2022 Medicus Integra© Award Recipients

Texas Health Physicians Group • Bon Secours Mercy Health

Texas health physicians group • 2022 Medicus integra© awardee

The Texas Health Physicians Group is a part of Texas Health Resources, headquartered in Arlington Texas. The group employs approximately 1075 providers, of which 600 are physicians. These physicians are spread over a wide geographic area in northern Texas/and the Dallas Fort Worth Metropolitan area. The leadership of the group consists mostly of physicians, and has actively focused their leadership to integrate physician wellbeing into their workflow, culture, learning processes and resilience support since 2018. The efforts are spearheaded by Dr. Lynn Myers. Leadership in the group is clearly supportive of Dr. Myers and her efforts, and are expressing tangible, business goal improvements based on her work. The culture of the group is transparent, intentional and collegial. Some members of leadership who were initially supportive, but skeptical of the usefulness of physician wellbeing work, now see it as an integral business strategy for the group.

The work continued and accelerated through the Global COVID 19 pandemic, and the group had improved productivity (110% of previous) during COVID, when nationally productivity decreased. This is clearly expressed by the physicians as related to improvements in business processes and the culture directly related to the group’s wellbeing focus. Through the survey process, the physicians all relayed their trust in the administration, particularly Dr. Lynn Myers, Dr. Parsley and Dr. Richwine. There is support over the years from Dr. Ewton, who remains committed to the wellbeing mentoring program in his role as an emeritus member of the physician group. Improvements were made in EMR processes, which resulted in their ability to get home earlier, responsiveness of their leaders to their expressed needs, and the willingness of administration to trust them to lead their own improvement projects.  

Texas Health Physicians Group receives notable recognition for the following initiatives:

• Responsiveness to Physician Process Feedback
• Former mentoring program was felt to be “process heavy” in feedback from mentors. Therefore, the program was stopped and a new program that was more “process light” was created to meet the expressed needs around content/paperwork/time
• EMR
• Processes and inclusion of physician input to builds 
• Creative wellbeing focused approach to using the creativity of interested physicians to develop unique pathways to reach clinical quality goals and reduce physician documentation – programs include:
• Speed Force 
• Home By Five Program 
• Builder Buddy Program
•  Physician Leadership Training
• Physicians Lead! – over 300 physicians trained (25% of total physicians) and they have clear projects which the group supports and implements in a sustainable manner. The physician leaders of the group are graduates of this training program.
• CME on an app – over 200 videos covering diverse topics that are directly applicable to daily practice and which are easily accessible and widely used
• CME for EMR learning
  
• Weekly talks led by EAP that have attendance of 40-300 physicians and which were found to be very supportive of resilience during COVID pandemic
• EAP includes coaching/counseling functions and is available to family members and  “permanent residents at the household” and which holds high trust and regard from the physicians
• Physicians interviewed that are not in leadership positions feel a strong wish to be available and approachable for colleagues, and expressed particular stories in which they helped another provider
  

Bon secours mercy health • 2022 medicus integra© awardee

BSMH has as its heritage the Congregation of the Sisters of Bon Secours, founded by Josephine Potel in 1824, in Paris, France, and The Religious Sisters of Mercy, founded in 1831 in Dublin, Ireland, by Catherine McAuley. BSMH was formed in 2018 by the integration of Bon Secours Health System and Mercy Health, formerly Catholic Health Partners. BSMH has more than one thousand sites of care across 7 states and Ireland. They provide over $2M dollars per day of community benefit on a $10B annual net operating revenue. BSMH provides services under two different brands in ten distinct markets across four states with over 3,000 physicians and advanced practice clinicians (APCs). These providers will see over 1.3 million unique patients for over 6.3 million visits this year. The system medical group supports clinicians in the various markets. Most markets have a Chief Medical Officer. Employed medical groups are governed using a Limited Liability Corporation (LLC). Each market has separate boards for primary and specialty care.

Goals of Survey

To help BSMH fulfill their mission of extending the compassionate ministry of Jesus.

To help representatives of BSMH answer questions they identified:

• How do we get 3200 of our providers to feel heard?
• Are the things we are doing on target?
• Are there blind spots?
• Are there things we are doing that we need to share?
• Employed physicians unload administrative responsibility at the cost of lost autonomy.
• Why do employed physicians have an attitude of entitlement to benefits?

Bon Secours Mercy Health receives notable recognition for the following initiatives: