Showcasing Our Excellence in Quality Improvement

GBMC HealthCare was honored to have been highlighted during this week’s 2023 Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Forum. During his opening address on Tuesday, Kedar Mate, MD, President and CEO at IHI, called out GBMC as a model of whole system improvement. He specifically pointed to the way our teams have embraced our lean management system (LMS) as part of our culture, referring to it as “embedded quality.” 

Our teams with Dr. Mate during his October visit.

We had the privilege of hosting Dr. Mate for Grand Rounds in October. During his time with us, he got to see LMS in action. He witnessed firsthand our commitment to learning and continuous improvement. This is part of what he highlighted during his keynote. He recognized that as part of our LMS process, senior leaders actively participate in daily team huddles where impediments to providing optimal care are identified and addressed using problem-solving tools. Our front-line teams proactively assess failure modes, collaborate with colleagues across the health system to create data visualizations, and foster ingenuity, leading to a seamlessly embedded operating system that has become second nature to the individuals involved. 

In his remarks, he described our systems as “habitual” – so engrained that we don’t know we do them anymore – it's just the way we work. 

I’m grateful to each and every member of our staff who has adopted a mindset for continuous improvement. We are fortunate to have the expertise of Carolyn Candiello, our Vice President of Quality and Patient Safety, who is leading the charge on this work, and our Quality and Safety team members, like Michele Patchett, MSN, RN, Director of Process Improvement/Innovation; Kerrie Walsh, RN, BSN, CPHRM, Patient Safety and Accreditation; Sarah Muslim-Lefebvre, Senior Program Manager for System Improvement; and Katie Koestler, BSN, RN, CEN, whose efforts support LMS and build capability and capacity in the workforce. 

It fills me with pride that our health system is being recognized at the national level. It is extremely meaningful that the innovation and best practices of our own GBMC HealthCare family was highlighted among 5,000 peers who really know and care about quality improvement, and I appreciate Dr. Mate acknowledging our successes. 

And later that day, Dr. Mate gave a virtual address at the open meeting of the Health Services Cost Review Commission, and he called out GBMC as a model to be emulated by others! I am so grateful to all on our team for embracing continuous improvement as our business model. It is clearly pushing us faster towards our vision of being the community-based true system of care that is capable of treating everyone as we want our loved ones to be treated!