As Senior Vice President of System Quality at Spectrum Health, John Byrnes, MD, has helped bring together the system's clinical and financial leaders.
By Sarah Fister Gale
John Byrnes, MD, senior vice president of system quality at Spectrum Health, has spent his professional life finding ways to improve the quality of healthcare delivery at institutions across the country. “My career has been about quality and patient safety,” he says, “and that’s what it will continue to be about until I’m done.”
Beginning his medical career as an anesthesiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center, Texas Medical Center, in Houston, he went on to lead quality improvement, patient safety, and outcome reporting programs at Sharp HealthCare, Catholic Healthcare West, and Lovelace Health System before arriving at Spectrum. His quality initiatives have helped cut hospital stays, reduce infection and mortality rates, and improve the overall health of key patient groups through proactive care management programs.
Byrnes attributes these successes in part to his willingness to make friends with the finance department. “The war between clinical and finance has held us all back,” Byrnes says. He admits that he used to feel that same hostility toward the financial team until 1998, when he met Lori Anderson, head of decision support for the financial department at Catholic Healthcare West—and his future wife.
“She bopped into my office one day, a few weeks after I got there, and offered to help,” he says. At first, he dismissed her offer with a laugh, but she quickly won him over by showing him the wealth of data that the finance department had access to and how it could be used to identify quality issues and to benchmark performance.
“Using this data, you can profile any hospital or individual doctor to identify practice patterns,” he says. “It’s very powerful information that can help increase quality exponentially.”
Byrnes points out that some hospitals, physicians, and executives assume they provide quality health care, so they think they don’t need to invest resources into the quality department. “That has been the biggest hurdle,” he says of his efforts, noting that the data reports on patient outcomes have helped him convince leadership that there is always room for improvement. “In health care, it’s important to be perceived as delivering the highest quality in the industry,” he says. “It’s a powerful marketing message, and staff morale goes through the roof.”
With executive support and the ability to track and prove cost and quality improvements using finance data, Byrnes helped Spectrum become a leader in quality care delivery. The programs he implemented at Spectrum have won the organization more than 50 quality awards during the past five years. These programs have also led to the improved health of the entire diabetic population served by its Michigan clinics, significant reductions in complications and medical errors for cancer patients at its Children’s Hospital, and an overall reduction in bypass mortality rates to 0.9 percent, when the industry average is 2.2 percent. Through the programs, Spectrum also identified an additional $3.6 million in future potential savings through further reduction in complications for surgeries such as C-sections, coronary artery bypass graft surgery, and angioplasties, Byrnes said.
“Historically, it’s been hard to sell the link between ROI and quality to the C-suite, but quality is as important as finance to the performance of the organization,” Byrnes says. “I told them, ‘Any money you give me to invest in quality efforts I will return to the organization as ROI.’”
He plans to continue to break down the silos around the quality and finance teams for the rest of his career because he sees it as the most direct way for patients, clinical staff and administrators to achieve the best results. “You only need one tool set—quality improvement. Ninety percent of the time when you make quality improvements it drives efficiencies and saves a significant amount of money.”