News Around the State

Mississippi's HFMA chapter names Making It Count award winners

The Mississippi Chapter of Healthcare Financial Management Association (MSHFMA) recently honored five members with a 2012 Making It Count Award. Making it Count Awards recognize leadership and those who are willing to take an extra step, take a chance, speak up, or make a difficult choice because they believe that their actions will help a loved one, better their community, improve an organization, or bring about a needed change.

The awards were presented in Biloxi, MS, during the chapter’s annual institute, April 18-20.  

Jim Blackwood of Tallahatchie General Hospital was honored. 

In September of 2010, the Board of Trustees at Tallahatchie General Hospital  approached Billy Marlow, CEO of North Sunflower Medical Center, to help them develop a plan to improve the hospital’s processes and financial stability. Thereafter, Mr. Marlow consulted Mr. Blackwood, a successful Jackson attorney, about the formation of a management company for the Tallahatchie project, whereupon Mr. Blackwood was presented with the opportunity to partner with Mr. Marlow in the operation of the management group. Mr. Blackwood joined the management company in February 2011 as TGH’s Administrator.

Mr. Blackwood’s legal background - coupled with the business model proven successful by Mr. Marlow and North Sunflower Medical Center and his wealth of knowledge in health law  - has allowed him to quietly lead the hospital in new and exciting directions.

Chris Brown, Director of Patient Financial Services at St. Dominic – Jackson Memorial Hospital, was also honored with  Making It Count Award. Ms. Brown’s 21 years of experience at St. Dominic’s and her expertise in many different areas of the revenue cycle is a valuable asset as she is often called upon for insight on issues not specifically related to the business office. She is known among her peers as someone who will provide candid, honest feedback and has high expectations of herself and those with whom she works.

Since assuming the Director position in 2008, days in net accounts receivable have declined from 68 days to 54 days at the end of 2011. In addition, Chris’ focus on reducing days in net accounts receivable has helped improve the organization’s days cash on hand from 45 in 2007 to 72 days at the end of 2011. Chris plays an integral role on the revenue cycle committee, whose focus is to reduce accounts receivable, improve the efficiency of the patient registration process, and optimize reimbursement to the organization.

Mark Lafontaine of Singing River Health System was honored with a 2012 Making It Count Award. As Revenue Integrity Manager, Mark Lafontaine is responsible for many tasks within the revenue cycle including the AR management of 12 family practice clinics, five specialty clinics and a rural health clinic. He also oversees hospital Denial Management, Underpayment Recovery, Pricing Defensibility and the creation of any revenue enhancement opportunities. Mark is also currently the Revenue Cycle Project Manager for Singing River’s health information systems conversion.

Eddy Mahaffey of Magee General Hospital received an award. He currently serves a vital role in the organization as the Administrative Director of Clinical Services. With a professional background in radiological services he has been the cornerstone to lead this area by being seventh in the State of Mississippi to have a pictorial archival computerized system (PACS).

Magee General Hospital was the first small rural facility in the state to have this advanced technology. Although radiology is where his career began he has also shared his talent with other clinical service areas. He is responsible for the strategic direction and management of five revenue producing departments within the hospital as well as the patient access department.

Suzanne Young of Magee General Hospital was also recognized. She currently serves a key role at Magee General Hospital as Administrative Director of Non-Clinical Services.

Suzanne is a cum laude graduate of the University Mississippi Medical Center where she obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Medical Record Administration. She has accepted various challenges in areas of compliance, charge master, customer service and revenue cycle management.

In addition to her hospital obligations, she provides Independent Consultation for several healthcare facilities and legal firms. Suzanne also serves as an adjunct faculty member at Meridian Community College. In addition to her administrative duties, she manages six hospital departments. She is responsible for the strategic direction of various areas and strives to reach the goal of making Magee General Hospital a “Center of Excellence”.

