Mission Health’s CEO cofounds National Taskforce on Humanity in Healthcare

Press release from Mission Health:

Mission Health today announced that Ronald A. Paulus, MD, President and CEO of Mission Health, has partnered with Bridget Duffy, MD, Chief Medical Officer of Vocera Communications, Inc., and William Maples, MD, President and CEO of The Institute for Healthcare Excellence, to design and launch the National Taskforce on Humanity in Healthcare (NTH).  The NTH has convened physicians, nurses, and healthcare and social change leaders to explore the crisis clinician burnout and to create a movement to help ensure that all care team members can achieve their highest healing potential.
“Our ability to proactively tackle this widespread and growing problem nationwide will be central to both helping our fellow caregivers and improving care quality and efficiency as we know that burnout is directly correlated to the quality, safety and cost of healthcare,” said Ronald A. Paulus, MD, President and CEO of Mission Health.  “Bridget and Bill are both national thought leaders on this topic. It has been a pleasure to lead this work alongside them as they are both dear friends and colleagues,” added Dr. Paulus.
In support of its mission to humanize healthcare, the NTH has outlined three imperatives in its position paper:
1.    to change the dialog around burnout and to focus on restoring joy to clinicians;
2.    to create and adopt a new metric for humanity in care delivery; and
3.    to design a blueprint for change to spread this work and impact clinicians on the front lines.
Each of these imperatives will be central themes during Vocera’s 14th Chief Experience Officer (CXO) Roundtable held April 24-25, 2018 in San Francisco, CA, where Dr. Paulus will speak.  Additionally, the NTH will release its Business Case for Humanity in Healthcareand NTH members will take the stage along with patient advocates, physician and nurse leaders, healthcare executives, innovators and researchers to extend this important work.
“We need to change the dialogue around physician and nurse burnout,” said Bridget Duffy, MD, Chief Medical Officer of Vocera and co-founder of the Experience Innovation Network, a community of healthcare thought leaders focused on technologies and programs that address the Quadruple Aim. “We must move beyond talking about the prevention of burnout, and instead systemically cultivate human connections with technology that fosters sacred relationships between clinicians and patients.”
“It’s past time to make countering physician and nurse burnout a priority. We all know that our nation’s medical needs will continue to grow as our population ages, so the time is now,” added Dr. Paulus.  “For Mission Health, rekindling joy among our cliniciansis central to our approach to patient care and it is at the core of everything we do.”
To read the Business Case for Humanity in Healthcare, please visit blog.
ABOUT MISSION HEALTH
Mission Health, based in Asheville, North Carolina, is the state’s sixth-largest health system. In 2018, for the sixth time in the past seven years, Mission Health has been named one of the nation’s Top 15 Health Systems by Truven Health Analytics, an IBM Company and part of IBM Watson Health. We are the only health system in North Carolina to achieve this recognition. Mission Health operates six hospitals, numerous outpatient and surgery centers, post-acute care provider CarePartners, long-term acute care provider Asheville Specialty Hospital and the region’s only dedicated Level II trauma center. With approximately 12,000 team members and 2,000 volunteers, Mission Health is dedicated to improving the health and wellness of the people of western North Carolina. For more information, please visit mission health or @MissionHealthNC.