CMO Notes

Matthew Miller, MD
Chief Medical Officer, WCHN

Jim Harrison, a great American writer and poet, died last month. He wrote, …“which brings us to the theme for today: how not to be crushed lifeless by habituation and conditioning.”

At least we can be assured that there is nothing habituating about our professional lives in healthcare; we are in a maelstrom of constant change. We’re probably at greater risk of drowning or burnout than being crushed. Let’s see if we can work together better and collectively win the day.

The EHR conversion to Cerner is a watershed event. It presents us the opportunity to think about how we take care of patients from a comprehensive and consensus driven approach. It is hard work but it is also incredibly valuable. We are an expanding network of hospitals and providers working through our PHO to manage thousands of lives together. We’re actually getting pretty good at it and our patients’ outcomes are a reflection of that collaboration. We have a new unifying website and brand that tells our story well. Click here for more information: www.wchn.org.

Some other updates:

• The Find a Doctor tool on our website has posed some challenges, which we are going to be addressing shortly. It won’t be enhanced, however, until this summer, when we convert our Medical Staff Credentialing Systems to a new network platform with much clearer information and a streamlined approach to credentialing. Stay tuned.


• Med News Plus: This is a free electronic push of succinct, high-quality CME opportunities that can both keep you up to date and CME compliant remarkably easily. The northern campuses are already familiar with this feature, which we’ll refresh and then open it to all in Norwalk this spring. You’ll love it.


• High Quality Efficiency Program (HQEP) Jargon? No.
  The HQEP is a fully legal and compliant mechanism intended to create a formal partnership between hospitals and providers working within the context of a PHO and clinically integrated network for value based care. (Now, that’s jargon.)

Basically, it’s a contractual agreement aimed at achieving quality improvements and cost reductions within hospitals and within population health initiatives. Think of it as co-management on steroids.

Typical metrics include quality and safety outcomes (e.g. readmission rates, avoidable hospitalizations), resource utilization (e.g. implant costs or standardization of care), or population health metrics (e.g. utilization of resources, PMPM spend, generic prescription utilization).

By practicing shared governance, providers are compensated predominantly for achieving results, and to a lesser extent, for the time spent in these endeavors. It’s a way to reward providers legitimately for their role in quality and efficiency improvements. We expect to be studying this model over the next few months and implementing it by the end of the fiscal year. Stay tuned.

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