UCSF’s intensive care unit study receives $2.1 million Moore Foundation grant

A multi-center study of intensive care units (ICU) led by UCSF faculty has received a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant of $2.1 million. The study of ICUs, including two at UCSF, aims to better understand the nature of team-based care and patient involvement in ICU settings.

"Given their position in the delivery of care, ICUs are arguably the 'heart' of contemporary hospital-based care," said the lead investigator, Scott Reeves, PhD, director of UCSF's Center for Innovation in Interprofessional Education. "They not only subsume a significant proportion of a hospital's total expenditure, but demand that team-based care is provided in an effective manner to meet the critical care needs of patients."

The study will be part of the Moore Foundation's new national Patient Care Program announced today, Aug. 28, 2012. The program, in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, will focus on both engaging patients and their families in their own health care and developing a systems approach that reorganizes interprofessional teams, processes and technology to support that engagement and focus on patient safety. The work is also expected to decrease health care costs.

"We are proud to be partnering with the Moore Foundation and our colleagues at Johns Hopkins on this tremendously important initiative," said Mark R. Laret, chief executive officer of UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital. "Finding new ways to leverage the talents of our interprofessional teams, patient families and patients themselves in their own care represents new opportunities to drive up the quality and safety of the care we provide, and to drive down the cost of that care. These goals are essential elements of our new health care system."

Reeves, along with co-investigator Michael Gropper, MD, PhD, director of critical care medicine at UCSF Medical Center, will further explore the need for effective team-based care to reduce duplication of effort, restrict clinical errors, improve safety and enhance the quality of patient care.

This study will begin in the next few weeks. Reeves and his team have not yet selected which two ICUs at UCSF they will be working with but he said that the choices will take into account the other ICU sites involved in the study - Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore (led by Peter Pronovost, MD) and Toronto, Canada (led by Simon Kitto, MD, PhD).

Additionally, this week, Reeves, will serve as co-chair of an Institute of Medicine (IOM) workshop that aims to improve health care. Reeves, who is also professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Interprofessional Care, will co-lead the two-day public workshop, "Improving Health by Linking Education Practice Using Interprofessional Education," at the Keck Center of the National Academies in Washington, DC. He has been part of the IOM planning committee for this workshop, which is a part of the Global Forum on Innovation in Health Professional Education founded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.