In this episode

Effectively reaching new and returning patients ultimately keeps them healthier. Brighton Ncube, an experienced healthcare executive and former SVP of Physician Practices and Ambulatory Care at Kingman Regional Medical Center, shares initiatives that improved outcomes for specific patient populations, even with limited resources.

He discusses the importance of understanding your unique patient populations and their healthcare conditions and challenges to effectively impact their health.

“As healthcare providers, we have to provide the best care, possible to our patient population and find ways to manage their health in the most effective way.”

– Brighton Ncube

 

Key takeaways

Brighton Ncube has spent many years as an ambulatory care executive, in addition to extensive time working to eliminate preventable diseases in Africa. He brings this perspective to a discussion on strategies to effectively manage health at the population level:

Understand your patient populations to address barriers to care.

“I always [try to] understand my [patient] population. What’s the demographics of my population? What are their barriers to care?” Ncube said. “For example, I’ve worked in rural communities where there are a lot of retirees. Most of the barriers to access are transportation. We then plan around that barrier,” Ncube said, with solutions for transportation and more virtual options for those patients.

Ncube also noted that after recognizing a demand for same-day sick visits, Kingman Regional began providing virtual same-day visits with guaranteed availability.

“In one of the systems that I worked for in Northern California, we had a wait time of nine months for colonoscopies. So we developed a team to [analyze the root causes] and implement process improvements,” he said. With multidisciplinary process improvements, including a period of time where colonoscopies were scheduled during weekends to address the backlog, “we reduced the wait time from nine months to three weeks,” said Ncube.

Look holistically at how you can impact specific care gaps. 

Speaking about Kingman Regional’s successful initiative to improve hepatitis C screening, Ncube outlined the following success factors:

• Checking for care gaps both in person and virtually.
• Promoting the importance of screening to patients.
• Reminding patients to complete scheduled visits.
• Ensuring that in addition to effective outreach, the organization planned ahead to have capacity for patients who came in for screenings.

Ncube emphasizes efficient processes leveraged from industries outside healthcare as a key innovation to be able to provide more effective care.

“There’s been a lot of innovations in implementing some of the methodologies which were prevalent in manufacturing industries…lean processes. Clinic managers will have a board outlining the metrics they’re tracking, which care teams are present…in healthcare, constantly we have to improve things. Applying processes from manufacturing to healthcare to say ‘This is how we do process improvement, this is how we monitor operations,’” Ncube said.

Ncube strongly emphasized the importance of operational improvements, capacity planning, and staff resources to make it possible to improve care.