In this new “Safety Speaks” conversation, Harry S. Smith, board chair of Valley Health System and member of the AHA Committee on Governance, discusses how their organization rearranged its governance system to ensure that quality and patient safety standards were being met across the board.

To learn more and sign up for the Patient Safety Initiative please visit https://www.aha.org/aha-patient-safety-initiative

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Tom Haederle

E pluribus unum that's Latin for out of many. One is the traditional motto of the United States and printed on the dollar bill. Out of many, one is also the goal for independent hospitals in their boards who merge into larger health systems and may face the challenge of maintaining safety and quality standards that are no longer just their own.

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Tom Haederle

Welcome to Advancing Health, a podcast from the American Hospital Association. I'm Tom Haederle with AHA communications. Valley Health System serves a sizable patient population in Virginia. It was formerly six separate hospitals, all of which were governed independently by their boards. In this Safety Speak series podcast hosted by Sue Ellen Wagner, Vice President of Trustee Engagement and Strategy with edge, we hear how Valley Health System rearranged its governance system to overcome the hiccups of its growing pains and ensure that patient safety standards were kept up across the board.

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Sue Ellen Wagner

Thank you Tom. Joining me for this podcast is Harry Smith, board chair of Valley Health System in Virginia, a member of the committee on Governance. Welcome, Harry, and thank you for joining me.

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Harry S. Smith

Thank you, Sue Ellen. Happy to be here.

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Sue Ellen Wagner

Great to have you. So can you tell us a high level overview of your health system?

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Harry S. Smith

Be happy to Valley Health System. And I've been involved with it and its largest subsidiary, Winchester Medical Center for 22 years. In two more years, I will retire. I will have termed out of Valley Health, and as a career banker, I have found health care to be. As a friend of mine at segue one time. You're performing God's mission, and I don't know of any organization in the world that does what hospitals and health care systems do to care for our population.

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Harry S. Smith

So when I first started this journey 20 some years ago, I was on the Winchester Medical Center board, which is about 83% of the economic engine, the patient base of our system. We had five other hospitals. We did have a system, Valley Health System. We serve nine counties and a city in the northern part of Virginia. And some people will know it as the panhandle of West Virginia.

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Harry S. Smith

So in addition to Virginia laws, rules and regulations, we also deal with West Virginia. So Valley Health System started back in the late 90s as starting to pull together a loose confederation of like minded small hospitals to become a regional hospital. Over the years, 2 or 3 that we thought might come into that system actually sold to a for profit system, and that was their decision.

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Harry S. Smith

So we ended up with the Winchester Medical Center, which is level two trauma to critical access hospitals and then three rural hospitals. It's been fun looking at this growth of this eclectic system of several different types of delivery in two different states. We realized early on, though, that we were somewhat disconnected, even though we had this holding company called Valley Health, we still had its board in six different hospital boards.

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Harry S. Smith

And principally they were responsible for their hospital, their operations. They had their own president for the most part. They did some of their financial and some of their accounting, but a lot of that was at the system level. But they were really principally responsible for quality. And so I became more involved and then was on the hospital board at Winchester Medical Center and the Health System Board, I started realizing how complex this was.

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Harry S. Smith

It should be more efficient, and we should be able to provide even better quality for our community. And how could we do that? And first is ask questions. One of the first questions I asked of our CEO was how many quality meetings? How many board meetings do you go to in a month? And it was astounding because remember, we had a quality hospital board meeting for each one of those, plus the system, and he was attending all of those, and each one was handling quality at a high level, but with its own standards.

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Harry S. Smith

You can't take six hospitals that used to be independent and overnight, put them all under one system and say to their executive team and to their board, you are no longer independent. So that took a process of moving more functions to the system, which we started really with finance and then audit. They then were principally quality. Then it was we've got to standardize quality.

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Harry S. Smith

So Valley Health System hired its chief quality medical officer to system level. That then started working with the individual hospital presidents and their vice presidents of medical affairs to begin that process. As it started, we still were meeting a lot and I'm not sure really moving the needle as positively as we wanted with quality. So we then visited several systems, worked with consultants on how do we do this better?

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Harry S. Smith

And what we came up with. What we did was Valley Health System then became the sole member of all of these separate hospitals. So we then evolved into one board, Valley Health System, which is the sole member of the six hospitals with one board. So early when they were independent hospitals, you had a lot of attention to quality, because that's pretty much what they did.

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Harry S. Smith

Now it's one big board, not in each community, even though there's some community representation. How is it going to handle quality in a community that might be 70 miles away? That brought through the standardization process? And we did that at the Valley health level, kind of just doing what we used to do. But now instead of 6 or 7 boards, it's one still wasn't working as well or as efficient as we thought.

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Harry S. Smith

We then decided to form what we call comeback. It's the Quality Medical Affairs Committee, which has the full authority of the board. The System board meets six times a year. Credentialing occurs more than six times a year. And we said the hospitals have to exist for credentialing. You just can't disband a hospital. It has to have a board.

