Quality Leaders: David Quillen, M.D.
David Quillen, M.D., sometimes takes family practice residents and medical students on field trips.
David Quillen, M.D., sometimes takes family practice residents and medical students on field trips.
If one or two residents or students are with him and have the time, Quillen invites them to sit in on the UF Health Shands Hospital Grievance Committee meetings he attends each month. He is both an associate professor for UF Health’s Family Medicine Residency Program and a member of the Grievance Committee, which assesses complicated patient complaints. Quillen encourages the residents and students to speak up and offer solutions. The Grievance Committee has the opportunity to make a lasting impact on patient care at UF Health Shands Hospital.
“The obvious goal (of the committee) is to try to resolve a problem for a specific patient and to identify what that problem is,” he explained. “But a bigger goal is: How do we identify system issues we can improve on?”
The committee wants to use what Quillen calls “an enduring method of process improvement.”
As more patients choose UF Health for their care, the team develops processes to accommodate continued growth. Getting patients out of the UF Health Shands E.R. and into longer-term care rooms is both important and challenging. Teams regularly reassess to ensure that patients are in a location that best suits their needs.
“The Grievance Committee is also working to assure that those patients continue to receive the optimum care that we can deliver,” Quillen said.
But Quillen’s work to improve our hospital systems doesn’t end with the Grievance Committee. He also provides information technology support for UF Health. In that role, Quillen works to help health care providers be more efficient and create a safer environment for patients.
Quillen said working on the IT team was “kind of accidental.” Michael Good, M.D., UF College of Medicine dean, saw that Quillen had an interest in getting IT issues resolved on his own and invited him to work with IT specialists.
“He felt that we needed one more person whose direct role was to try to make things better for our providers,” Quillen said.
Quillen is working with UF Health IT to make compiling electronic medical records less time consuming. Rolling out a voice-to-text feature in the electronic medical record system within the next few months is one project that will help providers care for such patients.
“That’s just one more opportunity and option for our providers to get more tools to work with while they’re seeing patients,” he said.
Quillen said one of his favorite parts of being involved with the Grievance Committee and IT is getting to help different disciplines.
“You know, they pay me to do this,” he said, laughing. “Are you kidding me? Of course I’ll do this! It’s made this a very exciting job — to do a lot of different things and help colleagues and the patients we care for.”
