I hope everyone is enjoying our beautiful Wisconsin fall! I enjoy all the warm colors and crispness in the air, but the transition from summer to winter can also be a time to reflect on the months that have passed. We even have a holiday celebrating the harvest of the season and “thankfulness” for what we have and what we have accomplished. (More on thankfulness in next month’s letter!) With transition in mind, I wish to share an update on our plans for this winter and spring of 2022.
The medical staffs within ThedaCare are partnering with the Greeley Company to review our Medical Staff Services, create a System Credentialing Committee, create System Bylaws, and customize and align Rules and Regulations for our 7 hospitals. For those that may not be familiar with Greeley, their mission “…is to help healthcare organizations improve efficiency, comply with regulations and standards, achieve practitioner engagement and alignment, and excel in the deliver of high-quality, cost-effective care.” They truly are experts in the field and have worked with hundreds of health systems to implement these goals.
We have had two separate consultants visit ThedaCare since I joined in 2020—and both have pointed out the many opportunities to the medical staff as well as for ThedaCare by improving governance standardization with a system approach. Some of the benefits include increased “user friendliness” for applicants and increased efficiency as well as fewer silos, decreasing duplication of work, and less fragmentation. Some of our Critical Access Hospitals struggle with the resources needed for ever challenging duties of credentialing, compliance, privileging, quality and behavioral matters. We will solve these concerns. When new physicians come to our region, the credentialing work required to apply to all 7 hospitals in the system is challenging, to say the least. Each physician then is expected to follow the unique bylaws, rules and regulations for all 7 hospitals. Imagine the number of hours in total spent by medical staff leaders and staff to review one application up to 6 times!
By creating a System Credentialing Committee, we will be able to simplify the application and re-application processes for physicians and APCs. We will have a larger and more robust span of expertise when working through new applicant files—and not duplicate the work multiple times across the organization. We can close the gap where a practitioner can be granted privileges at one site but not another. Increased diversity of information and expertise should drive even higher quality review of all applicants to join our medical staffs. Please know that Privileging will continue to be handled at each site given the differences in facility and staff resources, but we will continue to work to standardize privileges as much as possible.
A request has already been made to all medical staff presidents to seek out volunteers to assist in this work starting in January 2022. There will be a full day workshop on Bylaws where we will look at similarities and differences between our hospitals and compare best practices from Greeley. A draft document will be created from this conversation and the team will meet again in a month to review and finalize—with conversations and sharing in-between. Greeley will help with “Town Hall” meetings and medical staff conversations at individual hospital sites and we will ensure MECs are regularly updated. This process is repeated for the Rules and Regulations. The system credentialing work is fairly streamlined because so much of it is regulatory based.
This is an exciting time for acute care at ThedaCare! Creating these critical documents with a national expert will form the strong foundation needed to bring our hospitals into the future of population health. Please reach out to me if you have any questions on the projects described. If you are interested in volunteering, please reach out to your medical staff president.
Thank you all for everything you do to care for all of our patients and please stay safe.
Michael Hooker, DO
VP and Chief Medical Officer – Acute Care