Baptist Memorial Health Care receives grant from Susan G. Komen Foundation

The Susan G. Komen Foundation recently awarded a grant to Baptist Memorial Health Care’s Mississippi regional hospitals: Baptist Memorial Hospital-Golden Triangle, Baptist Memorial Hospital-Booneville, Baptist Memorial Hospital-North Mississippi and Baptist Memorial Hospital-Union County. The $48,000 grant will be divided evenly with each hospital receiving $12,000.

The one-year grant will cover the cost of mammograms and other diagnostic services to medically underserved women in communities the hospitals serve.

According to the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Facts & Figures 2012, estimates that 1,990 new cases of female breast cancer will be diagnosed in Mississippi, and approximately 440 women will die from the disease. More than 30 percent of the deaths from breast cancer in women more than 50 years of age are preventable through mammography screening. When caught early, 9 out of 10 women will survive breast cancer. Survival rates for breast cancer have steadily increased in women since 1990, thanks to earlier detection and improved treatment.  Mammography screening also increases the chance of detecting breast cancer small enough to be treated by lumpectomy instead of mastectomy and decreases the need for chemotherapy.

“Studies have shown that education and early detection saves lives. We are pleased to partner with the Susan G. Komen Foundation to offer Columbus area women the diagnostic care they need,” said Paul Cade, administrator and CEO of Baptist Golden Triangle.   

Health Management Associates, parent company of 10 Mississippi Hospitals, named one of World’s Most Admired Companies

Health Management Associates, parent company of 10 Mississippi hospitals, has been named by Fortune magazine as one of the World’s Most Admired companies in Health Care.  These hospitals are:

• Biloxi Regional Medical Center in Biloxi
• Natchez Community Hospital in Natchez
• Northwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center in Clarksdale
• Tri-Lakes Medical Center in Batesville
• Gilmore Memorial Regional Medical Center in Amory
• Madison River Oaks in Madison
• Crossgates River Oaks in Brandon
• Woman’s Hospital in Flowood
• River Oaks Hospital in Flowood
• Central Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson

"We are all very proud to be part of the Health Management family,” said Kace Ragan, Marketing Manager of the Southern Division. “This award is powerful evidence of the tremendous support Health Management provides each of our hospitals as they deliver great healthcare within each of their communities.  We are so appreciative for the dedication to patient care and commitment to excellence that is shown by our Associates and physicians throughout Mississippi.”

Within the category of Health Care: Medical Facilities, Health Management was named the No. 1 company in Quality of Products/Services and in Social Responsibility. Fortune compiles the ratings each year based on a survey of businesspeople in each industry who are asked to vote for the companies they admire most. Apple was named this year’s most admired company across all industries. The list will be published in the magazine’s March 19 issue.

 

Hollingsworth, Simmons named Marketing Professionals of the Year

Julie Hollingsworth, the director of marketing at Baptist Memorial Hospital-DeSoto, was recently named the Senior Marketing Professional of the Year for 2011 by the Mississippi Hospital Association's Society for Health Care Marketing & Public Relations.

Hollingsworth started with Baptist Memorial Health Care nine years ago as a Marketing Coordinator in 2002. In 2006, she advanced to Marketing Manager overseeing the five Baptist Mississippi hospitals and implementation of initiatives throughout the 14 hospital system. Shortly after BMH-DeSoto’s major tower expansion in 2006, she oversaw campaigns that contributed to the improvement of patient satisfaction and community perception by more than 30 percent, according to outside firm surveys while competitors stayed relatively flat or declined.  She then transferred to Baptist DeSoto as their Marketing Director. 

Hollingsworth is a native of Cleveland, Mississippi. She graduated summa cum laude from Delta State University receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a degree in design and continues advancing her education in health care earning 44 advertising and marketing-related regional and national awards.

Donna Simmons, the public relations director at South Mississippi State Hospital, was named the Junior Marketing Professional of the Year. 

Simmons earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mass Communication and Journalism with an emphasis in public relations from the University of Southern Mississippi and an Associate degree in Marketing and Management Technology from Jones County Junior College.  Simmons completed the Mississippi State Personnel Board’s Basic Supervisory Certification course in 2008.

