Hail and Farewell - Emily Sedgwick, M.D.
With the 2019 BCM 6th Annual Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Conference, Nana Ekua Coleman, M.D., Ed.M. (photo above right), took over as the Activity Director from Emily Sedgwick, M.D. (photo above left). Until the past Fall, Dr. Sedgwick had been the Chief Quality Officer of Faculty Group Practice and Medical Director of Breast Imaging at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM).
When BCM
recruited Dr. Sedgwick in 2007 to lead its breast imaging program, she wanted
to improve how the program’s patients were treated. Not being certain
about what that meant in terms of
processes and outcomes, she began to learn about performance improvement,
quality improvement, management skills, compliance, IT, CPT codes, and billing.
She received formal training in the Intermountain Program, completed quality
improvement courses at Harvard Business School, and was awarded the designation
of Certified Physician Executive in the American Association of Physician
Leadership. In 2011, while on the BCM Quality Improvement and Patient Safety
Committee, Dr. Sedgwick began a collaboration with the BCM Institute for
Healthcare Improvement Open School Chapter to develop a quality improvement
conference for trainees. Since the Conference’s inception in 2012, attendance
has grown to more than 200 from around the state of Texas. Each year the conference relies
on findings from attendee surveys to improve. Most recently these findings have
been used to emphasize the team-based approach to quality improvement and
patient safety and to offer topics that are relevant to non-physicians.
With that in mind, nursing continuing education credit is now available for nurse attendees. As Dr. Sedgwick departs her role as Activity Director for the Conference, she wishes to
encourage individuals who have ideas about how to improve care, to pursue those
kind of dreams as she had done, because “we all should and could do better.”
Dr. Coleman is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics-Critical Care at Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine and also Assistant Dean for Graduate Medical Education at Baylor College of Medicine, where she is the Team Launch Education Director. She views the opportunity to lead this Conference as an important unifying step of her professional work in quality in safety.
Prior to moving to BCM nearly five years ago, Dr. Coleman served as a divisional director for quality and safety at a large academic institution and was later promoted to lead the departmental work in this area. She is a practicing pediatric critical care physician at Texas Children’s Hospital. Through her work as a clinician, with the conference and other institutional initiatives, she has been able to consider quality and safety from three perspectives: how to optimize the delivery of patient care; how to engage leaders from an organizational management paradigm to advance work in this field; and how to make meaningful differences in educational processes and outcomes to improve the preparedness of clinicians to integrate quality and safety in their work. Dr. Coleman was one of the first to be trained as a Master Trainer in Team STEPPS, a nationally recognized program to improve patient safety within a healthcare organization. She was appointed as Assistant Dean in Graduate Medical Education at BCM, with focus on healthcare quality and patient safety in 2015. Dr. Coleman serves as the institutional lead for the ACGME Clinical Learning Environment Review (CLER) program at BCM and its affiliate hospitals, through which she has developed administrative and educational programs for faculty and house staff across the six core program focus areas, including quality and patient safety.
Dr. Coleman
has previously participated in the annual Quality Improvement and Patient Safety
Conference as both a speaker and an attendee over the past several years. Under
her leadership, she hopes for this Conference to be viewed as the premiere quality
and safety academic event at BCM, the Texas Medical Center, and beyond,
where each year, individuals are able to share ideas, learn more about where
the field is going, and leave the Conference prepared to innovate for the future.
Posted: April 2019