Capella Health

Beverly Craig, RN, Vice President, Regulatory Compliance & Clinical Risk Management for Capella Healthcare, will be a featured panel participant at The Advisory Board Company’s Crimson Clinical Advantage 2012 Performance Summit on May 3-4 in Orlando, FL.

Crimson Clinical Advantage is a web-based technology solution available through The Advisory Board Company used to address physician quality performance improvement. Hundreds of healthcare organizations are expected to attend the Summit at which they’ll learn from peers and experts how they can maximize Crimson technology to execute against the clinical, financial, and physician integration imperatives set forth by the advent of value-based care.

Craig’s topic – Standardizing O.P.P.E. Across the Health System – focuses on Capella’s approach, which included company-wide adoption of the new resource to monitor physician quality performance across the family of hospitals.

“The Joint Commission and other accrediting bodies and payers have recently established strict guidelines that require hospitals to conduct continuing reviews of the professional practice quality of each of their medical staff members,” said Craig. “Called Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation (OPPE), the process involves evaluating six core areas that help to measure a practitioner’s clinical and behavioral competence.

“Our goal with the Crimson technology has been to automate a very time-consuming, paper process with one that is easy to use and based on reliable data providing multiple benchmarks for comparison.  Overall, this should drive quality performance in a way that is actionable rather than just creating a process to meet a requirement.

“A well-designed and compliant OPPE program is able to show that a physician with clinical privileges is competent in the exercise of those privileges. The second purpose of OPPE is to intervene in a timely manner when there is evidence that clinical expectations have not been met. While making an OPPE program work involves administrative planning and execution, the most important factor is engaging the leadership of the medical staff to ensure that the process is meaningful and that it fulfills its purposes.”

Capella’s National Physician Leadership Group, including physicians from every affiliated hospital, selected The Advisory Board’s Crimson Clinical Advantage during the summer of 2010 as the tool through which the company would address physician quality performance improvement.

“With the direction of our medical staff leadership and the support of individual physicians, this tool is helping Capella’s hospitals and physicians work collaboratively to advance our goals in the delivery of quality, efficient, compassionate care.”

With 30 years of clinical experience, Craig is responsible for corporate oversight and program development related to regulatory compliance, accreditation, clinical risk management, patient safety and medical staff credentialing. She assists Capella’s hospitals in developing effective clinical risk management programs with the goal of enhancing patient care and patient safety.  She currently serves on the quality committee for the Federation of American Hospitals and is an active member of the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management (ASHRM).