Northwestern Medicine learns from patients and families

I had the pleasure of making a presentation at a leadership meeting at Northwestern Medicine today. Afterwards, while sitting through some other business sessions of the team, I saw this simple graphic representation.  It is emblematic of the types of changes that can occur when patients and families help set a health system's priorities.  Northwestern has convened a patient-family advisory council and was discussing with them the various metrics the hospital uses to portray progress on several clinical fronts.  The PFAC members made a persuasive case that the evaluative framework employed by the health system, and the corresponding set of metrics to measure progress along that framework, had a number of gaps. What evolved was the new framework shown above.  Over the next couple of years, NW will design and add metrics to their corporate scoreboard to fill in the gaps noted by the PFAC.

This is a fine example of the kind of partnership that can develop between a health care system and the people it serves.