“Educating and Incentivizing Housestaff on Early Discharges—An Intervention at Cost Containment.”

The 2015 awardees, Elizabeth Richey, MD, MS, and Constantinos Michaelidis, MD, MS, created this program, which provides individualized performance evaluations to BWH internal medicine residents, with the aim of improving care delivery, managing costs, and providing professional development around physician benchmarking. Currently, no standard system exists for providing residents with feedback on specific performance markers such as patient satisfaction, chronic disease management, and preventative health care measures. Drs. Richey and Michaelidis surveyed both BWH leadership and physicians running similar programs at other institutions, ultimately designing, and piloting a system that can generate customized feedback for each resident at BWH. These reports outline individual performance in the context of hospital averages and serve as a valuable source of data as residents continuously work with their attending physicians to identify actionable ways to improve performance and eliminate unnecessary and costly testing. Drs. Richey and Michaelidis were able to incorporate resident feedback from the first iteration of the quality improvement dashboard to develop a second version, which has been deployed across the residency program. Thanks to support from the Rappaport Foundation, the quality improvement dashboard has been systematized and, going forward, will become a routine component of the quality improvement curriculum for resident primary care physicians. The goal will be for the dashboard to serve as a tool for best practice sharing, quality improvement process training, and quality metric reporting and improvement.

“The Rappaport Award has opened a lot of doors for me to be able to move forward with something that I’ve come to be really passionate about, and it’s been a huge learning experience about how to make change in an organization.” –Dr. Richey