Improving Quality and Performance with Integrated Clinical Services

OVERVIEW

This hospital is part of a health system that employs approximately 3,300 clinicians and staff at over 20 locations.

OPPORTUNITY

The nearly decade-long partnership with Sound Physicians brought innovation to the hospital and improved its hospitalist program. While the hospital was operating at a high level across many of its clinical services, leadership believed there was an opportunity to elevate the patient experience and improve performance in other departments the way they had in hospital medicine.

In other words, the hospital felt confident that Sound Physicians’ 20 years of experience managing complex teams across the acute episode of care would provide the necessary skills to lead the charge.

SOLUTION

In addition to hospital medicine, we proposed adding Sound’s emergency medicine and critical care services, bringing together all three specialties as one team. Instead of individual departments operating in silos, this approach put the patient at the center of care. The hospital believed that a deeper, more comprehensive partnership with Sound would bring notable improvements in metrics. Further, hospital leadership was aligned with Sound’s approach: a single local leader and all three clinical services sharing KPIs. Sound’s clinicians, regardless of their specialty, were responsible for performance and quality across the continuum of services provided by Sound.

“Improved collaboration was apparent during the initial integration. The adult and pediatric ED providers needed to collaborate and share resources to staff the units safely.”

– Chief Nursing Officer

IMPACT

With an endorsement from the hospital, Sound aligned 70+ clinicians across multiple service lines into a unified team with one shared vision: to seamlessly deliver care across the entire acute care continuum from the emergency department (ED) and observation unit through pediatrics, intensive care, and hospital medicine.

From a whole hospital perspective, the Sound team collaborated to address performance metrics related to the hospital’s reputation. Door-to-provider time and ED length of stay (LOS), two critical components of patient experience scores, became the focus. Sound’s site and regional teams established a regular meeting cadence with hospital leaders to address barriers and track progress.

The 269-bed facility adopted Sound’s proven “pod structure” within the hospitalist program, where various clinicians work together on the same patient cohort. This approach significantly streamlined communication among all stakeholders. Sound also targeted disease-specific diagnoses, initiated multi-department integration, implemented a clinician scorecard review, conducted CDI (clinical documentation improvement) training, developed 1:1 physician feedback, and pushed to improve physician documentation.

With a single leader overseeing clinical operations, the hospital’s leadership had a strategic partner focused on improving the care continuum and the patient experience. Sound’s approach unified the management cadence, normalized the rhythm of business, and created a foundation for collaboration between hospital leadership and the clinical team.

“We are impressed with the engagement and enthusiasm of our local and regional Sound leadership team and Sound provider partners, who support a culture of continuous quality improvement, working together with us to achieve shared goals.”

— Chief Medical Officer