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Ringing in the New Year

The New Year always brings new promises and resolutions: losing those unwanted pounds you put on over the holidays, exercising three times a week, seeing those friends that you have been missing. 

At EPMG, after surviving the snow and cold weather, we have been busy planning for 2014.
Our 2014 strategic plan focuses on two main areas. First, is being the best place to work for all our employees. Second, we want to provide compassionate care in a cost effective manner to all our patients.

I want to share some of the highlights from the new plan to give you an idea of the breadth of work that we are doing to help make us the best Emergency Medicine group and lead our specialty.

• Innovation Committee:   Innovation is one of our core values and although we do many innovative things at EPMG, we need to have a formal process for how we evaluate, fund, and then prioritize new ideas.
• CheckMedic:  We are partnering with a company that will provide a Credentials Verification Organization (CVO) option for our hospital clients and will streamline credentialing for our clinicians.
• Best Practice Guidelines:  We will reintroduce best practice guidelines in our new patient safety organization.
• Provider Coaching:   We have started a program that allows us to observe and coach our clinicians on their interpersonal communications.
• Telemedicine:  Partnering with our local EMS system, we will evaluate and treat patients in their home linked to an ED physician remotely. The goal is to avoid unnecessary transfers to the hospital.
• Companywide Dashboards:  We have a new focus on metrics companywide including patient satisfaction scores, core measures, LBEs, and LOS.
• ED Utilization:   We must do our part to help reduce costs and unnecessary testing. We plan to start with the five tests and procedures that ACEP has identified through the Choosing Wisely campaign.
• Wellness:   We will continue to expand our wellness program to reach all our clinicians in a meaningful way.
• Engagement Committee:  We plan to take an in depth look at the results from our 2013 Modern Healthcare survey and investigate the areas with opportunities to improve. These include compensation, benefits, and the workplace environment.

This is just a sample of the projects and work going on at EPMG headquarters. I encourage you to review all of the strategies and tactics within the 2014 strategic plan found on our EPMG info center, under the resource library.

There are many challenges ahead in healthcare, but it is a great time to be involved in helping to shape the future. In the emergency department we have a central role in how care is delivered and we are fortunate to have an outstanding group of physicians, physicians’ assistants, and nurse practitioners.

Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions or if you want get involved with any of our projects or work.

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