She participates in the Mississippi Department of Mental Health’s Think Again/Shatter the Silence mental health education campaign and is a member of the Health Care Marketing and Public Relations Society and the Society for Hospital Auxiliaries & Volunteer Services of the Mississippi Hospital Association, the Area Development Partnership, the Pine Belt Chapter of the Public Relations Association of Mississippi and Clear Branch Baptist Church in Purvis.

The awards are given each year to an outstanding professional in the field of health care marketing and public relations. It is based on accomplishments and years of experience in the field, focusing on professionalism, creativity, contributions to the organizations and communities they have served, as well as continued dedication to learning and furthering the field of marketing and public relations.

 

 

IQH partners recognized for accomplishments

Outstanding participation contributed to the success of the Ninth Scope of Work as providers throughout the state took part in the quality improvement program coordinated by IQH and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Hospitals, nursing homes and clinics were among the entities participating in the program that is highlighted in a special edition of Quality Matters (attached below).

On Aug. 1, 2011, CMS gave the Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) an updated charter for leading change. The QIO Program invites all health care providers and health quality stakeholders, including patients and their families, to be a part of its new improvement initiatives.

More information is available at www.cms.gov/qualityimprovementorgs.

Download Quality Matters Special Edition Summer 2011

 

With Donation from Warren Foundation, UMMC Researchers Better Equipped to Study Cancer

A $15,000 donation to the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s tissue bank by the Leonard E. Warren Melanoma Foundation will support the future of cancer research and other disease investigations in Mississippi and beyond.

With the funding the University Biospecimen Repository bought a minus 80-degree freezer, capable of preserving thousands of samples of tumors, blood-serum and other tissues that investigators can use in research studies, said Dr. Alexandra Shaye Brown, UMMC assistant professor of pathology and repository medical director.

“This donation pays for a freezer – a very specialized one – but it also means so much more to physicians, researchers and cancer survivors,” she said.

Medical Center leaders, cancer researchers, surgeons and oncologists convened Thursday on the newly opened seventh floor of the Arthur C. Guyton Research Center, home of UMMC’s Cancer Institute. They gathered for a reception to greet and thank Melanoma Foundation officer Keith Warren and co-organizer Marshall Ramsey.

Warren and Ramsey established the foundation in 2003 in memory of Warren’s father, a victim of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. As a melanoma survivor and vocal advocate for screenings and early detection, Ramsey joined the cause. Ramsey is the political cartoonist at the Clarion-Ledger and Keith Warren is the paper’s systems editor.

They hold the foundation’s main fundraiser, the Run From the Sun, a 5K race in downtown Jackson each April. The event draws thousands of Mississippians and includes free skin-cancer screenings.

At the Sept. 15th gathering that marked the foundation’s first donation to UMMC, Warren said he was glad to support the repository.

“After learning about the UMMC Cancer Institute and the tissue bank, it looked like a great organization to support,” Warren said.

Ramsey said raising money through the foundation and donating to the tissue bank is a lemons-to-lemonade story of taking negative experiences with cancer and turning them into community events to fight the disease.

The road to a functioning tissue bank at UMMC goes back several years.

Brown completed her pathology residency at UMMC in 2006, moved to Houston for a fellowship at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center before returning to the Magnolia state in 2008 to join the School of Medicine faculty. While involved in breast cancer research in Texas she realized there was a gaping hole in many studies – a huge lack of samples from African-American females.

Brown knew Mississippi had plenty of patients who, with the proper consent and collection framework, could ease that disparity.

“Prior to our tissue bank, most tumors removed at UMMC were incinerated as medical waste,” she said. “We weren’t banking in Mississippi because we didn’t have the infrastructure.”

That infrastructure includes specialized freezers, such as the one the Warren Foundation’s donation purchased, as well as computers and software programs to catalog and track each specimen, centrifuges, dissection machinery and disposable laboratory materials like gloves and pipettes.