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Harry S. Smith

Well, its board is the Valley Health Board because it is a sole member owned hospital. So representatives then of each hospital, their vice presidents of medical affairs, their lead administrator, their chief nursing officers, key physicians serve on the Mac Quality Medical Affairs Committee, which has the full authority of the board. And it meets monthly, and it has full authority to do credentialing to review all quality indices, KPIs and we then at the Valley Health Board, when we meet that six times a year, will open.

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Harry S. Smith

Our meeting will have a consent agenda. And let me go back, if I might, because in one of this morning's presentations talked about the board's priorities as days and days and years and years ago, it may well have been finance. I think we all understand our number one priority is quality, and we have taken a lot of the normal duties and responsibilities.

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Harry S. Smith

Even the monthly financial report and the quarterly. And that's in a consent agenda now. So we don't have a long formal presentation on finance. So we save our time and our time is saved really at reviewing quality, educating the board on quality, but also taking time to educate. Our last meeting, we talked a lot about artificial intelligence and its impact on systems and quality and physicians.

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Harry S. Smith

And don't be afraid of it because it's just a tool. You still will have humans making those decisions. So I then chair the board. We'll go through the consent agenda of those items that used to take an hour or more. We then open the sole member meetings, and that's where the quality report flows up to our system. The chair of our quality committee and the chief medical officer for the system will make that presentation.

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Harry S. Smith

And all this information is in our board package, and we have what we call an S bar. You'll see the report. But then if you want literally the other 200 pages to go with that report, you can pull that up. That committee is populated, as I mentioned from, all of our hospitals are critical care. Our clinical administrators, our physicians assistants, nurse practitioners, chief nursing officers.

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Harry S. Smith

So it's very well represented. And that's where the deep dive occurs. That's where the sausage is made. We at the system level, who aren't on that committee have to have a very high level of trust, which we do and have given that committee, again, full authority to act on the board for our quality initiatives, including credentialing. So I know I'm rambling, but just to give you an idea of what this committee does and then how we review it.

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Harry S. Smith

So our comfort committee reviews credentials. Our staff executive committee, which some would call their medical executive committee minutes and reviews that are performance improvement committee harm scorecard quality scores, patient experience scores. They'll have special reports. They'll hear from our VHA, MG, which is our Valley Health medical group. That's the employed physicians. We have our entity presidents. There will have information that comes at a little bit of recruiting is epic working as we would sentinel events, serious safety events.

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Harry S. Smith

Again, this is for all six hospitals coming to one group. As I mentioned credentialing, we have advanced practice providers involved in that. We hear a report from each department cardiology, emergency medicine, family, etc. review in depth the Performance Improvement Committee which again includes harm patient experience, the annual quality plan which they review first recommend to the board. The board will review it, discuss it.

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Harry S. Smith

At times we tweak it. That will become the annual plan of quality for our system. They look at falls, wrong site surgeries, lab issues, patient access, wound care. All of this happens on a monthly basis. You couldn't expect a board of 14 to 16 to really have that depth and level of knowledge to review every month, the thousands of hours that go into the details, to come to that committee on a monthly basis, which typically meets for two to 2.5 hours.

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Harry S. Smith

So they have figured out how to get this information. And what underlies that information is a tremendous amount of detail.

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Chris DeRienzo, M.D.

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Safety Speaks, the podcast series dedicated to patient safety, brought to you by the American Hospital Association. I'm Dr. Chris DeRienzo, the AHA’s chief physician executive and a champion of the AHA Patient Safety Initiative. AHA’s Patient Safety Initiative is a collaborative, data driven effort that lifts up the voices of individual hospitals and health systems into the national patient safety conversation.

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Chris DeRienzo, M.D.

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Chris DeRienzo, M.D.

Remember, together, we can make health care safer for everyone.

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Sue Ellen Wagner

So that q-mac is a way to keep quality at that local community hospital level, and then weave it right up to the top to the system.

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Harry S. Smith

Absolutely. I'm not sure I'll say it's our challenge, but our opportunity now and this has been a ten year endeavor. But q-mac really in the last four years has come of its own to where the data, the conversation, the presentation, that's all very, very good. We still have some pockets though, where we could have better standardization of delivery of quality throughout our various entities, including our employed physicians.

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Harry S. Smith

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Harry S. Smith

And that's not easy to do. But if that is your goal, if that is your mission, if you know that you want to do everything right. If you don't, you correct it, you learn from it, and then you have to have those standards across the system that everybody is operating in the same manner. And that's where we're finding still a little bit of some variables.

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Harry S. Smith

The last thing they look at, and the most important thing that comes back presents to our board then would be our dashboard, our KPIs. This is approved. Our quality plan annually originates from this committee representing all of those constituents I mentioned earlier. Comes up to the board and is presented twice. Once. Okay, here's what we think. You all chew on this for a month or two.

