Metrics Task Force Charter
Introduction.
UT Southwestern Medical Center is embarking on a Clinical Services (“Transformation”) Initiative with a goal of achieving excellence in all aspects of the delivery of clinical care to patients. While we believe the quality of our medical care is in general excellent, we think it is now time to consider how to reorganize and transform the practice into a cohesive, patient-oriented program which will provide “best practice care” from both a medical and customer service perspective. In the process of visiting seven leading academic medical centers every institutional leadership team we met stressed the importance of objective measurement to effective management and change in the academic medical center.
Task Force Charter.
The Metrics Task Force composed of faculty physicians, UTSHS, departmental administrators, UT Southwesten administration and UMC Administration will review, augment, and preliminarily approve recommendations developed by campus-wide decision support staff in the following areas:
1. The practice metrics that are necessary to track and manage
a. Physician and clinic productivity
b. Patient satisfaction
c. Patient service
d. Financial results
e. Employee skills and performance
f. Employee satisfaction and morale
2. Standardized reports for the distribution of data.
3. Evaluate proposed standard metrics reports for accuracy, and integrity, prior to practice-wide implementation.
4. Recommend policies for the sharing of data on physician and clinic productivity, patient service, and patient satisfaction across the entire practice.
Initial proposed steps.
1. Rapidly develop a simple scorecard (15-20 variables) to monitor ambulatory patient service and clinic productivity.
2. Review the work of the Business Rules (and data integrity) Workgroup and recommend priorities.
3. Reduce, simplify and standardize the ambulatory visit codes for encounters, tests and procedures (IDX system).
4. Initiate review of faculty productivity measurement in use in other academic medical centers.
Conclusion.
The Task Force will report its recommendations to the Executive Committee of the Clinical Department Chairs for approval and implementation across the practice. The initial focus will be on ambulatory patient care and service but subsequently hospital patient care and service will be incorporated into the activities of the Task Force. The plan for improving UT Southwestern’s Clinical Services represents a commitment by the Clinical Department Chairs and Administration to implement major changes that will impact the entire culture of the institution. These changes are not aimed at making marginal incremental improvements, but rather at producing a fundamental transformation of the quality of patient care and service. The work of the Metrics Task Force will be central to this initiative.