Funding and support for the 3-year-old repository has come from multiple sources. Dr. Steven Bigler, chair of pathology, gave space in his department for the repository. Cancer Institute Director Dr. Lucio Miele funded two researcher positions for the bank, and Dr. Scott Stringer, chair of Otolaryngology and Communicative Sciences, donated the repository’s first freezer from his department.

As the repository’s collection grows, researchers from UMMC and medical centers nationwide will be able to mine the repository’s computer system to tailor groups of, say, triple-negative specimens from women ages 45-55 whose tumors metastasized but who are now in cancer remission. Or a sampling of men in their 70s who had pre-cancerous intestinal polyps removed.

The larger the repository’s collection, the broader its applications, said Jesus Monico, a cancer researcher at UMMC and the repository’s administrative director.

“When our software system is fully implemented, we’ll be able to grab all these data points about each specimen,” Monico said. “Researchers will be able to know all kinds of information – when the tumor was resected, how long until it was frozen, what its hormone-receptor status was, how it was treated medically, how big it was and if the patient is still alive.”

With more detailed records, scientists can design study proposals with greater accuracy. And the more likely those proposals will be to win funding from federal institutes, non-profit associations and pharmaceutical companies.

With the increased freezer space from the Warren Foundation’s donation Brown and Monico said they will be able to start collecting pediatric, gastro-intestinal, lung and colon tumors.

“And it’s not just cancer, we’ll be collecting other samples pertinent to biomedical research,” Monico said.

They’ve contracted with specialists from Vanderbilt University’s tissue bank to help with software implementation and they plan to seek national certification for the repository. That label will prove the bank meets standardized criteria and is a reliable and credible source.

“We want to build this right,” Brown said. “We’re so grateful to Keith and Marshall for their support and we’re determined to make this a top-notch scientific resource.”

More information about the University Biospecimen Repository is available by contacting Dr. Alexandra Shaye Brown at ashaye@umc.edu

More information on the Leonard E. Warren Melanoma Foundation and the Run From the Sun can be found at www.runfromthesun.com

35 HMA Hospitals Named Top Performers on Key Quality Measures by the Joint Commission

Health Management Associates, Inc., announced that 35 of its hospitals were named as Top Performers on Key Quality Measures according to a report released recently by The Joint Commission.

To be recognized as a top performer on key quality measures an organization must meet two 95 percent performance thresholds. First it must achieve a composite performance of 95 percent or above after the results of all the accountability measures for which it reports data to The Joint Commission were factored into a single score, including measures that had less than 30 eligible cases or patients. Second it must meet or exceed a 95 percent performance target for every single accountability measure for which it reports data, excluding any measures with less than 30 eligible cases or patients. River Oaks Hospital was recognized for achieving these thresholds for Pneumonia

The HMA Mississippi hospitals named include:

• Biloxi Regional Medical Center, Biloxi
• Crossgates River Oaks, Brandon
• Gilmore Memorial Regional Medical Center, Amory
• Natchez Community Hospital, Natchez
• Northwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center, Clarksdale
• River Oaks Hospital, Flowood
• Woman's Hospital, Flowood

Rice Receives Direct Care Worker of the Year Award

Pictured are Kathy Van Cleave, Director of the DMH Division of Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementia; Linda Rice of D’Iberville; and Diana Mikula, DMH Deputy Executive Director and Director of the Bureau of Mental Health.

Linda Rice of D’Iberville was presented with the Direct Care Worker of the Year Award at the 12th Annual Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease and Psychiatric Disorders in the Elderly hosted by the Mississippi Department of Mental Health (DMH). The award is designed to honor someone who demonstrates commitment, compassion, competence, and leadership in the field of dementia care.   

“Ms. Rice has certainly demonstrated the characteristics of commitment, compassion, competence, and leadership in dementia care,” said Kathy Van Cleave, Director of the DMH Division of Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementia.  “I’m so excited that Ms. Rice was able to attend the Conference.  I trust she will take the information she has learned and will share it with her team.”

