The Exec: UF Health’s New Chief Clinical Officer Wants to Turn Up the Volume on Clinical Outcomes

Implementing patient safety and quality initiatives

Phipps says there are several elements of launching successful patient safety and quality initiatives.

“The biggest key to success in any system-wide initiative such as safety and quality is a strong commitment from the leadership of the organization,” Phipps says. “There must be an organizational priority from the board of directors, the CEO, and other leaders.”

There must be an understanding about organizational attributes that promote safety, according to Phipps.

“You need to be a high-reliability organization, including elements such as culture, psychological safety, and reducing variation,” Phipps says.

Fostering psychological safety, which promotes the reporting of adverse events by staff members, involves messaging and modeling by a health system’s leadership, Phipps explains.

“It’s the things that you talk about and the behaviors that you exhibit,” Phipps says. “If patient safety and psychological safety for staff are important, you need to talk about those things. People need to see that the behaviors that leaders are endorsing are the behaviors that they exhibit.”

“First, you must believe that reducing variation is important,” Phipps says. “We know that reducing unwarranted variation reduces waste, improves safety, improves outcomes, and improves the experience of caregivers and patients.”

Health system leaders such as CMOs should get caregivers aligned around reducing variation, which requires cultural and technical work, according to Phipps.

“Culturally, you need to get people to understand that reducing variation is a pathway to excellence,” Phipps says. “Technical work can include getting everyone on the same electronic health record, sharing information, and aligning around order sets for common conditions.”

Leadership, vision, culture, and measuring outcomes are all important in promoting quality, according to Phipps, who adds that a factor that is often overlooked is that quality and clinical outcomes are best expressed by patients.

“An important aspect of a successful quality program includes involving patients and families, understanding their goals and values of care, understanding the outcomes that matter the most to them, and helping them to participate in setting the agenda for what you are trying to accomplish,” Phipps says.

Successful physician engagement

Phipps says he learned several lessons about physician engagement during his work as president of Novant Health Medical Group, where there is a rapidly growing, high-performing, largely community-based physician practice.

“Our approach to physician engagement was that physicians were our partners and leaders,” Phipps says. “As you would with any other partner or fellow leader, we had to give our physicians a voice in the organization and to understand what was important to them.”

“We needed to understand what solutions physicians had and to cultivate an environment of ongoing dialogue, mutual respect, honest communication, and alignment around a shared vision of providing great care to the community,” Phipps says.