By Robyn Marlow
Sometimes you talk. Sometimes you listen.
We think both are very important to providing the best quality care. We listen to our patients and depend on them to tell us how they are feeling – long beyond the time they walk out our doors. We also talk with them, and explain how we can help them be healthy.
We think this is a key part of what makes North Sunflower Medical Center different. We also know it is important that everyone in our community know all we do to help keep Ruleville – and people throughout the Delta – stay healthy and active. After all, North Sunflower is your hospital too.
Recently we told you about the new efforts we are taking to better understand our patients’ experiences when they come to us for treatment. We are also working hard to tell the North Sunflower story to everyone who will listen. And that effort getting noticed.
Last week, North Sunflower Medical Center was awarded five Aster Awards – including two Gold and two Silver awards – for excellence in healthcare marketing and advertising.
http://www.asterawards.com/winners
Our partners at Whitfield Media helped us bring home the Aster Awards for our sleep center commercial, diabetes telehealth network health fair flyer, and our “Oops” family commercial series.
North Sunflower Medical Center also received Aster Awards for work done by Manning Signs, Inc. for our medical equipment van design, and Mediagin for the medical center pharmacy website.
CHECK OUT OUR NATIONAL AWARD WINNING ADS HERE.
Of course, getting national recognition for hard work is nothing new for us, but it’s another example of how we’re proud that every member of our North Sunflower family strives to be the absolute best at everything we do.
A message from our CEO, Sam Miller:
"Simple things shouldn’t be so complicated.
Every one of us at North Sunflower Medical Center want to provide the best possible care around. To do that, we need to be constantly asking our patients how they feel about the job we do. Nearly every organization – from a local restaurant, to Amazon, to Walmart – have all forms of complex customer service surveys to see how they can better serve their customers. In fact, even the IRS sends “satisfaction” surveys to people they have recently audited. But federal law prohibits hospitals from reaching out patients after a visit to ask, “How’d we do?”
There are lots of good reasons for this, most importantly your right to keep conversations with your doctor private. But to reach our goal of continuous improvement, we needed to know where we did a good job, and where we need to do better. So this year, we started a partnership with J.L. Morgan & Associates to find a new solution that helps monitor and track patient experiences.
It’s all entirely voluntary and anonymous. They call to ask a few questions, and then report back the total numbers to us. Because they are entirely separate from North Sunflower Medical Center, they are allowed to ask you things we cannot. Questions like, “Did you doctor clearly explain your treatment options?” Or, “Was your room clean?”
We now get patient satisfaction reports every three months. This has allowed us to change the way we care for you. For example, we saw in the report last December that about 70% of patients said they “Always” received help as soon as they asked for it. This number was above the national average for hospitals, but we felt we could do better.
We shared these patient satisfaction numbers with our exceptional team of committed healthcare professionals, and asked them to come up with a plan to cut response times on all patient requests. We also wanted to better explain how we care for patients each step of the way – so no one would ever feel like their requests weren’t our first priority.
It’s working. In three months, the number of North Sunflower Medical Center patients who said they “Always” received help as soon as they asked for it went up 17 percent (from 70% to almost 87%). That’s better than 90% of all hospitals in the country, but still not where we want it to be. And by asking you where we can do better, we know we are going provide you and your family with even higher quality care.
We are proud that North Sunflower Medical Center is above the national average in 10 of the 11 patient satisfaction categories we track. We are especially proud that almost 90% of our patients report that our nurses “Always” communicate well, and that almost 95% say our doctors do too.
In the coming weeks, we are going to be working on making sure we understand when our patients are in any form of pain, and what we are doing to help manage their discomfort. And we are making sure patients know all they need to do to speed their recovery at home, after they leave our care.
Providing exceptional care is the most important way North Sunflower Medical Center serves this community. We do that by investing in the latest technology, hiring the most talented people, and taking care of the basics. Simply listening to your feedback, and hearing your honest answers aren’t the most high tech things we do around here. But working to be better doesn’t always have to be so complicated."
