday, January 16, 2014 | MedAxiom

Suzette Jaskie, President & CEO for MedAxiom Consulting, presented to the pre-conference attendance crowd on team-based care and profitability and opened by sharing benchmarking and trending data from the MedAxiom survey on clinical staff FTE’s per physician pointing out that there have been slight increases in cost and ratios, especially over the last two years. Ms. Jaskie then showed data that total staff FTE’s per physician has gone down slightly in the same time period. And to complete the initial set-up, she pointed out how work RVU’s correlated to these staffing ratios showing greater overall productivity across the measured cardiology programs.

Ms. Jaskie provided a definition of high performing work teams as “a group of people with specific roles and complementary talents and skills, aligned with and committed to a common purpose, who consistently show high levels of collaboration and innovation, that produce superior results.” She points out that high performing clinical work teams are led by physicians and noted that 50% of medical schools now offer a joint MD/MBA degree.

A New England Journal of Medicine article provides four key tasks for front line clinicians leading local systems including:

1. Establish the purpose by emphasizing the goal is shared and the action must be collective
2. Assure clinical microsystem can execute on goals (evidence balance with human need)
3. Monitoring system (value) performance
4. Improving performance

Ms. Jaskie says, “If physicians are in diagnosis and treatment mode 95% of the time… high performing work MUST be deployed to support throughout the organization,” and provides five postulates that all will allow these healthcare work teams to be successful. These areas of focus include:

• Talent management orientation
• Purposeful process driven work
• Work designed to leverage staff at the top of their license
• Highest justified pay, fewest number of people
• Performance management environment

Suzette closed the presentation by stating that effective operations are a matter of talent management merged with process management to deliver a culture of performance. And finally, she says, “you are never done improving.”