Questions for Deans/President-Senate Discussion – July 13, 2015
Niesel:
Please summarize the intent, initial input, next steps, etc, etc, from the recent Research Enterprise Planning
Session and ongoing strategic planning.
Callender:
Please provide a bri ef overview of the Chancellor’s recent visit; e.g. UTMB-specific feedback, System-wide initiatives, etc.
All:
Over the past 2 years there have been an unprecedented number of faculty and staff that have resigned and left UTMB. What is the administration doing to systematically understand the drivers of this exodus?
“Many faculty are >1.0 FTE, but have their numbers changed to add up to 1.0 on paper even though it does not change the work that they actually do. What efforts are in place to ensure that documented FTE matches what faculty actually do?
Division leaders are often not provided financial transparency by their respective departments regarding their division’s productivity and costs. This information is crucial to being an effective Division leader with regard to plotting the future course of the division, future hires and growth, and strategic planning. What can be done to provide division leaders with financial transparency when it is not being readily provided by the department?
UTMB’s use of travel agency/broker for faculty needing flights and hotels for conferences is a time consuming, cumbersome, and cost inefficient process. Faculty are able to find better prices and deals online than Marchi travel provides. Marchi travel also adds extra booking fees making even comparable prices found online more expensive to book through Marchi travel. Can we change the flight and hotel reservation process to where faculty can make their own reservations which will streamline the booking process, improve efficiency, and save money for UTMB?
Clinical :
Background info : UTMB rates ‘worse than expected’ for 30 day unplanned readmissions on the Medicare
Hospital Compare website. Some providers feel they are being pushed to discharge patients before their needs have been met. Moreover, there are significant delays in getting diagnostic tests done and back (e.g. no surgical path results over the weekends, limited OR time for emergent procedures on inpatients, limited number of bone marrows on inpatients). Currently, it is unclear what is being done about our high readmission rate & other potential inefficiencies in care.
Question: To what extent are the Academic and/or Research Enterprises involved in (or aware of) efforts to improve the quality of patient care?
“What is the plan for transitioning from fee for service to a quality based system?”
Clinicians performing direct patient care have not been included in the design and location of facilities where they are asked to practice, and most of this input comes from leaders and faculty who are not directly involved in clinical care. How can we change this process to further enhance operations efficiency, clinical productivity, and faculty satisfaction and retention?
Faculty are asked by their Department chairs to cover more off site clinics and inpatient services (future:
Victory Lakes and/or Angleton Danbury) without providing more clinical faculty and support staff to cover these clinical care needs. What is being done to hire the needed clinical faculty and staff to cover primary and subspecialty care demands?
When the new Victory Lakes hospital opens, where will the patients come from?
“What is the vision for helping to treat the uninsured and underinsured of Galveston?”