TeamHealth’s Acute General Surgery Programs Improve Care and Support Patient Retention

Hospital Information

• UVA Health System locations:
  • Prince William Medical Center (Manassas, VA)
  • Haymarket Medical Center (Haymarket, VA)

TeamHealth Services

• Acute General Surgery

The Challenge

Two Virginia-based hospitals struggled with effective management of patients presenting in the emergency department (ED) with acute surgical needs. The lack of effective surgery coverage meant that patients were often forced to be transferred to other facilities, or surgical cases were being performed after hours.

Solution

UVA Health System partnered with TeamHealth to implement an acute surgery program to improve the management of patients with acute surgery needs. Working together, TeamHealth and hospital leadership examined current processes and together implemented a new standard of care that kept surgery patients close to home, near where they live and thus eliminating the need for inconvenient transfers. Backed by TeamHealth’s experience in developing similar programs in hospitals across the country, the health system’s executive team initiated planning meetings with clinicians and staff in critical areas such as ED, anesthesia and surgery teams. Conversations were also held with community surgeons to review current procedures and processes to ensure a mutually-beneficial hospital-based surgical practice that allowed community surgeons to focus on their clinic-based practices.

TeamHealth’s solutions promoted improved outcomes by accelerating each hospital’s ability to respond and move patients more quickly from ED arrival to the operating suite.

“The acute care surgery program fostered confidence and camaraderie within our teams. It provided a great sense of accomplishment that we could effectively provide timely and expert care to some of the sickest patients in our community.” – Zan Zaidi, MD, Chief Medical Officer

Results

TeamHealth’s performance-driven approach to program implementation helped both hospitals improve the performance of their surgery programs. By exhibiting day-to-day program leadership and leading-edge innovation (including best practices gleaned from other surgery programs) processes were put in place to keep cases at the hospital and local patients and their families in their community, helping stabilize conditions at both hospitals. Other results include:

• In TeamHealth’s first year at Prince William Medical Center, surgical cases increased 27% over the previous year.
• In that same year at Haymarket Medical Center, surgical cases increased 38% over the previous year.
• Hospital administrators noted these results represented an immediate impact on the hospitals’ abilities to retain patients requiring acute general surgery.
• In the second calendar year, the combined surgical volume at Prince William and Haymarket Medical Centers was 34% greater than the client’s internal estimates, thus demonstrating the program’s ability to retain surgical cases that otherwise might have been transferred out to other hospitals and communities.

To learn more about our general surgery program, please contact us.