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WCE 2017: Quality and the Endourologist

Vancouver, Canada (UroToday.com) Dr. Timothy Averch, a urologist at UPMC, began the first presentation of the session by focusing on the importance of patient safety, noting that medical error is the third most common cause of death in the United States. In light of this statistic, Dr. Averch highlighted several basic principles to assure patient safety, including: just culture, removing blame and understanding system error, understanding how error gets to the patient, and the “Swiss Cheese” model. Dr. Averch concluded the presentation with several take home messages: medical errors are preventable, we are all human and make mistakes, and create systems and standards to prevent errors from reaching the patient.

Dr. Anup Patel, urologist at University of Michigan, presented on the principles of quality improvement. Dr. Patel emphasized four key principles for achieving quality improvement. First, a consistent and connected, enterprise-wide, patient experience should be the table stakes. Second, no matter what your title is, you cannot do this alone. Third, a continuous improvement culture lifts many boats. Lastly, maximizing pay-for-value means tightly aligning metric programs across payer, entity, and provider lines. Dr. Patel concluded that quality improvement requires meaningful, measurable, and creative change.

Dr. Sapan Ambani, urologist at University of Texas at Austin, ended the session with a presentation on clinical care pathways. Dr. Ambani focused on the process of building a pathway by presenting a model called “Phases of Clinical Pathways” (PDCA), which includes planning, doing, checking and adjusting. Dr. Ambani concluded the presentation by emphasizing that care pathways require structure, work and buy-in, and multidisciplinary collaboration will improve outcomes. 

Presented by: Sapan Ambani, Timothy D. Averch, Anup Patel 

Panelists: Sapan N. Ambani, Timothy D. Averch, and Anup Patel
Affiliation: University of Texas at Austin, University of Michigan, UPMC

Written by Taylor Capretz, Department of Urology, University of California-Irvine at the 35th World Congress of Endourology – September 12-16, 2017, Vancouver, Canada.