Vice Chairs of Safety, Quality, and Operations

Message from the Vice Chairs of Safety, Quality, and Operations

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Welcome to the new academic year! We are excited to announce our presence on the Department of Medicine website.

We hope to better highlight the ongoing efforts of our incredible patient safety team within the department. Please explore our website. We have Operations Executive Councils (OEC) focused on ambulatory and inpatient issues in the Department of Medicine. These councils have representation from each clinical division. Each division also has a Patient Safety Officer. Please get to know these representatives and elevate safety and operations issues that you encounter to them so we can continuously improve the care we deliver and the environment in which we deliver it. If you are interested in joining any of the committees, please don’t hesitate to reach out. 

Thomas Ciesielski, MD Vice Chair of Inpatient Safety, Quality and Operations
Maya R. Jerath, MD, PhD Vice Chair of Ambulatory Clinical Operations, Safety and Quality

Our goals for this academic year are to:

  • Improve recognition of the patient safety team to the department
  • Develop and implement an internal survey to assess our culture of safety
  • Continue to partner with hospital colleagues on improving mortality index, decreasing length of stay, and readmission rates
  • Optimize utilization of our existing New Patient appointment slots to improve patient access
  • Decrease burden imposed by the electronic health record to improve provider satisfaction

As always, we encourage all faculty, fellows, residents, and staff to report safety events through the Events Reporting System (ERS) (password protected). Additionally, please report near misses, and other potentially unsafe conditions.  We learn from these events and make improvements to the system. A good rule of thumb is, if it bothers you, report it. A few recent improvements based on reports include:

  • Identification and removal of duplicate medical treatment team options in EPIC
  • Development and distribution of guidelines and flow charts for radiology at Barnes-Jewish West County in June 2024 after an event at that clinical site
Dunagan

Upcoming Event:

Mark Your Calendars for the Clay Dunagan, MD, MS, Patient Safety & Quality Symposium 2025

To be held Feb 28, 2025 from 7 am-12:30 pm

More details to come …