The Wright Stuff: Your hard work paid off

A message to the WVU Medicine West Virginia University Health System family

Helping people when they need help the most – that’s what we do. And we do it well. But we’re always striving to get better. Our patients and their families deserve that. That’s why our Performance Improvement (PI) Plan goals, departmental goals, and individual goals are so important. They help strengthen the organization.

Our 2017 PI Plan, which was specifically focused on Morgantown-area operations, drove many of the efforts that helped us improve the patient experience, including outcomes, quality, and access, last year.

Here are some of our PI Plan achievements for the outpatient clinics:

• There was an increase in the number of patients who scored our doctors a 9 or 10 (highest rating) on the Clinician and Group Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CG-CAHPS) survey. This is a standardized tool to measure patient perceptions of care delivered by a provider in an office setting.
• We had an 11.75 percent increase in clinic visits; this translates to more than 100,000 more visits than the previous year. Even with this significant volume increase, we were able to decrease wait times for appointments by more than 10 percent.
• We hired more than 140 physicians in an effort to address patient access issues. This is in addition to the more than 100 physicians we hired in 2016.
• We increased the number of patients with diabetes who received a screening eye exam by 20 percent. While we didn’t hit our target for this goal, we did make some headway, with almost half of these patients receiving this exam.

On the inpatient side, our dedicated care teams significantly reduced the number of Medicare patients readmitted within 30 days of discharge for these conditions/procedures: heart attack, heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and total hip and/or knee arthroplasty. And what makes this an even more significant accomplishment is that the acuity level of these patients, or their severity of illness, was at an all-time high.

Each of you helped us achieve these and other goals that were part of the 2017 PI Plan.

Your hard work paid off in the amount of $658. That’s the PI Plan bonus that eligible full-time Morgantown-area WVU Medicine-WVU Hospitals employees and residents will receive. Employees will receive their bonus on Friday, March 2. Residents will receive their bonus on a future date.

The bonus payments total more than $3.3 million. We believe it’s important to invest in our most important resource – and that’s you!

The first PDF provides a detailed update on the 2017 PI Plan, as well as the bonus amounts awarded for each pylon.

The second PDF discusses bonus eligibility requirements in more detail.

Thank you for all you do!

Pictured are Emma Mason, RN (top photo), of the Center for Emergency Medicine, and Ginger Hall (bottom photo), of Sterile Processing.