Letter from the BWPO Chairman

Dear Colleagues:

Brigham and Women’s Hospital is nationally known for patient safety and quality care because of the commitment, dedication and talent of our care providers. Our hospital leadership has that same commitment and dedication to ensuring we have the resources and processes in place to deliver safe, quality care while constantly looking for avenues to improve. That dedication to quality has been recognized at the national level, when BWH received the National Quality Forum’s National Quality Healthcare Award in 2006.

That is the charge of the Center for Clinical Excellence (CCE), led by Senior Vice President for Clinical Excellence Michael Gustafson, MD, MBA, who has oversight for guiding BWH’s strategies for performance measurement, analysis, improvement and planning. The CCE’s senior team includes: Tejal Gandhi, MD, MPH, executive director of Patient Safety; Allen Kachalia, MD, medical director for Quality and Safety; Dorothy Goulart, MS, RN, director of Performance Improvement; and Troy Tomilonus, director of Decision Support Systems.

Tejal Gandhi and Allen Kachalia lead quality and safety work for CCE. Tejal is the founding director of our Patient Safety Team, one of the country’s first, and she has been instrumental in leading BWH’s efforts with online safety reporting, adverse event review and executive walk-rounds. She continues to work with Ambulatory Services leadership on quality and safety priorities. Allen leads our efforts on mortality reduction and risk adjusted mortality performance strategies, which is front and center in the national and state health care reform debate. During the past year, his leadership has proved pivotal to improvements in anticoagulation management.

Dot Goulart heads up the Performance Improvement group, spearheading unit- and division-based process improvement projects on everything from inpatient flow to outpatient satisfaction. Lean management concepts are spreading organically throughout the hospital in the clinical labs, operating rooms and ambulatory practices, thanks to Dot’s efforts to engage and empower all staff.

Troy Tomilonus leads perhaps the most behind-the-scenes team in the CCE, Decision Support Systems, which manages the massive Balanced Scorecard. Troy and his team not only help various departments identify data results and measurement needs, but they also create reports and interpret the data making it relevant and meaningful. Additionally, any morsel of internally or externally reported data flows through Decision Support Systems.

Our commitment to delivering safe, quality care, identifying the metrics to measure it and creating the processes to improve it has become a hallmark of BWH, and the CCE play a crucial role in both measuring and improving our performance. I encourage everyone to visit the Balanced Scorecard, available through the Start menu under Partners Applications, to review clinic metrics pertinent to your practice areas.