CHPSO

Patient Safety Culture Change

Patient Safety Awareness Week 2022
March 16, 2022 | 11:00 - 12:00PM PT

How can a health plan incentivize hospitals to develop reliable, sustainable and transparent cultures of safety? Learn about a groundbreaking new partnership of Inland Empire Health Plan (IEHP), BETA Healthcare Group (BETA) and Hospital Quality Institute (HQI) that rewards hospitals for participating in HQI Cares: Implementing BETA HEART® (HQI Cares), a comprehensive, multi-year program aimed at transforming patient safety and caregiver well-being. HQI Cares is now a part of IEHP’s Hospital Pay for Performance Program providing financial rewards to hospitals that meet quality improvement targets.

At the conclusion of this presentation, the participant will be able to

  • Learn about the benefits of HQI Cares: Implementing BETA HEART, a comprehensive program underway in 25 California hospitals designed to change patient safety culture and improve staff well-being. 
  • Understand how the program’s implementation is being conducted through an innovative partnership of three entities (a managed care health plan, a professional liability insurance company, and a quality improvement arm of a state hospital association.)

Click here for recording. 

Ms. Tarnow joined BETA Healthcare Group in 2010, having working in the healthcare field for over 25 years, with the last 19 years being dedicated to Risk Management. In her current role she is responsible for supporting member hospitals and insured medical groups by providing risk management and patient safety consultation, administrative and clinical risk assessments and education. She leads BETA’s PFCC efforts and BETA HEART®, a comprehensive response to patient harm. In her previous roles as a hospital based risk manager and Director of Risk Management and Patient Safety, Ms. Tarnow was responsible for risk identification, loss prevention, sentinel event management, and development and implementation of reliable systems to promote patient safety throughout an integrated healthcare system including the acute care hospitals, affiliated medical practices, and ambulatory surgery center.

Ms. Tarnow is a past president and current member of the California Association of Healthcare Risk Management (CSHRM). She is also a Certified Professional in Healthcare Risk Management (CPHRM), completed the Institute of Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Patient Safety Officer training in 2006 and the AHA/NPSF Patient Safety Fellowship in 2013.

Tim McDonald has worked as a faculty advisor to the BETA Healthcare group and their BETA HEART Program for the past five years. He currently serves as the Chief Patient Safety and Risk Officer for RLDatix. He teaches Risk Management, Patient Safety and Medical Liability at Loyola University – Chicago School of Law.  

As a physician-attorney, he has assisted more than 600 hospitals and health systems implement a process of “normalized compassionate honesty” combined with “fair and accountable” culture transformation. His research has focused on the implementation of the principled and humanistic approach to unexpected harm with an emphasis on early identification of harm events and the use of experiential learning for knowledge and skills development in the delivery of empathic and compassionate communication to patients and their loved ones and the provision of emotional first aid to affected health care team members following unexpected events. He has studied these domains and their impact on improving the quality of care while mitigating medical liability issues. He has also received numerous national and international patient safety awards and published more than 100 peer reviewed articles and book chapters on his work.

Genia Fick has been a part of the Inland Empire Health Plan (IEHP) team for over 19 years and has spent much of that time working in the field of Healthcare Quality.  Currently, Genia serves as the Vice President of Quality where she is responsible for leading diverse teams that support IEHP’s quality programs across the organization including quality monitoring and oversight; quality improvement; NCQA Accreditation; HEDIS Reporting; Clinical Informatics; Medicare Risk Adjustment; and Value-Based Payment programs. 

In addition to her work at IEHP, Genia has over 5 years of experience serving as a Certified HEDIS Compliance Auditor (CHCA) for the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) where she conducted Health Plan and Independent Physician Association (IPA) audits for HEDIS reporting, IHA Pay for Performance (P4P) reporting and CMS Medicare Data Validation.  Genia has a master’s degree in Health Psychology from Northern Arizona University where her studies focused in psychological links to health, research methods and statistics.