Connecting Strategic Operational Priorities Across the Health System
Cincinnati Children’s Operational Excellence, or OpEx, teams focus on connecting strategic operational priorities across the health system’s divisions. These priorities include enhancements and synergies around:
- Access, capacity, flow
- Employee experience
- Employee safety
- Patient and family experience
- Patient safety
The Mental Health Site of Care has an OpEx team made up of four leads: Beverly Smolyansky, PhD, a psychologist in the Division of Behavioral Medicine and Clinical Psychology, and Martine Lamy, MD, PhD, medical director of the Neurobehavioral Continuum of Care within the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Joe Luria, MD, Vice President Mental Health Operations and Adam Hill MSN, RN-BC, CPN, Vice President Patient Services. The group serves as mental health OpEx leads.
As mental health OpEx leads the group’s role is to bridge the operational work going on within the health system across its mental health divisions, which are now housed under the umbrella of the Mental and Behavioral Health Institute (MBHI).
“We serve as representatives for the MBHI divisions at the executive operational level,” Smolyansky says. “We look out for the divisions and help serve as connectors.”
One of Smolyansky’s and Lamy’s main initiatives is to improve the patient and family experience, including through implementing a more streamlined referral process and raising awareness of coordinated crisis services for mental health, like the Psychiatric Intake Response Center (PIRC), the PIRC Bridge Crisis Clinic and other outreach initiatives.
These services help divert unnecessary emergency department (ED) use and allow more patients and their families to receive necessary crisis-based services on an outpatient basis.
“Even though PIRC is run by psychiatry, everyone can access our behavioral and mental health services that way,” Lamy says. “We want providers to have their patient families call PIRC before going straight to the ED.”
