Department of Family Medicine (DFM) clinicians recently received a well-deserved shout out from the President and CEO of UCHealth.

The message was simple, concise, and celebratory.

DFM’s family medicine clinicians are knocking it out of the park when it comes to quality patient care both in our clinics and in our in-patient service in the hospital.

Our quality metrics are looking great! They include things like:

• A measure of how well patients do after being admitted to the hospital
• A measure of the quality of care for patients discharged from the hospital 
• A measure of how quickly patients can be seen in clinic from the time they call for an appointment
• A measure of new patients added to our clinic rosters
• And, a measure of patient experience where more patients said yes to questions like this: “Did the provider listen carefully to you?”

Our family medicine team shines on each and every one of these metrics.

Dr. Brian Bacak, Vice Chair for Clinical Affairs and Quality:

“The recognition by our system CEO is a tribute to our clinical leaders and providers at each of our clinics. They work really hard every day to enhance the patient experience and open up opportunities for care. Being either a  primary care physician or Advanced Practice Provider is really tough these days --- patients are more complicated than even 3 years ago. They have endured the COVID-19 pandemic, a changing healthcare landscape, and an increasing volume of messages and paperwork, all while maintaining a spirit of caring and goal to do the right thing for their patients. 

We scored very well in the category of patient experience, “Did the provider listen carefully to you ?” I think that is particularly meaningful as throughout everything that has gone on, our providers have maintained their caring, individual relationships with patients, which is a hallmark of Family Medicine. It brings to mind one of my more recent favorite quotes about empathy, from the Fredrik Bachman novel, “Us Against You” . He writes, “It’s hard to care about people. Exhausting, in fact, because empathy is a complicated thing. It requires us to accept that everyone else’s lives are also going on the whole time. We have no pause button for when everything gets too much for us to deal with, but then neither does anyone else.” 

Our caring for others means so much, and our clinicians do that so well. “

Dr. Aimee English, Assistant Vice Chair of Clinical Affairs:

“I think FM's top notch performance in inpatient mortality and readmissions (both >90th percentile of the Vizient benchmark. Vizient compares us to other academic health centers) is a demonstration of the impact of team-based care, continuity, whole person-thinking and process improvement. The inpatient family medicine service, fueled by the engagement of amazing residents and led by Katy Boyd, has historically been committed to reiterative process improvement. They are always striving for better and co-recreate operating principles each year. We take care of really complicated patients in the hospital, and then we wrap our teams around them in the clinics from the transitions of care calls to the BH or SW support to the pharm recs and beyond. While on service or at graduation each year, I get to hear stories of our residents going above and beyond for our patients during a time of need -- getting a wheelchair from the hotel they left it in, bringing them an outside meal on their birthday, or coordinating with pharmacy teams to get them low or no cost meds when cost is a barrier. We should all be proud.”

Congratulations DFM clinicians for the AMAZING work that you do every single day!