ASQ Healthcare Panel Brings Healthcare Quality Experts to Capitol Hill
WASHINGTON, April 26 - The crisis, complexity, competing interests and compassion that drive healthcare delivery in the United States came through in impassioned comments, questions and suggested solutions offered during ASQ’s Healthcare Forum on Capitol Hill today.
U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), a co-chair of the House 21 st Century Health Care Caucus, sought answers and new ideas from the panel — an unprecedented gathering of healthcare organizations that have won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.
Healthcare “is affecting everything, everywhere in our country, in our economy,” Kennedy said as he opened the discussion, which was timed to coincide with the last day of the Baldrige award’s Quest for Excellence Conference here.
“You have demonstrated we can do better,” Kennedy said. “As [Baldrige] awardees you are delivering excellence. You have been doing quality.”
But lawmakers have not done enough to lead other healthcare providers to follow the examples of the Baldrige winners, he said. “We don’t have the urgency that we need on the Hill.”
Kennedy publicly recognized the high-performing healthcare powerhouses attending the session, then pushed for answers from the experts for nearly two hours.
The panel, assembled by ASQ at the request of the caucus, included:
- G. Richard Hastings, president and CEO of St. Luke’s Health System of Kansas City, Missouri.
- John Heer, president and CEO of North Mississippi Health Services.
- Deborah Baehser, chief nursing officer and senior vice president of clinical care services, and Richard Lovering, senior vice president for operations, of RWJ University Hospital Hamilton of Hamilton, New Jersey.
- Frank J. Sardone, president and CEO of Bronson Healthcare Group of Kalamazoo, Michigan, the 2005 Baldrige Award winner.
- Bill Thompson, senior vice president for strategic development at SSM Health Care of St. Louis.
- Doug Wojcieszak, chairman of the Sorry Works! Coalition of Glen Carbon, Illinois.
Kennedy sought the panelists’ support for one of his key legislative initiatives, H.R. 2234, the 21 st Century Health Information Act, which seeks to streamline the creation of secure, confidential electronic healthcare records systems.
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| Congressman Patrick Kennedy confers with panel moderator Kathleen J. Goonan prior to the start of the healthcare panel discussion that ASQ conducted for the 21st Century Health Care Caucus. |
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Panelists agreed that new health-information technology has already improved patient care and outcomes in their organizations. But, said Sardone, such efforts must go further.
Better access to healthcare data has added “much greater transparency” to the process of making and managing healthcare decisions, Sardone said. But much work remains to help the general public understand these data, and to reassure people that healthcare providers are making decisions in their patients’ best interests. How, he asked, do providers assure the public “that we’re not providing incentives not to treat the patient?”
Hastings said lawmakers could help this process by eliminating restrictions that keep doctor’s offices from accessing electronic medical records maintained by hospitals.
Baehser said her hospital has successfully implemented processes and measurements to reduce medical errors and improve patient safety. Kennedy asked if RWJ has been “rewarded for that” by insurers. “Not yet,” Baehser said, “but we bring these things to the table with them.”
Wojcieszak provided insight on dealing with adverse medical events from the perspective of Sorry Works!, a coalition of physicians, healthcare providers, lawyers and patient advocates promoting full disclosure and apologies for medical errors when root-cause analysis shows that standards of care are not met.
Kennedy asked the panelists if they would support legally requiring “disclosure of true performance” by healthcare providers – a process not unlike the Baldrige award application process, which requires organizations to provide data on performance and results. Thompson replied that many SSM pay-for-performance projects “are asking, are we doing things right for the patients…. We’re not asking, and analyzing, are we doing the right things…. We see patients when they are sick. Who’s incentivized to keep the patient out of the hospital?”
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Panelists (left to right) Doug Wojcieszak, Bill Thompson, Rich Hastings, John Heer, Deborah Baehser, Richard Lovering, and Frank Sardone listen as Congressman Kennedy addresses panel observers and members and staff of the caucus. |
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Others in attendance included panel moderator Dr. Kate Goonan, director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Performance Excellence, an ASQ member and a former Baldrige examiner; ASQ Healthcare Division chair Celeste Nair and chair-elect Douglas Dotan; Dr. Robert G. Burney of the U.S. State Department, who writes a healthcare blog for ASQ’s Web site; Harry Hertz, director of the Baldrige program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology; Laurel Nelson-Rowe, an ASQ managing director; Ray Zielke, ASQ healthcare market manager; and several representatives of ASQ’s Washington DC Section.
For more information on these issues and other ASQ advocacy activities, please contact John Ryan, ASQ public policy analyst, at jryan@asq.org.
Read the panelists’ prepared statements.