Dear Section Members:
Happy Spring to all. As I wrote this, Colorado was bracing for the 2nd spring blizzard of 2016 – no kidding! Since our last newsletter, I had the privilege of attending CSM 2016 in Anaheim, CA. For those of you who were able to attend CSM 2016, I’m sure you will agree that the conference was another smashing success thanks to the outstanding work of our education committee. At CSM 2016, we hosted a new informal event as a way to engage CVP Section members – we called the event a “Coffee Meet and Greet” - and I think it was another of CSM’s “smashing successes”. We hope to continue with this event in the future.
If you attended the CVP Section Business Meeting, you would have heard that the CVP Section Board of Directors is in the process of revising the CVP Section Strategic Plan which will guide our activities over the next 3 to 5 years. We also created and debated new Mission and Vision Statements, as well as an update to our Organizational Values. In this newsletter, I would like to introduce the new Cardiovascular & Pulmonary Section Mission Statement: “Optimizing human movement and health by advancing cardiovascular and pulmonary physical therapist practice, education and research excellence.”
A mission statement communicates the purpose of an organization by concisely outlining the goals and objectives of that organization. I believe we have captured the ambitions of the CVP Section in this statement – we will promote excellence in practice, education and research for all physical therapists and physical therapist assistants which will positively impact all of our stakeholders – from our patients to our referral sources to APTA to our legislatures to our section members.
In future newsletters, you will hear more about the strategic plan. I value your comments. As always, I encourage you to feel free to contact me if you have any questions, concerns or if you would just like to chat.
Cheers,
Daniel Malone PT, PhD, CCS President
North Sunflower Medical Center is an ‘Economic Powerhouse,’ for Ruleville. That's according to the Delta Business Journal, which did a sizable write up on our beloved town in their April edition. The Delta Business Journal also mentioned the 5,000 square foot expansion of our state-of-the-art clinic. It is the new home of two doctors just joining the North Sunflower family. The story also talked a lot about the sense of strong community involvement here in Ruleville, something we all take pride in. The DBJ quoted Becky Tollison: "Our little town is really special. The hospital has just blossomed. The hospital keeps this little town going, but also [Ruleville’s] leaders.”
Carmen Cooper-Oguz
Monday, March 21, 2016
In the fall of 2015, I was selected for an international volunteer assignment in St. Lucia, an island in the Caribbean. I was approved for the assignment due to my dual credentials as a physical therapist and a wound care specialist.
NSMC Board of Trustees has re-scheduled their Regular Board Meeting for the month of March. The Board will meet in the Hospital Board Room at 11:30 A.M. on Tuesday, March 22, 2016.BOARD_RESCHEDULE
North Sunflower nurses learn to think outside the box
Written by Anne Preus
Brenda Deaton and Mary Helen Wasson incorporate creative thinking strategies in the Leadership Training for Nurses on Friday. The day's activities encouraged participants to think outside the box as North Sunflower Medical Center's nurse management staff completed this professional development component.
By BECKY GILLETTE
The University of Mississippi Medical Center’s Center for Telehealth and Intel-GE Care Innovations has had such success providing the Diabetes Health Telehealth Network that it is being expanded to serve those with other chronic diseases and those underserved across the Southeast.
A two-year-old diabetes program launched by the University of Mississippi Medical Center is expanding to other states and populations.
By Eric Wicklund on
The success of Mississippi’s telehealth-based diabetes program is prompting its parent health system to expand to other states – and other chronic disease groups.
The Diabetes Telehealth Network, a statewide remote care management program launched in 2014 by the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s Center for Telehealth, saved roughly $400,000, reduced A1C levels by 1.7 percent and saw no ER visits or hospitalizations among the 100 residents involved in the initial six-month pilot.
The program is now being expanded throughout the Southeast and will target COPD, heart failure, hypertension, and asthma as well as diabetes. In addition, UMMC has signed a five-year extension with Intel-GE Care Innovations, its partner in the Diabetes Telehealth Network, to help facilitate the expansion.
UMMC officials said they started with a known need – some 13 percent of Mississippi’s adults are living with diabetes and many face barriers to accessing quality care in a state that’s one of the poorest and most rural in the nation. They set realistic goals and produced measurable results, and now want to connect with 1,000 patients a month throughout the region by the end of the year.
