Reaching greater heights at Telluride

#TPSER8  A requirement of attendance at the Telluride Patient Safety Camp is that each resident must implement, lead and successfully complete a safety or quality improvement project at his or her institution over the next twelve months. Today, we started to hear from students as to the nature of their proposed projects.  Here are some summaries.  After each summary, I present a portion of the person's biographical statement to give you a sense of the breadth of experience at this conference and also the level of commitment represented by these residents:

Christopher Smith will design and implement an improved resident hand-off system to be integrated into the new EPIC electronic medical record system being installed in his hospital.  Chris is the current chief resident for Internal Medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) in Omaha, NE.  His burgeoning interest in patient safety stems from his experience designing a patient hand-off curriculum and his involvement with his program’s Clinical Quality Improvement Conference.  In the past year he also attended several quality and safety workshops through the Veterans’ Administration and worked through the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Open School courses.  Starting in the next academic year, he will join the UNMC faculty as an academic hospitalist.  His professional goals include developing a quality and patient safety curriculum at UNMC and expanding their simulation procedural training.

Sujata Sofat will introduce a curriculum for new residents focused on safety, to be delivered as part of their orientation. She notes, "My mentor, Dr. Stephen Evans, and I embarked on a project to create a curriculum for patient safety for the residents at our hospital. This in turn led to me finding a passion for quality improvement that I didn’t know I had. I joined the Center for Patient Safety and then became an active member of our House Staff Quality Council. I also volunteered to be a part of the AIAMC National Initiative Phase 3, and am working with others to combine our resident curriculum with a more comprehensive curriculum which will encompass medical students and attendings.  At Georgetown, Dr. Evans is known as 'Safety Steve,' and I’ve attained the nickname of 'Safety Su' for my heartfelt dedication to aiding him in his wholehearted efforts."

Jonathan Hatoun will conduct research on why residents are not reporting adverse events in his hospital and will then recommend changes in the reporting system to increase performance in this area.  His proposed project includes focus groups, surveys of senior residents, and contacts with program directors.  Jon grew up in the suburbs of Boston and is currently a resident in pediatrics at Boston Children's Hospital and Boston Medical Center and developed a strong interest in quality improvement and patient safety after being introduced to his residency's QI curriculum this year.  He notes, "Initially I started a project at Boston Medical Center to ensure that patient's who were admitted with asthma exacerbations were discharged with their medications in hand.  Through many iterations, we have developed a system that has increased the number of patients filling their scripts before discharge from around 10% to nearly 85% in less than a year."

Jon notes that he has gone full circle this week:  "During medical school I actually biked across the country - through Telluride - with my best friend as a fundraiser for the free, student-run clinic at Columbia." 

Jennifer Pinnick had a number of project ideas, an in-service education program about epidurals for nurses; a standard check-list for intern handoffs; and creating resident forums across hospitals in Chicago, like those held in in New York City.  Jennifer is an upcoming 3rd year anesthesia resident at the University of Illinois in Chicago.  She reports, "I got my undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky (GO CATS!). I also went to medical school at UK. There, I became a huge basketball fan and learned to wear hats to horse races. I also became interested in multiple aspects of patient safety. I had the opportunity as a fourth year medical student to do away rotations at 7 different hospitals. Some were huge university centers, others were very small hometown facilities. From east coast to west coast, these different experiences only further stirred my interest in improving safety for patients. "

Swing photos by Tim McDonald