The elimination of preventable hospital readmissions is a national priority designed to improve patient safety and reduce wasteful spending of health-care dollars. Penn Medicine is fully committed to this goal and seeks to contribute to it by more fully understanding and eliminating the current variability and waste in the hospital discharge process. In a project sponsored by Richard Shannon, MD, chair of medicine, members of the “Perfect Patient Discharge” project seek to redesign and execute a standardized and flawless discharge process that will become the new standard of care for hospital discharge. Founders 12 and Founders 14 will serve as the learning sites for the project.
To prepare for the project, team members learned the Penn Medicine performance improvement methodology and tools. This three-day education was accomplished through a three-way partnership between the Department of Medicine, the Healthcare Leadership in Quality Residency Track, and Penn Medicine Academy’s Performance Improvement in Action (PIIA) curriculum. This educational partnership relied on the expertise of both internal and external faculty. Rick Kleindienst and Deborah Christopher, internal experts in performance improvement, taught much of methods and tools supported by the facilitation skills of Brooke McDonnell, Staci Oppleman, and Patty Harris. Kristi Pintar, Corporate Director, Organizational Development and Leadership Practice, explained, “Participants in the PIIA curriculum benefit from the expertise of our external partners and the expertise and ongoing support of our internal faculty from numerous departments. The ‘Perfect Patient Discharge’ project is an example of an interdisciplinarmailto:Kristi.Pintar@uphs.upenn.eduy team supported by an interdisciplinary faculty all focused on improving the patient’s experience. Our goal is to build internal capability and capacity for performance improvement. We want continuous improvement to be the way we do what we do.”
To learn more about Penn Medicine’s performance improvement methodology and tools, email Kristi.Pintar@uphs.upenn.edu. To learn more about the “Perfect Patient Discharge” project, email neha.patel@uphs.upenn.edu.