“Half the state of Mississippi suffers from two or more chronic conditions, and we see so many of these patients come through our facilities on a daily basis,” Kevin Cook, CEO of UMMC’s University Hospitals and Health System, said in a November 2015 press release.. “We knew we needed to find a way to help these folks take control of their own health. By extending this program, we expect to save $189 million in Medicaid each year just with the diabetic population.”
“After seeing the success derived through our diabetes program with Care Innovations and the improvement in the quality of life it provided for those enrolled, we are ready to extend the benefits to other chronically ill populations and healthcare organizations who share our vision of a healthcare system that extends into the home,” he added.
To scale up the program, UMMC officials said they’re investing in new technology and hiring more staff, and will even add a new facility.
“We are offering this service not only to patients in Mississippi but outside of the state as well. We want the success of this program to impact as many lives as possible,” says Michael Adcock, FACHE, the administrator of UMMC’s Center for Telehealth. “To prepare for this, we have acquired new technology and employed additional staff to address our current needs and anticipated expansion. We are also planning for a new building to accommodate the growing needs for telehealth.”
The program is a feather in the cap for Intel-GE Care Innovations, a collaboration launched in 2011 to support the movement toward remote care management. Sean Slovenski, the company’s outgoing CEO, sees UMMC as a model for other providers around the country.
“You have to get one thing right before you go on, and with (UMMC) this is what we hoped would be the result,” he said. “The whole diabetes space is littered with apps and platforms that have come and gone, so it was a matter of finding something that worked, and then building on that success. Once you have that focus, you can add slices to the pie.”
Adcock said the remote monitoring platform includes a tablet assigned to the patient, enabling him or her to connect with and upload data from a variety of home-based devices, and equipped with a video conferencing link to care managers at UMMC. Center for Telehealth staff collect data from the patient every day and use that information to create a personalized care plan.
The Diabetes Telehealth Network – dubbed the first of its kind in the nation – also caught the attention of Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, who checked out the program at North Sunflower Medical Center late last year. The program’s success, he said, has helped the state in seeking federal support to extend broadband services to some of the state’s more remote communities.’
“This innovative partnership has gained the attention of the Federal Communications Commission as we are connecting patients in the rural town of Ruleville to a care management program they otherwise would not have access to in their town,” he told the Mississippi Business Journal last month.
Randy Swanson, Intel-GE Care Innovations’ new CEO, says the project hasn’t been without challenges. A care platform has to be versatile enough to adapt to each health system, he says, primarily because so many hospitals either don’t have the technology or are operating on legacy systems that can’t fully support the move to remote care.
Today’s technology platforms, he says, should be 10 percent standardized and 90 percent customized. Sadly, that isn’t the case with many EMR platforms.
“The EMR isn’t going to be the right place to load all that information,” he says.
http://mhealthintelligence.com/news/mississippi-scales-up-its-telehealth-network
A message from our CEO, 
We shared these patient satisfaction numbers with our exceptional team of committed healthcare professionals, and asked them to come up with a plan to cut response times on all patient requests. We also wanted to better explain how we care for patients each step of the way – so no one would ever feel like their requests weren’t our first priority.
It’s working. In three months, the number of North Sunflower Medical Center patients who said they “Always” received help as soon as they asked for it went up 17 percent (from 70% to almost 87%). That’s better than 90% of all hospitals in the country, but still not where we want it to be. And by asking you where we can do better, we know we are going provide you and your family with even higher quality care.
We are proud that North Sunflower Medical Center is above the national average in 10 of the 11 patient satisfaction categories we track. We are especially proud that almost 90% of our patients report that our nurses “Always” communicate well, and that almost 95% say our doctors do too.
In the coming weeks, we are going to be working on making sure we understand when our patients are in any form of pain, and what we are doing to help manage their discomfort. And we are making sure patients know all they need to do to speed their recovery at home, after they leave our care.
Providing exceptional care is the most important way North Sunflower Medical Center serves this community. We do that by investing in the latest technology, hiring the most talented people, and taking care of the basics. Simply listening to your feedback, and hearing your honest answers aren’t the most high tech things we do around here. But working to be better doesn’t always have to be so complicated."
