Georgia Regents Health System, which includes the Georgia Regents Medical Center, the Children’s Hospital of Georgia, and numerous outpatient clinics, has three primary focuses: education, research and patient care. Located in the heart of Augusta, it infuses the local economy with over $1.5 billion a year.

Since coming to Georgia Regents in 2013, Dr. Kevin C. Dellsperger, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer, has directed his attention to oversight of medical staff, teaching medical students, continuing research interests in cardiology, information management and quality assurance. Quality assurance and information management have received extensive attention. “I’m creating a systems alignment of quality and an operations alignment of quality,” he explains.

He says, “While each patient is unique, patients are taken care of in much the same way.” The quality of patient care increases when a common process for evaluating, examining, testing, problem solving and treatment planning is implemented in the same method by all healthcare providers within the healthcare system. Once the common process is established and practiced, it can be customized to the needs of each particular patient. “That’s the system of care,” says Dr. Dellsperger, “and that’s an emerging concept. We’re very early in that journey.”

This structure for providing care was instituted in July. Dr. Dellsperger places emphasis on educating providers in using the new system. Additional training for current staff is planned for the coming months. “I’m bringing a lot of change to the organization,” says Dr. Dellsperger. “The biggest challenge is empowering the staff.”

Undergraduate programs within Georgia Regents University are also incorporating some of these concepts into their curriculums. In addition, undergraduate students with a variety of degree objectives have the opportunity to use the healthcare system as a real live laboratory in their capstone projects. Students will graduate prepared to contribute to the system of care paradigm. Dr. Dellsperger says, “It can give students a leg up in getting the job they want down the road.”

Information management in the 21^st century heavily impacts healthcare, an industry which requires accurate and accessible knowledge about patients while at the same time protecting confidentiality. “The electronic medical record [EMR] is meant to make the patient safer,” explains Dr. Dellsperger. An algorithm for analyzing the mass of patient data within the record, for example, can be constructed to alert a doctor at the precise moment of decline in a patient’s condition and trigger an earlier intervention.

In August, Georgia Regents Health System signed a 14-year, approximately $400 million agreement with Cerner Corp, a health technology innovator. The agreement is dubbed the Jaguar Collaborative. On September 29, Cerner took over operation of information technology for GR Health and the health system’s 120 IT employees became Cerner employees. The goal of the partnership is to create an efficient, cost-effective healthcare delivery model through technological innovation.

The partnership signed with Philips in July, 2013 serves the same general purpose. Using the rich data source managed by Cerner, GR Health can collaborate with Philips to solve routine problems of the healthcare workplace, such as alert fatigue. Dr. Dellsperger poses the question, “How do we use sophisticated mathematical modeling to redefine our alarm settings and alert settings to so that when they go off it’s a meaningful event?” Through synergizing data, healthcare professionals will be equipped to make the right decision 100 percent of the time.

In the true spirit of academia, these collaborations will contribute to and advance the body of knowledge regarding best practices for best patient outcomes. GR Health System has no plans to safeguard these innovations for its sole use. “Our goal is to share this knowledge with the world,” concludes Dr. Dellsperger.