September 18, 2023

Texas Children’s continues to see growth and success in our efforts to support a positive working environment, bring awareness to organizational needs and transform the way we make improvements.

Highlights
  • Culture Rounds was featured during the Joint Commission Survey as a best practice for prioritizing the organizational focus on safety, quality and experience.
  • Cross-departmental leaders took action to resolve several technology concerns, including fixing and replacing several TVs in prominent patient locations.
  • IS helped resolve several action items identified during rounds including improved internet connection in CVICU, fixed printers and resolved MyCheck issues in MyChart.
  • After TICU/PICU families candidly shared challenges regarding long hospital stays and obtaining basic necessities, Volunteer Services partnered with a local Girl Scout Troop to create a new (and ongoing) hospitality cart with toiletries and comfort items.
  • Caught You Caring achieves milestone with over 11,000 submissions this fiscal year – click here to read a few special submissions!
  • Team members were thrilled to learn we’re investing in several new shuttle buses.
  • Upon learning a patient recovering from surgery wanted to meet the Chick-fil-A Cow, Culture Rounds made his birthday wish come true with a special visit!
Phase V Schedule & Tips

Executive teams and unit leaders will continue rounding and building relationships with patients, families and team members. Phase V will conclude Wednesday, Nov. 15.

  • Wednesdays from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. are designated by Texas Children’s as protected time for Culture Rounds, with the exception of rounding on our evening workforce.
  • Teams are encouraged to reschedule sessions on Oct. 4 in light of a system-wide leadership meeting.
  • Continue to utilize Cipher reports to drive action item resolution, and work as a team to help provide solutions!

Click here to read the full Culture Rounds newsletter update and share with your teams! Please email culturerounds@texaschildrens.org with any questions or suggestions.

August 11, 2020

Thanks to Texas Children’s Hip Preservation Program, eighteen-year-old Mallory Sweeney is back to doing what she loves – dancing. Read more

June 22, 2020

Interim Physician-in-Chief Dr. James Versalovic and several other Texas Children’s physicians recently published a paper in the Oxford Academic: The Journal of the Pediatric Diseases Society detailing the clinical course of 57 children with COVID-19 cared for at Texas Children’s at the beginning of the pandemic. Dr. Catherine Foster with Infection Control and Prevention is the lead author of the paper and Dr. Judith Campbell with Infection Control and Prevention is the senior author.

The paper’s overall findings were that most of the children were mildly symptomatic, and only a few patients with underlying medical conditions required hospitalization. System wide, the patient evaluation processes at Texas Children’s allowed for prompt identification and management of patients with COVID-19.

“These outcomes are an affirmation that we were doing what we need to do to provide the best care for patients and their families,” said Campbell, medical director of Infection Control and Prevention. “They tell us that we are identifying patients early and getting them the help they need quickly all while helping to reduce the spread of COVID-19.”

Some key findings of the study, which took place during the first five weeks of the outbreak in Houston include:

Identification process

  • Pre-procedural surveillance testing identified three patients who had no respiratory symptoms
  • The majority (71 percent) of cases presented in the ambulatory setting

Patient demographics

  • Fifty-six percent of all 57 patients were male
  • Median age was 10.7 years (range was 0.1 – 20.2 years)
  • Asthma (12 percent) was the most common underlying condition, followed by sickle cell disease (7 percent)
  • More than half of the cases (54 percent) reported a laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 household contact
  • International travel was reported in two cases (Mexico and Commonwealth of Dominica) and interstate travel in one case (New Jersey)
  • Most patients (83 percent) presented with either fever or cough, including all of the patients who presented to the Emergency Center
  • Fever was reported in 53 percent of ambulatory patients, 90 percent of EC patients, and 25 percent of hospitalized patients

Patient care

  • Six patients were cohorted in the Special Isolation Unit at Texas Children’s Hospital West Campus
  • Half of the hospitalized patients required supplemental oxygen via nasal cannula, and 1 patient was on home bilevel positive airway pressure without supplemental oxygen.
  • No patients required mechanical ventilation
  • The median length of stay was 2 days (range, 1 – 10 days)
  • None of the 57 patients received therapeutic agents to treat COVID-19
  • No patients died

In addition to the data above, the paper evaluated Texas Children’s Hospital’s integrated system approach to the evaluation and management of patients during the COVID-19 pandemic by performing a retrospective assessment of all pediatric patients with COVID-19 cared for through the Texas Children’s system.

COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11. As of the beginning of June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported more than 1.8 million COVID-19 cases and 100,000 plus deaths in the United States. Early reports have provided critical insights on the clinical manifestations of the disease in children. Most children appear to have asymptomatic or mild to moderate respiratory illness, whereas adults, especially the elderly, are more likely to suffer severe respiratory illness and a higher case fatality rate. Given the rapidly evolving nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, data on the epidemiology and clinical course of pediatric patients with COVID-19 in the United States are lacking.

“That’s why it’s so important to document what we are seeing and doing and share these findings with the medical community worldwide,” Versalovic said. “Texas Children’s has been doing this since the onset of the pandemic and will continue to be on the leading edge of scholarship and care of pediatric COVID-19 patients.”

Paper authors include:
Dr. Catherine Foster, Infection Control and Prevention
Dr. Elizabeth Moulton, Infection Control and Prevention
Dr. Flor Munoz, Infection Control and Prevention
Dr. Kristina Hulten, Infection Control and Prevention
Dr. James Versalovic, Interim Physician-in-Chief
Dr. James Dunn, Pathology
Dr. Paula Revell, Pathology
Dr. Tjin Koy, Infection Control and Prevention
Dr. Amy Arrington, Special Isolation Unit
Dr. Lucila Marquez, Infection Control and Prevention
Dr. Judith Campbell, Infection Control and Prevention

March 2, 2020

Not so long ago the Claims department at Texas Children’s Health Plan faced significant challenges. Those challenges led to unhappy providers and millions of dollars in state penalties. But in the last year April Riggs, director of Claims Administration – and her newly restructured team – have overseen a remarkable turnaround. The team is more efficient, providers are happier and within the last eight months, the department has incurred $0 in state penalties.

Remarkable is perhaps an understatement.

In record time, the team has:

  • Ensured that 98 percent of all claims are paid within 30 days.
    • They reduced the average time from 22 days to five days.
  • Reduced the amount of claims in cue.
    • The team had 80,000 claims in cue at their lowest performance level.
    • The goal was to be at less than 30,000 claims in cue, which they have achieved and sustained for 14 months.
  • Eliminated liquidated damages, which are non-compliance penalties issued by the state.
      • The department previously incurred $2 million in damages over a 21- month period.
  • For the past eight months, they have incurred NO new liquidated damages.
How did they do it?

“We coined our mission Mission Possible and we set some very straight forward goals,” said Riggs. “We knew that to be successful we had to define our mission, review historical practices and in no way could we return to business as usual.”

Riggs immediately set her team on a course that consisted of:

  • Putting the right people in the right positions
  • Making data driven decisions
  • Implementing metrics that matter
  • Consistently monitoring productivity; and
  • Collaborating with key business partners

After all of these efforts were in place, she noticed a shift occurring within her team. “It was a pleasure to watch it happen. We became a team that could identify issues very early on and then move swiftly to identify solutions.”

And if that wasn’t enough, Riggs said her staff began daily briefings to review their work for the day, the week and even for the following week. “I believe Mr. Wallace calls that skating to where the puck is going to be,” she said.

Indeed it is.

Members of Texas Children’s plastic surgery team have given 6-year-old Elvina Kolevi a chance at a new life after treating injuries she sustained during a burn when she was 2 years old. Watch ABC 13’s story about the little girl’s transformation.

Texas Children’s Neurosciences Program is all about improving patient outcomes. Every day, our team of neurologists, neurosurgeons, geneticists, physician-scientists and researchers are working together tirelessly to pioneer innovative therapies to improve the lives of children with neurological disorders.

On February 21, neuroscience leadership at Texas Children’s together with faculty and staff convened for the inaugural Neurosciences Retreat at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute (NRI). This informative and engaging event provided our multidisciplinary team of neurologists, neurosurgeons, clinicians, researchers, behavioral health experts, and more the opportunity to reflect on past successes, discuss areas of possible improvement, identify transformative goals and actively plan for the future.

