Working Hard to Keep People Healthy

It might come as a surprise for some to know that GBMC HealthCare’s primary goal is to keep people from being admitted to the hospital in the first place, unless absolutely needed. A core building block of the GBMC HealthCare System is the patient-centered medical home, which delivers advanced primary care to our patients. Advanced primary care is designed to be accountable with you for your health over time. It’s not about a visit to the doctor only when you’re sick; it’s about developing a relationship between the patient and the entire care team, managing chronic conditions, and preventing illnesses before they occur by promoting a healthy lifestyle, administration of vaccines, and use of screening tests.

Committing to overseeing your health in one of our convenient GBMC Health Partners – Primary Care practices is one of the ways we keep members of the community healthy. Primary care practices are open early in the day, until late in the evening, on weekends and holidays so that should you develop a problem, you have access to your providers or their associates, who have your medical record. This increased availability helps you avoid unnecessary visits to an Emergency Room or urgent care center (which are often unfamiliar with you and your medical problems), and potentially helps you avoid hospitalization.

Another way GBMC keeps the community healthy is by providing the highest quality care for those who are already in the hospital, so they don’t have an unfavorable outcome or need to be re-admitted for a preventable complication. Team members carefully monitor and measure safety and quality performance on a number of metrics – such as surgical site infections, hand hygiene, and patient experience – using a process called Lean Daily Management, and results are shared on the website, www.gbmc.org/quality. This directly supports the organization’s vision phrase of "To every patient, every time, we will provide the care that we would want for our own loved ones."

Please feel free to visit the Patient Safety & Quality Measures webpage yourself, follow the President & CEO’s weekly blog, A Healthy Dialogue, and watch recent episodes of the To Your Health and Greater Living Live broadcasts on Facebook to learn more about the important work being done to keep you, your family, and the community healthy.