Christopher Kim, MD, MBA, SFHM
Title: Clinical associate professor of internal medicine and assistant professor of pediatrics, University of Michigan Health System, Ann Arbor
Program: Project BOOST; Michigan Transitions of Care Collaborative (M-TC2)
Background: Dr. Kim brings clinical, quality improvement, leadership, collaborative learning, and discussion facilitation skills to his work as program director of M-TC2 and as mentor to the sites he works with.
The collaborative is part of a set of state collaborative quality initiatives funded by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. One of those initiatives is focused on improving care transitions between the hospital setting and ambulatory care providers, using Project BOOST tools—expanded to integrate more closely with primary care providers, physician organizations, and ambulatory care. The eight Michigan-based mentors for M-TC2 have all attended SHM’s Mentor University.
Teachable moment: There are local challenges and there are general challenges—those that are commonly shared by most hospitals, Dr. Kim explains. Both need to be overcome when working on an improvement project such as transitions of care. The local hospitalist brings expertise about the former—which are often more difficult to understand and overcome. The mentor brings knowledge and experience of the universal challenges, as well as the benefit of having seen or heard about what other programs have done. Together, they can work to help the organization become better equipped to improve the initiative at hand.
Success story: “One hospital in the collaborative realized that it could roll out the Teach Back concept to both nurses and physicians,” he says. They started to teach residents how to interact with patients and began using this approach in physician-nurse teams. Subsequently, the team shared with the collaborative how physicians have embraced the concept.
Lessons learned: Every site has its successes and challenges, he says. Sharing both sides of the story can only advance the mission of the collaborative, as each organization learns from the successes and failures of the others.
Mentored implementation really does what it’s intended to do—helping to support the sites and keeping an organization on track and accountable for the work it does, because someone external to the organization is working with it and providing information about what other sites are doing.
Advice: Talk with different disciplines and find out how much they long to work with other care providers, and then have discussions about how to make interdisciplinary practice happen. “At our collaborative meetings over time, many of the 24 participating sites have shared their progress—the good things and the struggles,” Dr. Kim says.
Larry Beresford is a freelance writer in Alameda, Calif.