Patient Care Systems

• Attract, develop, manage and retain the workforce that can reliably deliver clinical excellence.
• Optimize safety, efficiency and effectiveness of care delivery.
• Transform care through development of new, flexible, innovative systems and structures.

Patient Safety and Clinical Performance Improvement

The Patient Safety and Clinical PI team has been working on a number of high priority items to improve the safety of our patients at BJC. These items include:

• Implementing principles of high reliability and a just and accountable culture.
• Standardizing workflows across BJC in response to EHR implementation and updates.
• Investigating serious patient safety events and implementing actions to decrease risk for harm and improve performance.
• Working with Chief Nursing Officers to redesign and improve the care delivery model.

Infection Prevention & Epidemiology (IPEC)

The original Infection Control Consortium was established in 1996 and expanded as the work of hospital epidemiology expanded across BJC. Now IPEC, the work is primarily related to healthcare acquired infection (HAI) etiology, prevention and research. IPEC consists of infection preventionists, including RNs and other health professionals, as well as hospital epidemiologists (physicians), who are among certified experts in their field trained to protect patients from infection and other infectious disease related risks. Collaboration between IPEC representatives from each of BJC’s facilities has drastically reduced HAIs since the consortium’s creation by more than 50 percent.

Infection preventionists partner with health care teams in each of BJC’s facilities and use proven methods to ensure that patients and families stay safe from HAIs. In every facility hand sanitizer gels and rubs, hand washing stations, disinfecting wipes, “cover your cough” signs, in addition to masks, gowns and gloves help prevent the occurrence of HAIs. CAG assists IPEC’s goals through collaboration and the combined experience of its experienced health care professionals.

Nursing Workforce Initiative

The Nursing Workforce Initiative is focused on restructuring BJC’s nursing workforce in these distinctive areas, or work streams: nursing workforce attraction and retention, labor cost management and productivity, care delivery process improvement, and leaders’ standard work.

Patient Experience

The Patient Experience Leader Group was initiated in September of 2017 and consists of 25 members including patient experience leaders from every HSO. The group’s goal is to promote and sustain patient experience behaviors through the following actions:

• Supporting governance structure and consistency in survey tools and questions.
• Developing and standardizing training, orientation and onboarding for new leaders surrounding PRC tools.
• Standardizing dashboards and reports for patient experience metrics.

One indicator of the Patient Experience is the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems score (HCAHPS). This score helps BJC hospitals understand if they are consistently providing specific elements of care to patients in their facilities. In addition to HCAHPS, CCE assists BJC in measuring patient satisfaction using survey data from our vendor partner, PRC. This PRC patient satisfaction data provides insight into how well we are providing specific elements of care to patients. Both these measurement tools help CCE and BJC hospitals target our improvement efforts.

Integrated Care Systems

Integrated Care Systems (ICS) was created out of the BJC 2022 Goal to "Establish a BJC Care Coordination platform (coordinating care coordination/case management activities, supporting patients through handoffs and transitions, patient movement through the "network", supporting denials management)". ICS is made up of three main work streams: 1) Case Management 2) Utilization Management and 3) Denials and Management.