UT Southwestern’s Plan for Transforming Patient Care

In a relatively short period, UT Southwestern has achieved world-class status in research, education, physician expertise and technology but has only begun to fully emphasize and develop its clinical services for those who need advanced medical care.

While annual patient visits to the medical center’s clinics have increased dramatically from only 50,000 annually 15 years ago to more than 400,000 today, resources and infrastructure to serve that growth have lagged. Meanwhile, a technology explosion, nationwide management restrictions intended to curb rising costs and other factors have made it more difficult than ever for health-care consumers to make informed decisions and readily access the help they need.

What once was a simple visit to the doctor can become a bewildering, bureaucratic experience, where the needs and feelings of patients are secondary to the function of “the health-care system.” Yet physicians and patients alike recognize that patient-friendly care often contributes to successful medical outcomes.

UT Southwestern has adopted a plan to achieve an exemplary level of care for all patients by radically reshaping the means by which its tremendous medical expertise is dispensed to patients. The Clinical Services Initiative will enable UT Southwestern not only to transform its own system, but to lead the way in remolding American medicine so health care can once again be centered on the patient. This involves a comprehensive re-examination and re-design of organizational structure, management procedures, technology application and institutional culture, which impact the experience of patients in UT Southwestern’s clinics and affiliated hospitals.

These are among the steps included in this plan:

• Developing a more patient-centered culture, in which the status and priority of clinical care is elevated to the same level as UT Southwestern’s world-class research and teaching.
• Improved, more patient-friendly telephone system.
• Comprehensive Web-based electronic medical records, more efficiently and reliably accessible to physicians and patients, wherever and whenever needed, while ensuring confidentiality.
• Quick-response, institution-wide appointment scheduling system.
• Reorganizing and redefining the human resources function, staffing and staff training to enhance customer service at the staff-patient interface.
• Performance measures, recognition and incentives more directly aligned with patient satisfaction.
• Placing Zale Lipshy and St. Paul University Hospitals, the James W. Aston Ambulatory Care Center, and the faculty clinical practice under a single, patient-focused management structure.

Establishing within large medical departments smaller “firms” of physicians primarily concerned with a defined clinical practice.
New approaches to case management to help patients navigate seamlessly through a complex system.

More directly linking UT Southwestern’s clinical research to patient care, including more and easier patient participation in cutting-edge clinical trials and introduction of the latest diagnostic imaging technologies.

A detailed plan to achieve the Clinical Services Initiative’s goal of patient-centered care was finalized in 2002, after extensive internal evaluation, consultation with experts from other leading American medical centers, site visits to other top clinics where both strengths and weaknesses were examined, and advice from a visiting panel of experts from around the country. The initial phases of this plan, enthusiastically embraced by UT Southwestern’s physicians and a broad cross section of community leaders and donors, are already being implemented. In addition to significant UT Southwestern resources already being dedicated to this revolutionary project, $100 million in private philanthropy, as part of the medical center’s Innovations in Medicine capital campaign, will also be needed over the next several years to make it a reality.

With the implementation of the Clinical Services Initiative, UT Southwestern will be able to serve its patients not only with the latest in medical science, but also with the most caring personal attention, enabling UT Southwestern Medical Center and the North Texas region to become a uniquely attractive international medical destination.