The Arizona-based health system's new chief clinical officer is committed to sharing data with patients and curbing medical staff burnout.
Banner Health has promoted Marjorie Bessel, MD, to serve as the organization's new chief clinical officer.
Bessel, who most recently served as Banner's vice president and chief medical officer for community delivery, is succeeding John Hensing, MD. He retired last month.
At Banner, one of the unique aspects of the chief clinical officer position is direct oversight of the information technology department, Bessel says.
"IT reports up to this role, which is responsible for care delivery and making sure information flows. There is a lot of technical support to make sure all of that is happening," she says.
HealthLeaders Media spoke recently with Bessel. Following is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation.
HLM: Why do you have a passion for healthcare transparency?
Bessel: Part of it is personal. One of my brothers was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma six years ago. He does not live in Phoenix, where I live.
It was really important to both of us—him as a patient and me as a close sister—that the University of Rochester where he got care had a fabulous patient portal. My brother is an engineer and it was very important to him to know everything that was about to happen to him. He wanted to know all his data.
When you are in a situation like that, it can be overwhelming and life-altering. You want to feel that you have some control over what is happening to you. For my brother and patients like him, that control comes from access to their own data.
HLM: How did your brother's experience influence your approach to transparency at Banner?
Bessel: That portal experience was important to my brother and important for me at Banner. When I looked at what we had at Banner, I did not see the same level of transparency or sharing data with our patients. We did not have the same level of sophisticated tools to enable that to occur.
I worked on a very large change management initiative to make sure information was flowing to Banner's portal without delay and without embargoing test data. That resulted in a lot of changes to workflows all the way down to the provider level.
HLM: You also are an advocate for medical staff wellness. Give an example of a burnout initiative you have helped lead at Banner.
Bessel: I am responsible for burnout across the organization, in partnership with our chief human resources officer, Naomi Cramer. We have a balanced approach to put up programs so we can support all of our providers across the organization.
When you think about safety, the patient is front-and-center. They may have been harmed by the care that was delivered by Banner. Their friends and their family and their support network around them also suffer when an error happens.
We know there is a whole other circle of people suffering. These are second victims, and they are the people who delivered the care. It could be the nurse. It could be the pharmacist. It could be the physician, it could be a therapist, or someone else.
We are making sure that we are having excellent conversations with the patient, and with the patient's family and friends. We are also making sure we are supporting the staff involved in the event because they suffer as well.
HLM: It has been two decades since publication of "To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System." What are the primary remaining patient safety areas of concern?
Bessel: As humans, we all are going to make mistakes. What we experience in healthcare is when we put processes into place, when we put programs into place, when we put safeguards into place, we have drift over time from those best practices because we are human.
Because we have drift, we experience errors that programs or processes were supposed to mitigate.
Some of the solution is going back to basics, which is something we do at Banner. We have to make sure that when we put a program into place that we are consistent and focused on monitoring it.
Some of the challenges we have also are very basic. A lot of errors are related to infection such as post-operative infection. The solutions can be very basic like remembering to wash your hands.
At Banner, we are going back to revisit programs and processes that we have put into place. We are correcting drift. We are also working on the basics that all of us should do like hand washing.
Christopher Cheney is the CMO editor at HealthLeaders.