By Robert J. Russell, acting CEO
Serving as acting CEO for Penn Presbyterian Medical Center (PPMC) over the past nine months has been energizing for me professionally and personally. One of the things that has impressed me is the amount of teamwork within our services – how people communicate across all levels and share information across the organization. We have terrific individuals at PPMC and how they collaborate makes the work even better.
Presby truly has a different feel than other large, academic medical centers. People here know each other and feel comfortable talking with one another. Even as we’ve gotten bigger, we’ve managed to keep our sense of community.
An example of how we are working across departments to enhance our processes and improve patient care is our Project IMPACT (Improve Patient Care and Throughput) initiative. For the last six months, an executive steering committee at PPMC has worked closely with several multidisciplinary teams – from frontline caregivers to leadership staff – to help patient progression flow more smoothly.
Simply defined, patient progression is the advancement of hospitalized patients through various points of care through discharge home or to a secondary level of treatment, such as a skilled nursing facility. A delay at any transition point of patient care can create a domino effect. Patient progression delays have been a challenge at hospitals nationwide for the last few years. Project IMPACT has been working across the continuum of care to improve throughput. Our activities have focused on enhancing multidisciplinary rounds to expedite discharges and remove barriers, cohorting patients in locations where the entire care team can efficiently work together, focusing on only providing necessary care in the inpatient setting, managing expectations with patients and families regarding what is needed for discharge in advance, and partnering with Penn Medicine at Home to facilitate post-acute care either in the home or in a skilled nursing facility. As of April 30, we’ve already seen marked improvement in the measures we have been tracking.
In addition to Project IMPACT, PPMC has much to look forward to in the next fiscal year, including the relocation of our inpatient Behavioral Health services to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP) – Cedar Avenue. This will allow us to add two nursing units on Wright-Saunders 4 and 5. In September, we will open our new 10-story parking garage. We recently opened a new Penn Cardiology office in Bensalem, and are working on expanding our cancer infusion program at Virtua Voorhees in South Jersey.
PPMC is continually growing to serve the needs of our community and we should all be proud of the work we do here every day for our patients.