Catherine Lau, MD, assistant professor at UCSF School of Medicine detailed the program at Hospital Medicine 2014, the Society of Hospital Medicine’s national conference.
According to Dr. Lau, hospitalists at UCSF and UCLA partnered with anesthesiology and neurosurgery leaders to identify areas in neurosurgery that could benefit from expanded interventions focusing on improved neurosurgery patient outcomes. The multidisciplinary team developed a toolkit that included a number of key components, including developing a postoperative clinical care checklist to reduce mortality and complications.
The toolkit is being implemented at all University of California medical centers and researchers will collect data on the program’s impact. “We created this interdisciplinary collaboration and decided that we wanted to standardize practices across all five UC medical centers to hopefully improve neurosurgical outcomes and care experiences,” said Dr. Lau to Medscape Medical News.
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