CEO Message: February 2019

Dear Colleagues:

Happy New Year! I hope you had a rejuvenating holiday and end of the year with your family and friends.

This new year, we are embarking on several new initiatives. Doing our best to ensure the safety of our patients is a top priority for NEMG in FY19. This is not only a strategic priority, but it is essential to our commitment to being a high reliability organization.

Developing Ambulatory patient safety programs was one of the key feedbacks we got from our last employee engagement survey. The following four NEMG endeavors are currently in development to develop a set of structures and processes that aim to increase safety, communication and quality awareness among staff, physicians and administration in the ambulatory setting:

• Morning Escalation Safety Huddles
• Safety Committee
• Ambulatory Peer Review Committee
• Professionalism Committee

The Morning Escalation Safety Huddles (MESH) is a new program aimed to develop the framework for identifying potential or existing safety risks and create a reliable, situational awareness of patient safety issues across NEMG. This is a practice that will enable senior leaders to respond with more agility, celebrate great care and successes and better support all NEMG sites.

Identified safety events are reviewed and monitored by the NEMG Safety Committee. This committee strives to identify, implement and audit models of safety around evidence-based best practices. These models consider the goals of patients and employees and are grounded in a culture that promotes high reliability and accountability centered on learning, transparency and fairness.

To further support NEMG’s efforts around patient safety, we will be forming the NEMG Ambulatory Peer Review Committee. It will provide an organized approach to promote continuous improvement of the quality of health care provided in the ambulatory setting. This committee will offer NEMG medical staff the chance to lead conversations on best patient-oriented practices, assess the quality of clinical care and make recommendations under the legal protections of the Patient Safety Organization.

Finally, the NEMG Professionalism Committee will deliver a clearly defined peer-centered process for addressing professional behavior concerns.

Thank you all for your diligent work and dedication to providing our patients with the most exceptional experience possible. My very best wishes to all of you as we begin this year. Let us work together to create positive and meaningful change for our work lives as well as for the communities we serve.

Best wishes,

Prathibha Varkey, MBBS, MPH, MHPE, MBA President and Chief Executive Officer Northeast Medical Group