5 Questions

Good morning!
 
Today, I’ll respond to some of the items you’ve sent to me through the VC Notes inbox.
 
A reminder, I read all your questions and comments and enjoy hearing from you. I’m only able to respond to some of them in this space, but I pass the rest along to senior administrators for their review and possible follow-up.

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Q:  Specialty pharmacy needed a special shout-out for revenue generation, like surgery was singled out in the Friday, February 16, 2024 VC Notes, given the impact of the program on the financial health of the institution presented in leadership meetings. 

A:  There are several areas within our clinical enterprise that have experienced notable increases in revenue recently, including Specialty Pharmacy. I agree it’s worthy of mention here. Brad Sommers, executive director of pharmacy, and his team have been doing great work.

For FY24 year-to-date, Specialty Pharmacy’s margin is $18.94M. This represents an outstanding 143% increase compared to this same point in FY23. That certainly deserves a shout out!

Specialty Pharmacy cares for 1,420 patients with complex prescription situations enrolled in our management program with an average patient-cost-per-dispense of $15.81 and a 97% medication adherence rate, which tracks how quickly we get prescriptions to patients and the frequency they get filled. Prescription costs can be expensive, and Specialty Pharmacy staff do all they can to help defray the costs.  So far, they have secured more than $4M through external medication assistance programs to benefit their patients. Maybe this is one of the reasons their patients have rewarded them with a whopping 96% satisfaction rate.

And one last data point that deserves recognition: So far this fiscal year, with more than 12,000 prescriptions dispensed, there have only been 2(!) reported errors. This represents 99.98% accuracy. Well done and thank you for working so hard to keep our patients safe.

Q:  What is going on with housekeeping? It’s horrible. Both patient areas and administrative offices go without a proper cleaning. Trash cans get emptied (sometimes) and housekeeping thinks that is good enough. Too many times the restroom in our area is not cleaned, tissue paper is rarely restocked we have to continue to call down for more. The floor has not been mopped in who knows how long. Just walking around the hospital, you can clearly see a lack in housekeeping. We need a cleaner place for our patients to receive care and our employees to work. 
 
A:  Thanks for this submission. I get several comments related to cleanliness, and I appreciate all of them. They are all forwarded to Environmental Services and HHS, our housekeeping vendor, management and executive leaders for awareness and possible follow-up action.

HHS reports they are making concerted efforts to get back to full staffing and overcome negative impacts of staffing challenges. The expectation is that HHS will rectify this and take it off the table as an ongoing reason the cleanliness of some areas is not up to the standard we expect.

Some other environmental services initiatives aimed at improving facility cleanliness include:

• Increased supervisor presence and increased rounding to oversee and review the work of the front-line cleaners.
• A revised onboarding process with improved training, including a competency test, to better ensure housekeepers understand the scope of their work and are ready to do the job from day one.

Much of this has already been implemented, so you should already be seeing improvements in areas that may not have been as clean as expected. But, if that’s not the case, notify Environmental Services and HHS managers at 4-2685 or hospitalhousekeeping@umc.edu.

Q: In the 2/23/24 edition of VC Notes, you answered a question regarding department contact lists. I wanted to mention that this list is not very comprehensive. For instance, if I need to call the OR control desk, I cannot find it by searching "OR," "operating room," or "control desk." Similarly, I cannot search for "nuclear medicine" or "Eli Manning Clinic," or "radiation oncology.” It would be helpful to know how to find contact information for these areas.

Q:  The phone directory doesn't work as well as you think it does. Search for Shipping & Receiving, Biomedical Engineering, 2C, 3C, NICU... There are common names of departments that we go by that may not be the formal name. (Sports Medicine is Orthopedics for another example) You may get a list of employees that work in the departments you are looking for, but you have to click on a few of them and figure out the main number.

A:  I’ve responded to submissions on this topic a couple of times recently, but it keeps coming up, so I wanted to bring it back. Accessing phone numbers through the intranet is functioning as intended, but some updates made by our DIS team to that clarifies where and how to submit department numbers to show in the “directory” are worth bringing to your attention.

You can use the search bar at the top of the intranet to list the department phone number you are looking for in the search results, or it may sometimes be more helpful to use the full A-Z directory listing found here. Every phone number added by a department/unit/office can be found there. It may be worth it to save the link to that page for quick access. You can also get to it quickly by clicking “A-Z Index” on the front of the intranet and then clicking “Show UMMC Departments.”

Any UMMC unit can request its phone number(s) be included in the intranet directory. Using the form, numbers can be submitted along with various aliases that are commonly used to refer to a department instead of the full name. An example of this is “DIS” is listed, but if you search for “Information Systems,” the numbers for DIS would show. That same form is used when a phone number change needs to be made. I encourage a designee from all UMMC departments/units to check the intranet. If your main number isn’t listed, please submit your information.

Q:  Why do we only have award nominations for nurses, respiratory therapists, and good catches? Why is there no award to recognize any employee in general besides the front and center nomination? I'm from the main lab and we are looked over even though we are essential to most of the hospital needs. There are plenty of questions/ situations we in the lab answer that nurses and doctors do not know. There's an employee in my department I want to recognize, but there is no proper award/ recognition to do so. 

A:  Human Resources is working on an initiative for just the type of employee recognition you are asking about. I checked with Frank Lenior, chief human resources officer, about this and he reports that later this summer they will roll out a program that will assist supervisors/managers with situations when an employee deserves to be recognized but doesn’t fit into one of the formal awards categories.

Our Awards and Recognition Committee, of which I am a member, is also talking about this topic and how to make options available for acknowledgement of deserving employees.

However, I do think that any manager/supervisor who has an employee whose work and/or dedication extends past what is expected shouldn’t wait for an institutional solution to roll out to initiate some sort of recognition. There are plenty of examples across campus where departments/units have taken it upon themselves to recognize employees who go above and beyond. It’s meaningful for those employees who get called out for their good deeds in front of their colleagues.

Q:  There has been a lot of discussion about the budget lately. Has there been any discussion about a raise or cost of living increase?

A:  The budgeting process for FY25 has been underway for a while, and one goal with the next budget is to make available a pool of money that can be used for merit- and market-based compensation increases.

I mentioned this in the Feb. 16, 2024 VC Notes that talked about our financial status at that time. But, to go a little further about the plan for merit-based compensation adjustments than what I said in that column, I’ll share that the determination of an employee’s eligibility for that type of raise will be, in part, determined using this year’s performance evaluation scores.

Annual evaluations – for both faculty and staff – will be done through Workday this year and will be open May 1-June 30. The lookback period for this evaluation cycle is from Jan. 1, 2023 - when we last conducted institution-wide employee evaluations.