by Kevin M. Sanders

On Saturday, Sept. 11, at OU-COM’s 29^th Convocation Ceremony Roy Chew, Ph.D., president of nationally recognized Grandview/Southview hospitals and president of the Ohio Osteopathic Hospital Association, will receive a Phillips Medal of Public Service, the college’s highest honor. The medal is bestowed upon individuals who have demonstrated outstanding achievement in the areas of medicine, public administration or public policy leadership.

Under Chew’s leadership Grandview Medical Center has received several national awards, including the 2004 Distinguished Hospital Award for Clinical Excellence from HealthGrades; recognition as one of 40 teaching hospitals in the 100 Top Hospitals: Benchmarks for Success study from Solucient, the only osteopathic hospital receiving this honor; 50 Top Hospital designations in U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Hospitals” issue for two years in a row; and five-star ratings for excellence in the areas of pulmonary care, total knee replacement surgery, and back and neck surgery, also from HealthGrades. Chew has been president of Grandview, one of 12 Centers for Osteopathic Research and Education system hospitals, since 2000.

The honors that Grandview has earned have come through careful planning and a prolonged effort of continuous quality improvement, says Chew.

“You begin by identifying clinical quality as one of your top priorities. We did that starting about four or five years ago,” says Chew.

“We set out very deliberately and in a very focused manner to work on clinical quality improvement initiatives.

“We worked with our medical staff in the various specialty areas, along with our nursing staff and others, to benchmark ourselves against the external quality indicators out there, such as risk-adjusted mortality. We just kept working on process after process that would improve the quality of patient care in each specialty area.

“You have to break down each of the clinical processes into steps and look at each step. And what we’ve found is, as other organizations that focus on quality have, that eliminating unnecessary steps helps bring you closer to obtaining the quality outcome you’re seeking. You look at the value of each step that you’re taking and you do this for every single specialty. And then once we get agreement around those quality indicators and the processes, you strive for consistency. You want to make sure that you are consistently doing it the right way.

“The key to all this is really the medical staff. You’ve got to have medical staff leaders who are willing to devote the time to do this — and we had great, great leadership from our medical staff. They were willing to step up to the plate and say, ‘We have to concentrate on being the best that we can be in all these areas.’

“The members of the medical staff here are dedicated, and they are talking to each other all the time, much more so than at other hospitals I’ve seen. I believe that a lot of that has to do with the fact that we have common bond, which is osteopathic medicine.”

Grandview also is one of the top 15 community teaching hospitals, as opposed to academic teaching hospitals such as UCLA or Stanford.

“Medical education,” says Chew, “is really the foundation upon which this hospital stands and grows today. It’s absolutely vital to our future and our success. Our medical staff members are very passionate about medical education. They’re passionate about teaching. A lot of our medical staff are faculty members or have gone through some of our teaching programs.”

Chew says he believes that the concept of the CORE is unique in American graduate medical education. Although in its infancy, he says it is “definitely the right direction to go.”

The CORE system, he says, allows community teaching hospitals, such as Grandview, to link with major universities, such as Ohio University.

“I think that the combination of the two institutions achieves synergies that are certainly better than either one could achieve by itself,” he says. “It provides a good platform for dialogue at the educator level and the administrator level. And it keeps us on our toes innovation-wise. It is a unique collaborative effort.

“I think that being an osteopathic institution allows us to interact with our medical staff much more closely than a non-osteopathic hospital might. Our hospital and members of the medical staff are involved with the American Osteopathic Association and Ohio Osteopathic Association and find themselves at the same table at the same time in many ventures.

“That really does help us with our communication, because we are so tightly linked with each other. Communication, I have found, is one of the great keys to obtaining great clinical outcomes.”