ICU Receives Award for Excellence - UCLA Health System

UCLA’s First Chief Innovation Officer Will Lead Efforts to
Transform Innovative Ideas into Evidence-based Practices
Long before legislators established the latest healthcare reform mandates,
Molly Joel Coye, M.D., M.P.H., played many key roles in advancing
national and international efforts to improve healthcare quality and
efficiency through innovation — including co-authoring two landmark
reports on healthcare quality, To Err is Human and Crossing the Quality
Chasm, as an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences’
Institute of Medicine. Last September, Dr. Coye stepped into the role of
chief innovation officer at UCLA Health System, the first position of its
kind at UCLA and one of only a handful of similar appointments in the
nation. According to Dr. Coye, UCLA’s culture of innovation makes it an
ideal place to break new ground.
“UCLA Health System faculty, trainees and staff have a long history of
inventing better ways to deliver high-quality, patient-centered healthcare,
but developing and sharing these innovations across our hospitals and
clinics has been largely hit or miss,” says Dr. Coye. “We want to establish
an avenue through which we can identify, evaluate and refine novel programs
and strategies invented by our employees, rapidly deploy the most promising
breakthroughs across our system, and share our successes with other
healthcare organizations locally, nationally and internationally.”
Among other responsibilities, Dr. Coye will oversee the new UCLA
Innovates HealthCare initiative, designed to promote and coordinate
novel approaches to continually improve quality of care within UCLA
Health System and across other health systems and establish UCLA as a
leader in healthcare innovation. The CICARE Patient Experience program
developed at UCLA, which significantly raised customer satisfaction at
RRUCLA and SMUCLA within
two years of initial deployment,
is an example of an innovative
healthcare delivery initiative
that could be rolled out to other
organizations across the country,
according to Dr. Coye.
“We definitely want to move the
needle on the dial on evidencebased
quality, access and patient
experience measures,” Dr. Coye
says. “CICARE is important for
us to highlight because large
numbers of UCLA employees
were part of a quality improvement
effort that produced excellent
Molly Joel Coye, M.D., M.P.H.
results, and we have good data to
support our findings.” UCLA employees will also be critical to developing
and implementing future innovations. Dr. Coye says that many employees
will begin to hear about or be part of projects designed to test quality
improvement strategies by mid-year.
“As we continue to strengthen the culture of innovation within our
organization, we will identify many opportunities to improve the care
we provide to our patients,” Dr. Coye says. “But we recognize that major
change is tough to tackle.”
Emergency Department Coordinators Save Woman’s Life
John Kennedy and Marina Novak
Two emergency department coordinators at
RRUCLA, whose duties include answering phones
and providing general information to patients and
their visitors, helped rescue a suicidal woman who
had called the unit seeking help. They received the
“Health System Award for Excellence” for their
extraordinary actions.
John Kennedy, who has worked as an emergency
department coordinator for less than a year, says
the young woman was crying when she called and
quickly revealed that she planned to kill herself.
“I knew it was my responsibility to take it to
the next level, but she wouldn’t tell me where
she was because she didn’t want to upset her
family,” Kennedy says. During the course of
their conversation, she gave Kennedy her name.
Kennedy wrote it on a note to co-worker Marina
Novak, who called 911 to start the rescue process.
“At one point the woman got upset and said she
needed to call me back, but I told her I needed to
keep talking to her and we stayed on the phone
another five minutes,” Kennedy says. He spoke
to the woman for about 20 minutes, which gave
law enforcement officials enough time to contact
the woman’s mother, who was able to provide
information on her whereabouts.
An ambulance transported the woman to the
RRUCLA Emergency Department.
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