A DISSECTION OF NEWS FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF SURGERY
The Scalpel Thoughts From the Chairman Another academic year has ended and begun! The new group of residents and fellows officially started on July 1st. Congratulations to a fantastic group of residents and fellows who graduated in June. As my first full year as the Chair of Surgery at UTMC/UTGSM has ended, I’m filled with gratitude for the opportunity to be a part of a wonderful culture at a time where learning to better care for each other in healthcare will be essential if we want to be a part of a sustainable healthcare system. I don’t know of another academic medical center that has the spirit of collegiality across divisions, departments and Dr. Bruce Ramshaw even with the hospital administrators and managers. We will need to work together to learn how to measure and improve the value of care we provide in the context of whole, definable patient care pathways. To do this, we need to identify the group of people who care for patients in a definable patient care pathway (i.e., the process) for the entire cycle of care and define what outcome measures (e.g., costs, quality and patient perspective) define value in the context of that specific pathway. From the science of data and systems, we know that a definable context is necessary for meaningful measurement and analysis. Until now, we have tried to apply a measurement of value for all patients, combining many different patient care pathways as if the uniform measurements will have the same value for different patient care pathways and different patient subpopulations. For example, the measurement of value for a patient who has an inguinal hernia and chooses to undergo an outpatient inguinal hernia repair will have very different measures of value than a patient with terminal breast cancer who is receiving end of life hospice care. To understand the best measurements of value for these very different patient care pathways requires the contribution of knowledge from the group of people actually providing the care, with the patients and family members providing their perspectives as well. This systems approach to measuring and improving value will allow us to decrease costs and improve outcomes for all patient care pathways to which these principles are applied. We have begun the process of pulling data from all of our systems in the clinic and hospital so we can have the data in one place for the clinical teams to use for measuring and improving the value of care they provide. Although this is not a simple, short-term solution, it is a real solution for a complex problem, based on the science of systems and data. It will likely take several months to achieve this data management but when we have the data available for the clinical teams to learn from, the patient, hospital and clinical teams should all derive benefit and the costs of care can decrease while outcomes are improved.
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Inside this Issue
● Chief Resident’s Dinner ● Resident Research Day ● New Residents and Fellows ● Faculty News ● Academics
The Department of Surgery’s mission at the University of Tennessee Graduate School of Medicine is to provide surgical education by delivering the highest quality patient care, teaching and research.
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