Taking it to the street…

In the last blog post, I spoke of the great work of our patient-centered medical homes and how we have truly transformed care to become more patient-centered. It has been very difficult for us to get the word out about this transformation. I believe that the average member of our community does not know how we are innovating and what it means for individual patients, families, and the local economy. We’ve made progress, but, we still have a lot of work to do to “get the word out” to the community.

So, last week, I was the featured speaker at a “house party” with the folks at Quarry Lake Condo Association. The purpose of the meeting was to share GBMC’s vision and our quadruple aim—better health and better care with the least waste and the most joy for those providing the care. I was truly excited at this opportunity to speak directly to patients and prospective patients.

At the event, I had the pleasure of meeting the host, Mrs. Rozzie Brilliant, who received oncology support care at GBMC and whose own daughter also received life-saving testing and care at GBMC. During her presentation, Rozzie, a four-year survivor of ovarian cancer, explained her personal story and connection to GBMC and her oncologist, Madhu Chaudhry, M.D. Rozzie hosted the event out of her desire to give back to GBMC and to assure that all of her friends knew of our work.

I spent a few minutes speaking of our vision and our vision phrase: To every patient, every time, we will provide the care that we would want for our own loved ones. I told those in attendance that in America, it was clear that we have the best doctors, nurses and other clinicians in the world, who are working very hard, but, that the system they work in needs to be redesigned to help them get the job done. I told them that the biggest challenge was how to coordinate care for those with chronic disease and how we were redesigning just about everything at GBMC to become more patient-centered and to meet this challenge. They listened attentively as we discussed advanced primary care and our hours of operation. They were intrigued by our disease state registries and how we were working to assure that everyone had evidence based colon cancer screening among other things. I reminded them how good our specialists are, how we have outstanding surgeons and that surgery at GBMC costs much less than surgery at most other local hospitals and with outcomes that are at least as good if not better. The participants had many questions and we had a great dialogue. Greg Shaffer, Director of Marketing, and his team were there to help me answer questions and to provide more information about how to access our care.

I felt very good about this session where I was speaking directly to those who benefit the most from our redesign work…members of the community. We will do many more of these sessions. Do you have a group that you would like us to address?