Tracey Hoke, MD
On Wednesday, October 19, 2022, Tracey Hoke, MD, Chief, Quality and Performance Improvement, participated in a meeting of The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), the sole body of advisors from outside the federal government charged with making science, technology, and innovation policy recommendations to the President of the United States and the White House. PCAST was seeking ideas from hospital leaders to improve patient safety and quality in U.S. healthcare. “Because this is a science and technology committee, we focused on ideas in this arena,” says Dr. Hoke.
“Changes in the healthcare workforce are our greatest challenge, so we suggested that any technology advances to support training, or ways to hardwire best practices, would be most beneficial to patients. Technologies that streamline documentation and offload work from providers would also be welcomed. The group discussed the need for reliable, predictive modeling tools to provide early warning of a patient’s decline as another way to support a relatively young and sometimes transient workforce. We talked about electronic health records and the need to have real interoperability between systems so that we can see all records for all patients,” Dr. Hoke remarks.
The group also discussed the need for focused support for harmonization of clinical data entry, deliberate collection and curation of social determinants of health risks, and hardwired connections to local resources. The conversation ended with a long discussion about clinical data collection and benchmarking versus reliance on administrative, or billing, data. Thank you, Dr. Hoke, for representing UVA Health, making technology recommendations to this council, and advocating for ways to improve patient safety and quality at UVA, in Virginia, and across the country.
Filed Under: Faculty, Honors & Awards