Charlotte Lee, MD
Resident in
Internal Medicine
PGY-2
The waiting area where I spent time experience a patients' cycle of care in one of the ambulatory clinics at MGH |
Several days
after finishing the value-based healthcare delivery course at HBS, I had the
chance to complete an exercise for my outpatient clinic rotation called the
“patient footsteps” exercise. As a resident with my longitudinal primary care
clinic at the MGH Internal Medicine Associates, the exercise was a way for
residents to ask to shadow a patient’s clinic experience from the start to
finish of their entire clinic experience (from sitting in the waiting area, to
getting checked in with the medical assistants, to the actual visit and then
the post-visit). Taking the healthcare delivery course at HBS was highly
helpful in the way that I approached this exercise because it allowed me to
think more critically about the entire cycle of care for an urgent care visit
and also ways for process improvement that would create more value for the
patient, providers and all staff involved. If I had not taken the course, I
would definitely not have focused on these aspects of the experience and
therefore I spent a couple of hours just getting a sense of how primary care
could be better delivered by just viewing the mechanics of one visit. When I
reflected on this experience, I came up with initiatives that the clinic could
work on and how digital technology might be applicable to making the visit more
efficient and valuable for everyone.
I very much
enjoyed the way the healthcare delivery course was structured and learned a
significant amount from the discussion of the cases which were similar in
themes that were addressed, but varied in terms of the patient populations that
each case focused on. I learned how process improvement occurs in the surgical
settings where a lot of quality and safety work was initially started and then
how value-based healthcare delivery has been very successfully applied to the
primary care setting in one of our cases. I felt that the course was very
impactful for my training because it helped me realize that my colleagues and I
informally discuss a lot about how to improve value for patients and how to
better quantify the value in the work that we do, but that there are tangible
ways to do this. Furthermore, I have gained both the tools and the motivation
to apply this to the internal medicine space and hope to do so in the future.
Little did I know that the course would make my morning sitting in the waiting
area of my ambulatory clinic so fruitful.
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