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WORLD- A Culture CLASS CARE of Visit stvin.org for the latest news about CHRISTUS St. Vincent. CHRISTUS St. Vincent's investment in a comprehensive plan to re- engineer its quality improvement strategy is paying off. Three years in, patient satisfaction is on the rise, and the data supporting numerous improvements that have been made is stacking up. Chief Medical Officer John Beeson, M.D., sees a very bright future ahead. Dr. Beeson, along with other CHRISTUS St. Vincent executives, has been hands-on in the planning and execution of a carefully devised strategy to create a culture that supports the pursuit of continuous improvement. "We've created a sophisticated infrastructure of people, technology and systems that allows us to accelerate advancements to care," Dr. Beeson says. "It gives us the ability to consistently follow a robust protocol of using scientifically collected data to analyze our performance and create high- reliability processes." IMPROVING PERFORMANCE A major component of this new infrastructure is the hospital's Clinician Directed Performance Improvement (CDPI) program. Launched in 2015, CDPI empowers physicians, nurses and other front-line providers to take the lead in making improvements to patient care, training them in the science of process improvement and ensuring they have the time needed to complete projects. "Few hospitals of this size have something like this in place," says CDPI Medical Director Lara Goitein, M.D. "It's a forward-thinking program that shows we are serious about the quality of care we provide. It gives the doctors and nurses who take care of patients every day the ability to change our systems for the better." ACHIEVING RESULTS The work of CDPI teams has contributed to positive outcomes throughout the hospital, including improvement in hand hygiene practices, a significant reduction in the rate of hospital-acquired infections, safer use of narcotics and other medications, improved pain management in labor, decreased use of unnecessary testing and treatment in babies with viral respiratory infections, and more mothers carrying babies to term. According to Goitein, 85 percent of the program's first round of improvement objectives were realized with statistically significant results — an impressive achievement in the realm of process improvement. SPURRING INNOVATION CDPI has also spurred the early adoption of innovative services and procedures, such as the use of nitrous oxide as a safe, noninvasive method to control labor pain, and the use of fecal transplants to treat severe, recurring digestive tract infections. Projects now underway include optimizing the treatment of sepsis, reducing the unnecessary use of antibiotics to prevent antimicrobial resistance, improving the quality of nighttime sleep for patients, advancing the management of neonatal abstinence syndrome and optimizing the timing of blood transfusion. "It is a very exciting time to be a part of CHRISTUS St. Vincent," Dr. Beeson says. "We're creating a culture of world-class care." ✚ Spring 2017 | st vin.org HEALTH ADVANCES 9