Rice, a Nursing Assistant with Gulf Coast Hospice, has worked with individuals with Alzheimer’s disease for the past 27 years. Nominated by her co-workers, she is described as someone who is not only an aide to clients, but also a friend. Her nomination letter reads, “she has spent numerous nights and weekends making sure no one feels alone. She forms a bond with all of her patients and caregivers…She has a special touch when it comes to dealing with all kinds of patients. She has been asked for by name by caregivers and family members.” 

DMH hosted the Conference in an effort to address the needs of people suffering from or caring for someone with Alzheimer’s disease. More than 500 people attended the conference. Because there was a tie for this award, Ms. Rice shares the Direct Care Worker of the Year Award with Pam Brown of Oxford. 

Carlton, Powell named Professionals of the Year

The Mississippi Hospital Association’s Society for Health Care Marketing and Public Relations recently named a Junior and Senior Professional of the Year for 2010. Tom Carlton was presented with the Senior Pofessional of the Year Award and Laurie Powell was presented the Junior Professional of the Year Award during the society's annual meeting in November in Madison, Miss.

These awards are given each year to an outstanding professional in the field of health care marketing and public relations. It is based on accomplishments and years of experience in the field, focusing on professionalism, creativity, contributions to the organizations and communities they have served, as well as a continued dedication to learning and furthering the field of marketing and public relations.

Hal Leftwich (right), administrator of Hancock Medical Center, presents Tom Carlton (left) with the Senior Professional of the Year Award.

Carlton has been with HMC since December of 2006 as marketing/development director. He has over 13 years of health care marketing experience. He is a member of the Rotary Club of Bay St. Louis (where he was honored as the Rotarian of the Year in 2009), the Lions Club of Diamondhead (where he was named the Melvin Jones Fellow in 2010), and Leadership Hancock County. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of Missouri.

Laurie Powell (right) is presented with the Junior Professional of the Year Award by Amy Sharpe, cancer services coordinator for St. Dominic Hospital (left)

Powell serves as a marketing specialist for St. Dominic Hospital in Jackson. She holds a B.A. in Communications and an M.S. in Instructional Technology from Mississippi State University.

She has also served as Jackson Chi Omega Alumni Panhellinic Representative (2008-10), Jackson Area Alumni Panhellinic Association Vice President (2009), a member of the Marketing Committee for WLBT Great Lengths Cancer Campaign (2010), and a member of the Marketing Committee for Drive to Inspire Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign (2008-10).

MAHQ awarded top association in nation

 
MsAHQ Officers John W. Pace, Helen Vance, Tiffany Welch. Merida Johnson, and Marie Howatt accept the NAHQ Silver Association of Excellence Award from NAHQ President Linda Scribner

During the 35th Annual National Association for Healthcare Quality Education Conference held October 1-3, 2010, in Kansas City, Missouri, the local affiliate chapter of NAHQ, the Mississippi Association for Healthcare Quality was awarded the Silver Association of Excellence award, designating it as the second best of all state chapter affiliates in the NAHQ organization. This is a very special recognition for MsAHQ as just two years ago they ranked very close to the bottom of the list. Their work to come from “worst to first” in less than two years has been widely recognized throughout the state by leaders including Governor Haley Barbour and Lt. Governor Phil Bryant.

Founded in 1984, the mission of MsAHQ is to be the advanced leader in quality in the healthcare industry by promoting the use of quality principles and practices in healthcare organizations and supporting the growth and development of healthcare quality professionals. The Mississippi Association for Healthcare Quality is recognized by leaders of healthcare organizations and by healthcare quality professionals as Mississippi’s premier source of expertise and affordable continuing education in the area of healthcare quality. MsAHQ will hold its Annual Fall Education Conference October 28-29, 2010, at the Lake Terrace Convention Center, Hattiesburg. For more information about MsAHQ or the Fall Conference visit www.missahq.org.