Simone Rauscher, Ph.D., Associate Professor in Department of Health Systems Administration, also attended the June meeting of AcademyHealth in Seattle, WA, and presented a paper, Financial Assessment and Investments in the Public Health System. Her paper, Assessing the Quality of Self-Reported Community Benefit Expenditures: Evidence from Not-for-Profit Hospitals in California, was co-authored with Mark Vyzas, a graduate student in the Master of Science Program in Health Systems Administration. Rauscher also presented a poster entitled Non-Operating Revenue and Hospital Financial Performance: Can Hospitals Rely on Income From Non-Patient-Care Activities to Offset Losses on Patient Care?
Four faculty members (Dr. Robert Friedland, Prof. John Gilmore, Dr. Bernie Horak, and Dr. Jason Ormsby) and six MHSA graduate students (Alexandra Blake, Elliott Brown, Gabrielle Brown, James Cervantes, Charles Cornell, and Claire Demarco) received their Green Belt certification in Lean Six Sigma on July 22, 2011. Others receiving certificates included members of the administrative and nursing staffs at Georgetown University Hospital and Shady Grove Adventist Hospital. The eight-week program was sponsored by the Department of Health Systems Administration at Georgetown University. As part of the training, the participants were teamed together to lead a Lean Six Sigma project at one of the hospitals. The project areas were discharge planning, provider hand-off communications, deep vein thrombosis, urinary catheter infections, central line blood-stream infections, and patient throughput. Students will continue in the Fall semester as project managers to follow-up on their projects. Faculty will serve as advisers to the current and future Lean Six Sigma teams.
Dr. Bernard Horak, Professor in the Department of Health Systems Administration and Program Director for the MHSA Program, presented a poster, Student and Resident Initiatives in Quality Improvement (QI) with Dr. Eileen S. Moore (Assistant Dean for Community Education and Advocacy, Georgetown University School of Medicine) and Ms. Jamie S. Padmore (Vice President, Academic Affairs, Medstar Health) at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) in Chicago on June 9th. The poster described approaches that Georgetown and Medstar Health have taken to provide QI training and experiences to residents and students in the health professions (e.g., health systems administration, medicine, and nursing), including the QI projects in which health systems students serve as project managers for Lean Six Sigma teams that address quality and safety issues at Georgetown University Hospital.
Professor Michael Stoto has been working lately on two national projects involving population health. He is part of a National Quality Forum's steering committee working on development of measures for population health. Professor Stoto also recently served as part of the faculty for a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) training program. Motivated by new IRS requirements for not-for-profit hospitals to prepare community health needs assessments as part of the community benefits they provide, this program is training and placing population health experts in communities to enhance collaboration between health care organizations and public health.