April 2017 Newsletter

2016-2017 Resident Safety Council Leadership Team

The mission of the Resident Safety Council is to improve the safety and quality of the care we deliver at Stanford Hospital. We aim to achieve our mission by three means. Firstly, training residents to be leaders and enriching their residency education with quality improvement skills. Secondly, identifying areas of improvement and forming committees to address the issue in innovative ways. Thirdly, incorporating the resident voice in hospital standing quality improvement and patient safety committees.

The 2016-2017 Resident Safety Council team is co-chair by Lena Scotto, Critical Care and Anesthesiology Fellow, and Sanaa Suharwardy, Obstetrics-Gynecology Resident. The three Vice Chairs are Lijia Xie, Vice Chair of Committees; Felipe Perez, Vice Chair of Communication; and Sujatha Seetharaman,Vice Chair of Education.  The Team Leaders are Justin Slade, Internal Medicine Resident; Kelly Fedoruk, Obstetrical Anesthesiology Fellow; Niharika Tipirneni, Critical Care Fellow; and Ilana Yurckiwicz, Internal Medicine Resident.

Co-Chairs

Lena Scotto, MD

Lena Scotto is an Anesthesia Critical Care Medicine Fellow from San Jose, CA. After graduating from Stanford undergrad, she worked in healthcare consulting for several years. She then attended Johns Hopkins Medical School.  While Maryland crab was delicious, she returned to Stanford for Anesthesiology Residency and stayed to be a Chief Fellow in Critical Care Medicine. She enjoys hiking, traveling and gardening.

Sanaa Suharwardy, MD

Sanaa Suharwardy is an Ob-Gyn resident from Danville, CA. After attending UCLA and completing a bachelors degree in economics, she traveled to the Midwest to attend medical school at Washington University in St. Louis. She plans to pursue fellowship after completing residency. When not in the hospital, Sanaa enjoys hiking, eating out of food trucks, and not setting an alarm.

Vice Chairs

Suja Seetharaman, MD, Vice Chair of Education

Sujatha Seetharaman is a 3rd year fellow Adolescent medicine who attended Kasturba Medical College, India . Worked for many years as a Pediatrician at Boston Children’s hospital and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia during which time I saw a lot of teen parents and their infants, STIs and their socioeconomic impact and then decided to pursue an MPH at the Bloomberg school of Public Health, where I focused on Adolescent health and development. Eventually I wanted to focus more on the practice of Adolescent Medicine and thus applied for fellowship at Stanford. I plan to work at an Academic University hospital and practice Adolescent medicine as well as pursue my career as an independent clinician investigator. In the long run, I am also looking forward to becoming a consultant for the World Health Organization trying to impact policy and programs directed towards adolescents and young adults, particularly on prevention of teenage pregnancy. I like hiking, listening to music and spending time with family and friends. 


Felipe Perez, MD, Vice Chair of Communications

Felipe De Jesus Perez is an anesthesiology resident from Long Beach, CA. After receiving his Stanford bachelors degree he took three years to work in health policy. He attended Stanford Medical School and did his internship at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. When he is not working he enjoys playing soccer and dancing salsa. 


Lijia Xie, MD, Vice Chair of Committees and Team Leader of Committees

Lijia Xie is a PGY2 in the Stanford Internal Medicine program who is from Beijing and San Francisco. She attended college at UC Berkeley and med school at the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program. She is interested in hospital medicine and oncology. Her hobbies include adventurous eating and dancing! 

Projects and Teams

Building A Better Discharge Committee

Justin Slade, MD, Team Leader for Discharges Committee

Justin Slade is an internal medicine intern from Goodrich, Michigan. After receiving a bachelors degree in chemistry from Boston College he attended Boston University School of Medicine. While in medical school he was involved with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and led efforts at Boston Medical Center to improve coordination of care for patients with sickle cell disease and promote medical student participation in quality improvement initiatives. As an RSC team leader for the Discharge/Readmission project he hopes to contribute towards an improved discharge process with the aim of preventing hospital readmissions. In his free time he enjoys road trips, golf, and spending time on the water. 

Discharge Commitee

Building a Better Discharge Committee. With a greater prevalence of chronic disease in our aging population and a healthcare system that is tasked with addressing an increasing number of social and economic issues that contribute towards one's health, the process of discharging a patient from the hospital has become increasingly complex. This complexity contributes towards a poorly standardized discharge process that allows for failures in communication between health providers and their patients. These failures collectively result in sub optimal hospital discharges that may increase a patient's risk for readmission, diminish patient and provider satisfaction, and create bed flow issues within a hospital. The "Building A Better Discharge" team aims to identify variability and inefficiencies within the discharge process that lead to these unwanted outcomes and to develop electronic medical record based interventions that can better orchestrate ideal and efficient hospital discharges.

Team Members

  • Michelle Chen, MD, Otolaryngology
  • Teresa Liu, MD,Internal Medicine
  • Rebecca Tisdale, MD Internal Medicine
  • Julia Chang, MD, Internal Medicine
  • Marta Almli , MD, Internal Medicine
  • Gabrielle Paci, MD, Orthopedic Surgery
  • Alexandra Ruan, MD, Internal Medicine
  • Leon Castaneda, MD, Internal Medicine
  • Ginger Yang, MD, Internal Medicine
  • Allison Kwong, MD, Gastroenterology
  • Christina Klein, MD, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation

 


Breaking Down Barriers Obstructing Efficient and Timely

Kelly Fedoruk, MD, Team Leader for MD & RN Comminication Committee

Kelly Fedoruk is a Fellow in Obstetrical Anesthesiology from Saskatoon, Canada. She did her undergrad and med school at University of Saskatchewan. She plans to find more adventures in Obstetrical Anesthesiology! Either overseas or back in Canada. She loves to run, hike, bike, cook and travel. She is the Team Leader for MD/RN Communications.

