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by Kevin M. Sanders
On Saturday, Sept. 11, at OU-COM’s
29th 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.”
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