Baruch Fertel, MD, vice president of quality and patient safety at NewYork-Presbyterian in New York City, is eager for the new year. He spoke with Becker's about what's ahead for the hospital system this year.
Note: This conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Question: What are you most excited for in 2024?
Dr. Baruch Fertel: It's a new year, and new resets. It gives you the opportunity to build on what you've accomplished in the year before and have a fresh start. I lead quality and safety for NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, and the new year is an opportunity for a reset of our annual metrics, and it's refreshing. People like to build. They like to have a fresh start. It is an exciting time when everybody comes in energized and enthused after the holidays and ready to hit the ground running.
Q: When you're thinking about last year, what are the biggest highlights of last year and what's a challenge from last year that you're hoping to tackle this year?
BF: Last year we spent a lot of focus on aligning our quality structure across the health system. We're a matrixed organization, so we have a model where there is a mix of local ownership with central oversight. So our various campuses own their quality area, own their data, and we work to standardize at the system level. This year we would like to spend more time on proactive quality. We will look for those opportunities to deliver better care to our patients and to make sure that we're achieving the most superior outcomes.
Q: What kind of strategies are you thinking of employing and what will they look like?
BF: We will use a combination of benchmarked data and our event reporting system to identify those areas where we have opportunity. If we're seeing signals in the data that something's not going in the right direction, how can we intervene sooner? Or if we look at our safety data and we see that we have a couple of near misses in an area that tells us that something may not be right, it allows us to come back and do a deeper dive and see if we have to refine some of our processes and prevent harm.
Q: What have been some of the biggest obstacles when it comes to quality and patient safety at NewYork-Presbyterian?
BF: Emergency department boarding is an opportunity as well as timely access to care. Those are all areas that our leadership is intensely focused on. We are looking to optimize these processes.
Q: What other health care trends have you been following?
BF: Employees should connect with the mission, feel valued and do things that are meaningful. Engagement is key because if we have engaged staff that feel connected to the mission, they're going to give it their all. Patients want to receive the amazing patient centered high-quality care we offer. It starts with having staff and a team that really feels engaged, motivated and part of what we're doing and the leadership that models the way.
Q: As a healthcare leader, what engages you, what gets you out of bed?
BF: The ability to make a difference for patients. We are all patients. Every one of us or our family, at one point in life will be a patient. The work that we do is meaningful. We can improve people's lives. We can help make them better. We can allow them to get to the next occasion that they want to experience, enjoy a few more years and have a better quality of life. We can develop evidenced based pathways that deliver superior outcomes. We can bring our world class care to every patient we touch. That opportunity on a broad scale is priceless.
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