Personalizing care in a transactional world

Ira Byock, M.D., FAAHPM, is founder and chief medical officer of the Institute for Human Caring at Providence, one of the nation’s largest health systems. For the second year in a row, he and his team are hosting a national conference showcasing evidence-based, replicable and scalable strategies to transform healthcare into something patients and providers desire: healthcare that’s easier to navigate, less expensive, and more humane.

IB: We’re bringing together some of the best minds in healthcare and American society to show how culture change in healthcare – leading to real transformation – is not only possible, but readily achievable. 

We’re making measurable progress across Providence, and are eager to show other health systems how we can collectively improve patient outcomes, enhance provider satisfaction – which is so important during pandemic-induced burnout – and save costs.

The half-day conference will feature six sessions. Most will have a main speaker, who’ll present for 10 minutes or so, followed by a 20-minute panel discussion. Among the luminaries:

Dr. Tammie Quest, director of the Emory Palliative Care Center and professor of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Emory University School of Medicine. She kicks off the first session of the day, “Why Serious Illness Is a Serious Health-Equity Issue.”

Dr. Wes Ely, who has a terrific new book, “Every Deep-Drawn Breath” (Simon & Schuster), will lead a panel discussion called “Whole Person Care in the ICU,” which is particularly timely during the pandemic and its attendant clinical isolation. 

Amy Berman, RN, senior program officer at the John H. Hartford Foundation, will highlight national work she’s leading called, “Age-Friendly Work at Providence and Beyond.”

In between all this we’ll also have a deep discussion on how to engage faith communities and another on how to customize and humanize your electronic health record system.

IB: We have a special post-lunch treat called “Reflections of a Kitchen Widow – Nurturing Others and Ourselves,” featuring actor, author and healthcare advocate Tembi Locke. Tembi and I are going to prepare a Sicilian dish from her wonderful memoir and recipe book “From Scratch,” which also is the basis of an upcoming Netflix series, by the way. Hers is a story of love, loss and living. We’ll talk about the healing powers of food, family and community.

IB: Market demand, pure and simple. Long before the pandemic, health organizations from across the country have been calling me and my Institute for Human Caring colleagues, asking how we’ve been able to affect transformational change inside one of the nation’s largest healthcare systems. They want to know more about how we’ve trained hundreds of providers in having goals-of-care conversations with ill patients, customized our electronic health record system to make it easier to document patient wishes, created extensive visual dashboards to measure and monitor progress, partnered with C-suite leaders, or developed effective collaborations with the likes of the Center to Advance Palliative Care, Advanced Care Planning Decisions, ReImagine, StoryCorps and the Conversation Project, among others. We often would accommodate requests on a 1:1 basis. This conference offers a way to help health systems address their needs on a one-to-many basis.

IB: We expect participants to leave the conference with new tools and abilities to conceive, develop and implement some of the evidence-based, replicable and scalable strategies we will showcase – from increasing the documentation of advance care planning, making the ICU more patient- and provider-friendly, meeting health-equity goals, partnering with faith communities, and more. 

The faculty assembled here is par excellence. You will be hard pressed to find professionals more qualified in their respective fields, practicing at the height of their expertise and/or licensure. If there’s a desire to go deeper after the conference, to unpack best practices or better understand the do’s and don’ts from our experiences, then my colleagues and I from the Institute for Human Caring can make ourselves available for private consultations.

To learn more, please visit www.InstituteForHumanCaring.org/Conference.