The American College of Surgeons is dedicated to improving the care of the surgical patient and to safeguarding standards of care in an optimal and ethical practice environment.

Oct. 13, 2009
Oct. 14, 2009
Oct. 15, 2009

Contents:
• LaMar S. McGinnis, Jr., to be installed as 90th ACS President at Sunday Convocation
• F. Dean Griffen, MD, FACS, to receive 2009 Distinguished Service
• Honorary Fellowship to be awarded to five prominent surgeons
• Dr. and Mrs. Reiling to receive Distinguished Philanthropist Award at FLS luncheon
• Martin Memorial Lecture to showcase re-engineering success
• Inaugural meeting of the Young Fellows Association to convene Monday
• Panel discussion, new curriculum examine surgical palliative care
• SESAP: An excellent tool for Maintenance of Certification
• National Accreditation Program for Breast Centers celebrates first year

Martin Memorial Lecture to showcase re-engineering success

Glenn D. Steele, Jr., MD, PhD, FACS, president and chief executive officer, Geisinger Medical Center, Danville, PA

Geisinger Medical Center has re-engineered its system of care so exceptionally that it drew the attention of President Obama, who praised Geisinger’s best practices for delivering high quality care at costs below the national average. Glenn D. Steele, Jr., MD, PhD, FACS, will provide the details of this remarkable initiative when he presents Re-engineering Systems of Care – Surgical Leadership as part of the The Martin Memorial Lecture sponsored by the American Urological Association. He will present the lecture from 8:30 to 9:30 am Monday in McCormick Place Convention Center, W375DE.

“I thought it would be pertinent and interesting to highlight for surgeons one of our most interesting innovations here at Geisinger Medical Center,” Dr. Steele said. “We took many of our high-volume, hospital-based interventions and had our clinical leadership re-engineer how we gave care, adhering to evidence-based or consensus-based best practices. We then hard-wired these best practices into our electronic health record.”

In this re-engineering process, clinician leaders sought answers to the following questions: Could unjustified variation be successfully decreased? If so, would reducing unjustified variation increase the quality of patient outcomes and decrease cost? At Geisinger, the answers were “yes” to both questions, and Dr. Steele will present more details on what clinician leaders discovered during this process.

Additionally, other major points he will address in the presentation include the importance of strong clinical leadership to successfully re-engineer systems of care, the role of consensus-based and evidence-based best practices in re-engineering systems across the entire spectrum of care, and the crucial need for hospitals, doctors, and nurses to work together to achieve best practices. When combined together, these strategies will increase quality in outcomes, and reduction in costs.

“Our system at Geisinger is even integrated across the insurance component and the health care providers, all within one company,” Dr. Steele said. “The real question is whether our experiment can be expanded to other parts of the country with different system structures, where there may not be integration among doctors (primary care and specialty), hospitals, and insurance payers. The essential questions to consider in this situation include: ‘Is this scalable?’ and ‘Could this be applied to other systems?’”

Clearly, the Geisinger effort has been highly visible. In addition to President Obama praising the feasibility of Geisinger’s system in a June 11, speech, Dr. Steele has been interviewed on numerous occasions in national media outlets, including CNN, about the exceptional re-engineering initiative and results at Geisinger.

“We are really attacking unjustified variation, looking at what’s already available in evidence-based or consensus-based best care, and engineering it into the entire episode of care, whether it’s a heart procedure or a total hip replacement,” Dr. Steele said. “Our doctors feel really good about this approach because we do get better outcomes at lower costs.”