The High Value Practice Academic Alliance (HVPAA) held their annual meeting this past weekend in Baltimore, MD. The Architecture of High Value Care conference brought together clinicians from many specialties - including hospital medicine, ambulatory care, emergency medicine, radiology, dermatology, ob/gyn, etc – health policy researchers and data scientists, and students and residents, in an idea-sharing and idea-generating high-yield meeting.
A goal of HVPAA is to train learners in providing high value care and working on projects related to that. Duke’s combined internal medicine/pediatrics residency has 2 scholars accepted into this competitive Future Leaders Program – Dr. Claudia Leung and Dr. Austin Wesevich. They will receive dedicated mentorship from national experts in their work with a Duke team to reduce duplicative laboratory testing.
Ordering Wisely
There were four half-day sessions dedicated to a rapid-fire review of areas of overuse and waste, covering inpatient and ambulatory medicine, emergency medicine, and pediatrics. The speakers were all quality improvement champions who reviewed the literature on what was the clinical waste and described easy-to-implement projects to reduce this waste locally. For example, Dr Pam Johnson, a radiologist at Johns Hopkins, reviewed the high-value approach to imaging for diagnosis of pulmonary embolism.
Meet the Professors
As high value care implementation work is still a relatively new field nationally, the conference provided opportunities for attendees to meet with experts in an informal roundtable setting, providing an opportunity for mentoring and networking. There were facilitated conversations around discharge transitions and re-admissions, antibiotic stewardship, etc.
Keynote
Dr. Bob Pendleton of Utah delivered the take-home message of the conference: “Value in healthcare shouldn’t be a buzzword. It must be a purpose that transcends metrics, graphs, and spreadsheets; it is about nurturing a culture that drives us toward our human potential of people caring for other people.” Dr. Pendleton, Chief Medical Quality Officer at University of Utah Health, gave an inspiring talk about the importance of embracing high value care on behalf of our patients and underscoring how important the work we do in this field is for the future of healthcare.
New initiatives
The conference was also where new initiatives were announced and promoted. The Costs of Care Foundation, led by Dr Chris Moriates and Dr Reshma Gupta, announced their Affordability Moonshot – the goal of creating “a world in which no one has to choose between their life and their life-savings.” Dr Jay Bhatt of the American Hospital Association also promoted their work on improving hospitalizations for the aging population, focusing on the 4 Ms: Mentation, Mobility, Medication management, and what Matters most to them.
Overall, the Architecture of High Value Care Conference was packed with clinical pearls, policy innovations, and people passionate about improving care for our patients. The HVPAA works year-round to promote the message of high value care and guide quality improvement interventions, and Duke is definitely a part of this conversation.