Becker's Hospital Review

115 PRACTICE MANAGEMENT THOUGHT LEADERSHIP ciently likely to cause harm in the near future because it's either poorly designed or there's no standard of work. So it gives us a barome- ter by which we measure what we spend our time on, and we prioritize those things that have demonstrated harm. at's a really hard philosophical concept for folks to get their heads around — that you're going to prioritize the work and you're going to stick with that priority based on potential for harm or actual harm and stay focused on that. It means you're going to say no to a lot of stuff. We have resources that are assigned to every facility. ose facilities can help deploy those resources to a project that they want to work on if that project measures up to our quality safe- ty and service scorecard. We have a three-page scorecard with 90-plus metrics on it. If a prob- lem meets our standards, we can focus on it. Our primary focus is reducing hospital-ac- quired infections, and through this process we've reduced the five most common hospital acquired infections by 54 percent over the last two years. We had hospitals that have gone a year without an infection. Some of our bigger hospitals went three months in a row without specific types of infections. Zero is the goal. We're trying to get to zero harm by 2024. A lot of places in the country do this, but we've achieved an 80 percent reduction on our serious safety events in the last three years. It's held for the last 18 months. We feel pretty good about that. Q: How do clinicians interact with these standardized work orders? LH: We hardwire these packages into the EMR. So if you're a nurse on the floor caring for the patient, the computer is expecting to see you do certain things for certain proce- dures and conditions. We built in the ability in real time for caregivers to see how they're performing according to the standard work process instead of waiting on a report to come out three months from now. A nurse at one of our facilities, who's been around for 20 years, said, "You know what? I fi- nally feel like for the first time in my career qual- ity is here to help me." In the past, quality was usually the team that would show up on your floor and say, "Hey, guys, your hand hygiene is not meeting requirements. Hey guys, you've got more infections. Stop having infections." When we implement a new program, our 100 system office employees take 24/7 hour shis at the hospital and we stand by and answer any questions clinicians have about the new docu- mentation, the new policy or the new devices. We call it elbow-to-elbow support. Aer implementation, we go back and audit. We have folks go around and randomly com- plete observational audits to make sure we're still doing the work. at's part of this whole improvement cycle, so we feel like once it's fixed it stays fixed. We don't wait for infections to occur. We look at the process measures that tell us that we're not doing everything we want to be doing. Let's go jump on it. It's a proactive interven- tion rather than waiting for problems. n Corner Office: Novant Health CMO Dr. Eric Eskioglu on why his team is embracing artificial intelligence By Kelly Gooch E ric Eskioglu, MD, brings both clinical neurosurgical ex- perience and an aerospace engineering background to his role as executive vice president and CMO of Winston-Salem, N.C.-based Novant Health. Dr. Eskioglu, a practicing vascular neurosurgeon, was an aerospace engineer at AlliedSignal Aerospace Company and Boeing before beginning his healthcare career. He worked at Physicians Regional Healthcare System in Naples, Fla., and at Lee Health in Fort Myers, Fla. He later served as senior vice president of neurosciences for Novant Health before becoming CMO of the organization in 2018. Dr. Eskioglu earned a Bachelor of Science in mechanical and aerospace engineering from the University of Arizona in Tuc- son and a medical degree from Kansas City-based University of Kansas medical school. He was the first inaugural fellow at the National Institutes of Health with Pfizer Clinical Research Scholars program in Bethesda, Md. He completed his neu- rosurgery residency at Nashville, Tenn.-based Vanderbilt University Medical Center and an additional endovascular/ vascular neurosurgery fellowship at the University of Florida Health Shands Hospital in Gainesville. Dr. Eskioglu spoke with Becker's and answered our seven "Corner Office" questions. Editor's note: Responses have been edited lightly for length and clarity. Question: What is one thing that piqued your interest in healthcare? Dr. Eric Eskioglu: A genuine feeling of helping people, the desire to help others. Q: What do you enjoy most about the city you work in? EE: I enjoy interacting with not only patients but other thought leaders in medicine and trying to come up with out-of-the-box things we could once only dream of but can now make a re- ality. I just want to be able to advance Novant Health's cause for being the best healthcare system in the country, known for quality, safety, but also known for a tremendous amount of in- novation that patients come to expect. When you come to a hospital, you should be able to ex- pect great care. Unfortunately, healthcare is not there yet, but Novant Health is leading the charge to get to a point where the great care is going to be expected and it's going to be done, period. The other stuff, added value, is going to be how we personalize this care to each patient and how we apply precision medicine to each patient to further their care and to make it really a worthwhile experience for them in their hour of need and make it less stressful for them. Q: If you could eliminate one of the healthcare indus- try's problems overnight, which would it be? EE: It's the bureaucracy, and it's the amount of data we must deal with. I hate to say this, but I almost feel like a lot of

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