Mass General Brigham is working to eliminate internal competition among its hospitals, and the changes have improved patient access, volume and fellowship training.
“Three years ago,I was chief of cardiology on our Mass General campus,” Patrick Ellinor, MD, PhD, executive director of the Heart and Vascular Institute at the Boston-based system, said in an upcoming episode of Becker’s “Clinical Leadership Podcast.” “My job was to improve our patient experience, grow access and do testing on the Mass General campus. My biggest competition at the time was Brigham and Women’s Hospital. That’s silly.”
The system’s hospitals long operated as silos, each with its own brand and identity, which Dr. Ellinor said confused patients. The push to unify them is meant to make care easier to access, ensure consistent quality across the system, remove redundancies and better balance capacity across sites.
Making an easier patient experience
The system consolidated at least a dozen patient-facing websites, with more than 30,000 pages of content, into a single site with a few thousand curated pages. The system also has a single phone number for transfers, routed to an access center that finds capacity across the system, and a single call center for new heart and vascular patient referrals that connects patients with an available provider close to home.
In a few weeks, echocardiogram orders will become visible to providers and scheduling staff at every site, so patients can be offered the closest or soonest available slot. The system plans to do the same for every test and study it offers.
“They’ll be able to talk to the patient right then and ask where’s closest to home: If a site a few miles away has an earlier slot, would you rather go there?” he said. “That visibility and transparency will extend across our entire system.”
Making care easier to get has also grown volume.
“What a lot of people don’t realize is that patients are turned off if they can’t schedule a test easily, and largely two things happen: One, they had trouble scheduling and it never gets done. Two, they go to our competition and get the study done,” he said. “We live in a world where Amazon can deliver a package in a day or two, and people expect things in real time. I don’t want to compare us to Amazon, but that’s the societal influence we live in, where things are available 24/7. If you’re worried about your health, you’re going to get that test wherever you can get it the quickest.”
Over the last four years, new patient requests and completed new patient visits at the Heart and Vascular Institute have grown nearly 30%, which he tied to the single cardiology phone number. The institute had more than 81,000 new patient visits last year, up 4% from the year before.
Cutting training competition
The system has also ended competition between its fellowship programs.
“As someone who has been at both of our academic medical centers, I can tell you we had parallel programs in direct competition with each other,” Dr. Ellinor said. “In cardiology, electrophysiology, heart failure and each of the major areas where we train residents and fellows, we were competing for the same finite pool of talent. Frankly, we can do better, and we have.”
In the past year, the system moved to a single cardiology fellowship. It just finished interviewing for the program and will soon submit a single Mass General Brigham rank list, with the first fellows starting in July.
“Twenty-eight years ago, I made a choice to go from one campus to another,” Dr. Ellinor said. “Would that affect my career? That’s a silly thing for our trainees to worry about. We should prioritize their educational experience first and foremost, and that gets much simpler when we come together as a system.”
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