MD & RN Communication Commitee

Breaking Down Barriers Obstructing Efficient and Timely MD to RN Communication Committee.  Through our group meetings, we discussed the difficulties MD's often find in contacting the appropriate RN in order to communicate important information about patient care. In particular, our residents stressed that communication can be often inefficient, as there are often several points of contact made before finding the "right" person. Through the use of surveys, focus groups, nurse shadowing and resident education, we plan on performing a root cause analysis in order to determine where we can intervene to reduce the number of steps required to make this contact and therefore enhance the efficiency of workflow for both the resident and RN. 

Team Members

  • Ashrit Multani, MD, Infectious Diseases
  • Rebecca Miller-Kulhmann, MD, Neurology
  • Alexandra June Gordon, MD, Emergency Medicine
  • Adam Sang, MD, Emergency Medicine
  • Peter Baumeister, MD, Emergency Medicine
  • Jessica X Yu, MD, Gastroenterology
  • Michael Genualdi, MD, Internal Medicine
  • Amandeep Godara, MD, Bone Marrow Transplant
  • Hilary (Hanbing) Wang, MD, Internal Medicine
  • Ron Li, MD, Internal Medicine
  • Haley Manella, MD, Emergency Medicine
  • William Dixon, MD, Internal Medicine
  • Libo Wang, MD, Internal Medicine

Code Blue Quality Improvement Committee

Niharika Tipirneni, MD, Team Leader for Code Blue Committee

Niharika Tipirneni. Attended George Washington University Hospital for internal medicine residency & a sleep fellowship. Currently at Stanford Hospital for Critical Care Fellowship. She is originally from the DC area, and is out here in the West Coast for the first time. Attended University of Maryland, College Park for undergrad and then went to George Washington University SOM, DC . She plans to work primarily as an intensivist, and has research interests that include improving sleep in the ICU, early resuscitation, and medical emergency response situations. She likes to travel, very much into wine and moved to the perfect place for it, already joined a vineyard out here, likes to read specifically presidential history, and likes to sing. 

Code Blue Commitee

Code Blue Quality Improvement Committee. Code blue activations are indicated for cardiopulmonary arrest & near arrest situations but research done last year found that of the code blues called within a two year period, only 25% were for true arrest and 15% for airway compromise.  As the code blue team has a high resource load and diverts key players in the hospital such as the MICU fellow, anesthesia resident/attending, and respiratory therapists away from other critically ill patients, there is room to improve how urgent encounters are managed.  Our team aims to analyze the current process and work flow to see how to facilitate efficient management of these situations without compromising patient care and still be able to support hospital staff who need extra resources. 

Team Members

  • Julian Villar, MD, Critical Care Medicine
  • Bikram Sharma, MD, Critical Care Medicine
  • Libo Wang, MD, Medicine
  • Melissa Vogelsong, MD, Anesthesiology 
  • Graeme Rosenberg, MD, General Surgery
  • Carter Neugarten, MD, Emergency Medicine
  • Anna Olsen, MD, Anesthesiology/Pediatrics
  • Tiffany Sinclair, MD, General Surgery
  • Soo-Ryum Yang, MD, Pathology
  • Yarl Balachandran, MD, General Surgery

Transfers of Care Committee

Ilana Yurkiewicz, MD, Team Leader for Transfers of Care Committee

Ilana Yurkiewicz is an internal medicine resident from New York. After completing her undergraduate degree from Yale University she attended Harvard Medical School.  She plans to specialize in either hematology-oncology or primary care. She also has a background in medical ethics and journalism. She plans to incorporate both into her career as well. She enjoys reading, hiking, and playing board games.  She is the team leader for the Transfers of Care Committee. 

Transfers of Care Committee

Transfers of care are a frequent occurrence in Stanford Hospital and take many forms. One of the most prominent is from the emergency room to the hospital wards. These high-stakes transfers sometimes involve challenges with communication or transfer of critical information to the accepting medical team. Our committee is working on implementing a tool to facilitate improved communication and safer transfers from the emergency room.

Team Members

  • Anisha Mazloom, MD, Pediatrics
  • Arpeet Shah, MD, Internal Medicine
  • Chris Winstead-Derlega, MD, Emergency Medicine
  • Frank Chen, MD, Internal Medicine
  • Josi Schwann, MD, Anesthesiology
  • Kathleen Jia, MD, Internal Medicine
  • Katie Doering, MD, Emergency Medicine
  • Michael Zhang, MD, Neurosurgery
  • Silvia Loica-Mersa, MD, Internal Medicine
  • William Shomali, MD, Hematology-Oncology
  • Z Jason Qian, MD, Otolaryngology Surgery

How You Can Participate

Residents

If you are a resident and want to join a committee we are always looking for enthusiastic members. We are also in need of residents to participate in Stanford Hospital Committee Meetings. 

 

What Are Stanford Hospital Committee Meetings?

Hospital committees are where important administrative decisions are made that affect the daily lives of residents and patients. Lijia Xie’s role is to encourage resident participation at committee meetings as we, the residents, keep the hospital running and should have a say in decisions that affect us and our patients. If you are interested in attending a hospital committee meeting, please email Lijia Xie at lijiax@stanford.edu. Thank you!

 

Faculty

If you are faculty we are always looking for resident safety council champions. Your role can be in advising one of the committees, mentoring one of the team’s leaders, or as simple as being the contact person for your department to help recruit and get the Resident Safety Council message to your residents.