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Harry S. Smith

We're going to come back and then receive formal board approval for our quality plan. In the last three years, the board has made a few tweaks. They never have just blindly accepted the Mac report and quality plan. An example would be the mortality index. We were doing really, really very well on that because we were doing so well.

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Harry S. Smith

Cue Mac folks in executive management recommended, because the hurdle was already pretty high, that we should continue that for the next year. Board member said, we think you need to raise that. You've already obtained this level. And they go, yeah, but this is a great level when you look at peer. Yeah, but we think you can do better.

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Harry S. Smith

And they exceeded that.

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Sue Ellen Wagner

Commend you for that. That's amazing.

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Harry S. Smith

Thank you. And they did accept us. So currently we are looking at and this is where we had to tweak the mortality index. We look at whole house infection. We used to just look at sepsis. They made the change I guess or quality medical officer tell me what this whole house infection is. And he goes, well it's a new indices that CMS is looking at.

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Harry S. Smith

And sepsis. We've got a pretty good handle on that in our system now. So we're now looking across the whole system i.e. the whole house at all infections not just sepsis. If we would see sepsis crop up, then we certainly would put a shining light on that and give that more attention. We are looking average length of stay.

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Harry S. Smith

We think that is important, which ties a little bit into and we still have operating margin. And then last is engagement employee outpatient inpatient ed critically important to us. What people think about us, how do they feel about our quality. And we take that seriously. These are our major dashboard KPIs. And really only 20% of that is finance.

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Harry S. Smith

You might say a little bit of length of stay is tied to finance. And I will tell you, a decade ago, 60% would have been financial indicators. Now it's it's 20%.

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Sue Ellen Wagner

And the rest is quality or most of it.

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Harry S. Smith

Most is quality. And again, working through that socially, politically and again when you're realigning boards and duties and we're wanting to get to a point where you never will get. And that's 100% perfection. But if that's your goal and if you can continue to improve on that goal, tweak it as you get there, then I think we've done our job absolutely well.

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Sue Ellen Wagner

So you've really described a great case example for other systems to follow in other hospitals. You're still keeping that quality local, but your reduced the number of meetings that boards have to go to. And that system is still seeing what's going on across all of your six hospitals. That's great.

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Harry S. Smith

We are we have independent trustees. The chair of Cmac has to be a trustee. Now we're lucky this happens to be a physician. So that's great. We have a trustee who is a nurse, actually dean of a nursing school who had been a practicing nurse. She is on that. So we have independent nursing validation. We then have several independent trustees who do not have a medical background.

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Harry S. Smith

And we now require that members of the board who are not members of Q Mark, mandatorily have to attend at least one meeting a year, because in one of our surveys a couple of years ago, members said they weren't sure that we were meeting our quality commitment. Those on the committee were going, what?

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Sue Ellen Wagner

So you just weren't transferring the information more broadly.

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Harry S. Smith

And we were bringing it up to the system board, but we were bringing it up through, you know, a monthly meeting report, but some probably weren't going to. That's bar in reviewing those 100 or so pages. Nor should they. They were newer learning how to trust this. Is it really working as we think it should? One way to get that is to have the experience of attending that meeting at least once during the year, to really see what these very dedicated professionals are committing to and doing, to continue to strive to improve quality, to, again, that 100% level.

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Sue Ellen Wagner

It's a very important step to make sure that all your board members are knowledgeable about what's going on and understand. And I also think it's pretty phenomenal that you've modified the way your consent agenda is done, and you're talking more about quality. We talked earlier at the annual meeting at our age friendly and Quality and patient safety program, how it's so important to have quality be front and center of your board members.

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Sue Ellen Wagner

Any other words of wisdom for other boards in terms of what they should be focusing on, on quality and patient safety, or how they get buy in to make some changes to their board structure and how they should be talking about quality and patient safety.

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Harry S. Smith

I think the first is don't be shy that you don't know everything. You may not have a background in health care. That's where I think most of the apprehension might be. You have to be comfortable in giving up the perceived local control. You have to develop what your community, what your structure that will work for you and it.

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Harry S. Smith

And I would say this would be more for those trustees that don't have that quality level of background. It's okay to ask a question. I mean, I'm a banker and I've started this years ago going, how many meetings do you attend and why are we spending so much time on this and why are we doing that? Getting involved in organizations like the American Hospital Association, attending meetings, listening to peers best practices.

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Harry S. Smith

It really does help with efficiency, effectiveness. And it's okay to ask that question. It might not work for everyone. That's okay, but you can improve what you're doing in every single instance and circumstance in every part of this country. If you just aren't comfortable with the status quo and just ask why, how, and maybe we can do things better, we found that you can.

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Sue Ellen Wagner

Well, I think you've provided some great insights for our listeners, and I want to thank you for joining me.

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Harry S. Smith

Thank you, Sue Ellen.

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Tom Haederle

Thanks for listening to Advancing Health. Please subscribe and write us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.