Carolyn Clancy visited the Kimberly clinic and Orthopedics Plus in addition to Radiation Oncology, and Collaborative Care at Appleton Medical Center. Read what she said and view videos.
The Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ) has been one of the big winners from a federal budget perspective. The budget has almost doubled by several hundred million dollars and a lot of those dollars will be spent researching "comparative effectiveness". So when the leader of AHRQ decided to visit ThedaCare the obvious question was why? Dr. Clancy made it clear she is very interested in understanding what high performing health organizations are doing and how others in the country could emulate them. Throughout her visit she continually asked how the ThedaCare Improvement System could be applied across many institutions nationally. She was very excited about the work in ambulatory care (she is an internist by training) and could easily see how the "new delivery model" which is ThedaCare's Medical Home initiative, could positively change medical care across the country.
It is clear we need to publish results on ThedaCare's lean redesign of patient care so that the principles and practices can be shared to influence industry change. Without committing any research funding, Dr. Clancy gave us the highest compliment when she said "I've got to bring my staff here to see this" implying even AHRQ can improve work processes. The last word we heard was "fantastic". However, I'm sure we haven't heard the last word yet, from Dr. Clancy or AHRQ and we look forward to more rigorous discussions. In fact the Center is principle investigator on a three million dollar grant that was recently submitted to AHRQ. Although the grant rules made it impossible for us to discuss this with Dr. Clancy, it is clear that studying the impact of the lean methodology in hospitals and clinics will be an important aspect of determining comparative effectiveness.
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