V E TE R AN S AFFAI R S & M I LITARY M E D I CI N E O UTLO O K
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■■ A soldier working in the Fort Drum, New York, pharmacy. In
one successful best practice, in Madison, Wisconsin, clinical pharmacists worked alongside primary care teams, taking the lead to discuss medication needs with patients and freeing up primary care doctors’ schedules to see patients with medical needs.
platform people can easily use, and pick up these projects on their own. That’s how we are getting these projects scaled and available to as many places as possible in the system. You just stated the words I was going to ask about. What is the Gold Status best practice? Does that relate back to the 15 or 20 of the sharks, if you will? It does. Gold Status best practices are what we end up with after our solicitation rounds go through the complete process. Let me describe to you how the process goes. The very first thing we do when we receive a submission is to send that submission to peer employees across the system who would be able to comment on it. For example, one of our Gold Status best practices was to develop group therapy sessions led by chaplains for veterans with moral injuries [people who have undergone events that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations] that had led to PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. Normally, a veteran with a moral injury will go to a psychologist or psychiatrist for medical intervention and counseling. This is an innovative way of helping veterans coping with moral injuries to deal with
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would like to bid on. And their bids aren’t money directly. They offer resource allocation within their own facilities to be able to get projects completed. That comes in the form of people, time, funding to implement technology, space, and equipment purchasing. So, it ultimately does come down to money. But the way we are getting the bids, and the form of the bids, are in terms of resources and resource commitments medical center directors are making across the country. At the end of that event, we end up having 20 finalists and multiple bids for those projects in different places. And we ultimately narrow it down to between 10 and 15 projects we consider Gold Status, and at the end of the planning summits, people are going back to their facilities ready to go to replicate the project. Because we have this tool [the Diffusion Hub] that has all the projects on it, replication is not just limited to the people who come to this summit. We end up getting a tremendous amount of what we call organic engagement – people picking up projects on their own because they are hearing about them. And because everybody’s contact information is on this electronic platform, people can easily reach out to the facilities where these projects originated. So that is another way in which we’re seeing a tremendous proliferation. People are more easily able to do that because we intensively project manage the initial round of replications. These are where the “sharks” have chosen someone to own the project. And we provide project management support and extensively document these experiences so we can put a toolkit on this