After welcome remarks from Executive Vice President Dan DiPrisco, the retreat began with a moderated panel discussion with two patient families who shared their inspiring stories that brought them to Texas Children’s Hospital. One of the guests was Debbie Sukin, the daughter of the late Dr. Ralph D. Feigin.

Sukin’s two sons, 18-year-old Jacob and 15-year-old Eli, were born with neurological challenges. Jacob was diagnosed with Angelman’s syndrome and Eli was diagnosed with a very rare neurological disorder caused by a CASK gene mutation diagnosed through genome DNA sequencing at Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine.

“Texas Children’s holds a very special place in my family’s heart,” Sukin said. “We always knew about the hospital’s focus on clinical care and research, and didn’t quite know at the time that it would be so beneficial and important to our family. We are very much involved, on both the basic science and clinical sides, and the multidisciplinary components that are necessary to care for a child with neurological issues.”

The Sukin family’s journey, like so many other patient family stories shared at the retreat, highlight our clinical and research partners’ collaborative efforts in advancing neuroscience research, ultimately leading to the development of novel treatments and discovery of cures for neurological disorders.

“We’re always striving to do things better, and I think this retreat is one step towards getting us there,” said Texas Children’s Chief of Neurosurgery Dr. Howard Weiner. “Everyone here is ready to embrace a new idea if it’s going to advance the field forward. The key to our success is the ability for everyone – in Neurosurgery and our amazing colleagues in Neurology and the NRI – to work together for our patients.”

Weiner, along with Dr. Gary Clark, chief of Neurology and Developmental Neuroscience, and Dr. Huda Zoghbi, director of the NRI, participated in a panel discussion that highlighted the organization’s bench-to-bedside achievements in neuroscience research and neurological care over the last 20 years, and outlined collaborative opportunities to accelerate innovation and research to improve patient outcomes.

“We’re entering the renaissance of neuroscience in pediatrics,” Clark said. “Neurology and neurosurgery are not the same programs they were five or 10 years ago. Neurological diseases that we thought for years were not treatable, have become approachable with new DNA therapies, enzyme replacement therapy to treat lysosomal disorders, and minimally-invasive surgical approaches like laser ablation, that was pioneered at Texas Children’s, and has yielded successful outcomes for treating epileptic seizures.”

The panel also discussed strategies to ensure a seamless flow from bench to bedside, that will help researchers accelerate the discovery behind the causes of neurological diseases so that effective therapeutic interventions can be developed to improve the quality of life and outcomes for patients.

“At the NRI, our teams have identified the causes of about 66 different neurological disorders, some degenerative, others developmental or psychiatric, and have identified the path for therapeutics,” Zoghbi said. “Together, with our collaborators and trainees, we are charting new paths towards viable therapies that will have an immeasurable impact on families suffering from unexplainable neurological diseases.”

After the panel discussions, attendees split up into pre-selected breakout groups. The teams chose their groups based on the topic, and were tasked with helping to establish neuroscience goals and collectively chart the path for treatments, discoveries and cures to be realized over the next five years

The breakout groups facilitated lively discussion and engagement around these topics:

  • Operational Excellence: Facilitating support for clinical care and research
  • Translating Discoveries to Therapies: Overcoming barriers in order to accelerate the translation of research discoveries into effective patient care and better outcomes.
  • Population Health: Strategizing on how to deliver better care to the large population of people with neurological diseases in Texas by preparing and empowering pediatricians to handle straightforward simple cases so Texas Children’s experts have band width to see more complex cases promptly.
  • Educating for the Future: Training the next generation of physicians, physician-scientists and scientists who will care for patients, enroll them in studies, push the research forward to discover new paths for interventions.
  • Research Funding: Increasing NIH funding to support the basic, clinical and training missions and to advance the agenda of discovery and therapeutics development.

“One of our goals coming into this retreat was to simply facilitate discussions,” said Senior Vice President Matthew Girotto. “We have world renowned clinical and research teams that, too often, do not connect with each other. By simply bringing everyone together, we were able to uncover several opportunities that could not only help accelerate discovery to improve patient care but also increase our collaboration with Texas Children’s Pediatrics in addressing many of the common neurological needs of children.”