In The Press
OCTOBER 2021
Reimagining bone and joint health while reducing disparities in care
Everyone has a role to play in improving bone and joint health. Exemplifying this belief is the new Center for Bone and Joint Health at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital.
By pulling together providers, resources, and services that better meet patients’ personal and specific needs, the Center is addressing the crisis threatening to disable a significant portion of the U.S. population and that is placing growing, burdensome costs on the healthcare system.
MAY 2021
What matters during a pandemic: Pain points and ideas from the front line
Never has it been more important to make sure your teams, especially point-of-care staff, feel heard and valued. COVID-19 has required much from many, but also has fostered an environment where empathy, community and connection through shared experience thrives.
DECEMBER 2020
Reducing disparities in musculoskeletal care: Focusing on bone and joint health
Living an active life requires bone and joint health. Musculoskeletal conditions like osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease, inflammatory arthritis and osteoporosis lessen a person’s quality of life, cause pain and disability, and significantly increase healthcare costs. The threat of limited mobility and disability from chronic pain and weakened bones is concerning for increasingly large portions of the aging U.S. population.
May 2020
What matters to you, matters to us
During a time of uncertainty and rapidly evolving change in the healthcare sector, it is imperative that we center and value what is important to the patients we serve and employees with whom we work.
December 18, 2019
Work out robotics value equation before adoption
Adoption of robotic systems by orthopedic surgeons has been slow and limited due to lack of improved efficiencies, the requirement of significant capital expenditure and no convincing evidence of changes in outcomes, according to an article in The Journal of Arthroplasty, by Brian S. Parsley, MD, in 2018.
August 7, 2018
6 ways medical technology has changed hospitals and patients’ care experiences
Use of electronic health records (EHRs) are increasingly prevalent in U.S. hospitals. Naturally, this shift toward paperless medical record-keeping has changed the way medical professionals interact with medical data, their patients and each other. But have these changes truly made the standard of care and patient experience better?
July 17, 2018
Co-design and teamwork helps CMU engineering alumnus Tony DiGioia improve outcomes for patients
Two patients have joint replacement surgery —one leaves the hospital two days before the other and goes directly home, skipping transitional care. The difference? That patient, her family and joint care team developed a plan for her that met her needs and prepared her for surgery and recovery beforeentering the operating room, including pre- and post-op exercises, pain management, anesthesia and rehab.
April 25,2018
Best Doctors in Pittsburgh 2018
Pittsburgh’s medical lifesavers rated by their peers, including anesthesiologists, cardiologists, dermatologists, neurologists, ophthalmologists, pediatricians, psychiatrists, surgeons, urologists & many more.
Check out Dr. DiGioia under Orthopaedic Surgery!
April 12, 2018
The Patient-Centered Value System: How Co-Design Improves Care Delivery, Patient Experience
Not every health system is committed to disrupting the status quo, but UPMC has made a point of doing just that. One example is a commitment to co-design, a methodology that treats care delivery as a complete experience from the patient’s point of view. UPMC is using the patient experience as a catalyst to drive transformational change.
From that first call to the doctor’s office to the appointment and hospital and then back home again, the methodology combines technologies to support process and system improvement. Scalable and customizable, this new “operating system” is now in place at many UPMC facilities and offices.
February 22, 2018
Doctors honored for volunteer work with Operation Walk Pittsburgh
Orthopedic surgeon Michael W. Weiss has a busy practice in the North Hills, but he says the best week of his professional life comes every year when he goes to underdeveloped countries in Latin America to perform free hip and knee replacements.
Dr. Weiss and surgeon Anthony DiGioia are co-medical directors of Operation Walk Pittsburgh, a nonprofit that has provided more than 400 joint-replacement surgeries since 2009 in Guatemala, Cuba, Panama and Honduras.
February 21, 2018
Book Review: The Patient Centered Value System: Transforming Healthcare through Co-Design
Those of us who have worked in the health care world for any length of time have an instinctive aversion to those who claim to have transformative ideas for this sector. Our problem is that we know too much about how hard it is to make even incremental change, much less transformative change.
November 7, 2017
Controlling the Growing Costs of Healthcare — with Better Results and Greater Patient Satisfaction
Better care, better experiences, and lower costs: they represent the elusive trifecta in today’s healthcare environment — but innovative systems are helping healthcare providers achieve all three.
Bundled payment structures are economic payment models intended to engage all members of the healthcare team. This economic packaging is designed to encourage hospitals, physicians, and post-acute providers to work together to improve both quality and coordination of a full episode of care, starting with the initial hospitalization and continuing all the way through recovery.
November 2, 2017
The Patient Centered Value System: A new operating system for the delivery of care
As Robert Ebert, dean of Harvard Medical School, wrote in 1965, “The existing deficiencies in health care cannot be corrected simply by supplying more personnel, more facilities and more money. These problems can only be solved by organizing the personnel, facilities and financing into a conceptual framework and operating system that will provide optimally for the health needs of the population.”
October 3, 2017
The Patient Centered Value System
The Patient Centered Value System: Transforming Healthcare through Co-Design by Anthony M. DiGioia, MD and Eve Shapiro was recently published. The forward was written by Don Berwick. I had the honor of authoring the preface. It was fun to have a really good professional writer, Eve Shapiro, help me shape my ideas. I hope that you will read the preface which is reproduced below and become enthusiastic about exploring the potential it has to support your efforts in care delivery.