But quality improvement is in his blood, and he can see himself returning to it someday, Dr. McIlraith said.
“For me it was never about rising up in the ranks of leadership. It was really about making the world I exist in better,” he said.
In recounting some of the lessons he learned over the last 17 years, Dr. McIlraith recalled his first and all-time favorite quality initiative: Central Coordination. It was a concept he implemented around 2002 at Kaiser Permanante that fundamentally changed the way patients were admitted from the emergency department.
The previous system had separate admitting and rounding physicians, which lead to too many patient hand-offs, increased risk of mistakes, poor efficiency, and low patient satisfaction, he said.
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