Celebrating our LeapFrog Award

On behalf of Senior Leadership, we cannot begin to tell you how excited and PROUD we are that we have been named one of the country’s Top Children’s Hospitals by the LeapFrog Group! I’m still gitty when I think about it.

A few weeks ago, when the e-mail went out to everyone to announce the big news, we told you to watch out for a blog post sharing how we will be celebrating. Well, the Engagement League has come up with a great idea!

First, everyone is getting a Children’s Specialized item of their choice from our online store!

Within the next week, you will receive an e-mail from Megan Muller. The e-mail is going to have a hyperlink and a personalized promo code. This promo code is customized for you and can only be used ONCE. So, please don’t share it (or lose it!).

The hyperlink will take you to an online store we’ve created where you can choose 1 of 4 gift items we’ve designed to celebrate our LeapFrog win! There are some great options for you; I think you’ll have a lot of fun choosing your gift.

Here’s a peak at the items you’ll get to choose from.



A men's short-sleeved or long-sleved t-shirt. Sizes come in S, M, L, XL, or XXL.

 

A women's short-sleeved or long-sleved t-shirt. Sizes come in S, M, L, XL, or XXL.



The best part? You can have it shipped directly to your home!

Ordering your gift online through the hyperlink and with your personalized promo code, is really where you get the benefits. Not only will you get your order quickly and at your convenience, but if you want any of the other items being offered you can order more and pay the difference. The promo code you will be e-mailed will cover the cost and shipping of one item; if you wish to order more, you will be responsible for payment of the extra item and extra shipping.

 

If you are unable to access the store, we will have an order form for you to fill out. Unfortunately, ordering offline will take a bit longer; we can’t process the order until the shop officially closes. So please keep that in mind.

But folks, there’s more!

It’s true that everyone loves branded items, but the true way to celebrate is with food!

After the New Year, Senior Leaders will be visiting our sites with delicious cookies for each of you!!

The date is still TBD – there’s a little thing called schedules that need to be looked at J – but we’ll let you know as soon as everything is finalized.

Once again, thank you – every one of you – for your dedication to our families and our kids. You should be proud of yourself and all of your hard work.

Lessons Learned From My First Job

I am always interested in hearing about people's first jobs. Usually they were when they were kids; they were never glamorous and usually taught some type of life lesson that we still call upon year after year.  I am sure many of you have already heard me speak about this in our State of the State meetings, but my first job was as a waitress.

Jim's Country Diner is now closed but was located on Rt 130 in Windsor, NJ. It was a real diner, diner. You know the one with 200 items on the menu and the typical soup rotation (Monday Yankee Bean, Tuesday Lentil, Wednesday Chicken & Rice, etc).

For $1.09 an hour, the lessons I learned about customer service and immediate feedback were significant. I also learned how to pay attention to non-verbal cues.

For example, when people weren't eating their food and you just knew something didn’t taste right, even if they didn’t tell you. Or how much people appreciated when you remembered what they ordered the last time and asked if they wanted it again (the "regulars" always left bigger tips when their drinks were waiting for them when they came to sit down).

Serving people their food, much like delivering their health care, is a very personal interaction. You learn a lot about people—when they are happy, when they are sad, when they are not feeling well.

And just like with us, they became our family. When a regular didn’t show up, we would be concerned and often find a route to make sure they were ok.

Working at Jim's Country Diner taught me about how hard it is to do manual labor into your 60's. The women who had spent their lives waitressing were exhausted but could not do anything else because they didn’t have a college degree or other skills to fall back on. It was very difficult for them when their bodies gave out; there were also no health benefits and the physical demands of the job always took a toll.

I am convinced that working at Jim's Diner is what pushed me to get my Master's Degree right away. So many of the people who worked there had intended to do this work as an interim before they went to college, but they liked the cash too much and never could find a way to afford to go back.

In the end working as a waitress taught me about hard work, anticipating the customer's needs, how little it would take to "make" someone's day with an act of kindness, and how disrespectful people could be when they treated you as if you weren't valued. Each lesson I hold today and carry with me to try and be a better person and leader. 

How about you? Is there a first job lesson that you would like to share?

Pediatric Primary Care at Mountainside

Children’s Specialized Hospital has offered a Pediatric Practice for well over 20 years. It was originally funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as a pilot for a medical home that would treat children with complex medical needs. It is not a separate building, house, or hospital, but instead a way to provide comprehensive primary care to children with special needs and their siblings.

Earlier this year (2014), we recruited Dr. Matt McDonald, Section Chief - Inpatient and Special Needs Pediatrics, to lead a team to turn the “idea” of a medical home initiative into a reality. I’m happy to announce that yesterday, December 10, we officially launched Pediatric Primary Care at Mountainside.

Our Primary Care Practice has been highly praised by the families who have access to the care that we provide. Pediatric Primary Care at Mountainside is special in the way the team cares for children with complex healthcare needs. No other pediatric rehabilitation center across the country is implementing this type of innovative care coordination model.

In order for this program to be successful and approved by the National Committee for Quality Assurance – we “must pass” the six required elements:

1. Access during office hours
2. Use data for population management
3. Care management
4. Support self-care process
5. Referral tracking and follow-up
6. Implement continuous quality improvement

Pediatric Primary Care will offer same-day appointments, a web portal that provides better access to the patient’s medical information, the ability to handle more aspects of care remotely, and regular follow-ups.

We are examining ways to use technology more efficiently; to better support our families, and go beyond the service of primary care and service as the care coordination of ALL of the care needed by the child and family. This means linking all of the various clinicians (regardless of whether they are at Children’s Specialized or not) and share information to manage the whole child in one database that is actively managed by a care management team.

So many times our kids have to repeat tests, and because there is often so much to communicate about what is going on in the health of the whole child, things can be missed. 

Folks, this is BIG. This service is going to help us set the bar nationally in caring for children with special and complex medical needs. Teamwork is the most critical part of transforming our current practice and making it successful for our patients and families. It is a huge undertaking – to envision this program, then to build it both from a technology and clinical skill set.

Thank you to Dr. Matt McDonald and entire team who has made this happen.

Adding this service to our care is important to our families. It allows them to be certain that their children are receiving the best care. We are excited to offer this service at Mountainside now, with the intention of rolling out the program to additional sites shortly after. 

For more information visit http://www.medicalhomeinfo.org/.

For detailed information on recognition visit http://www.ncqa.org.

Ensuring a child can be transported safely after tragedy hits

Natalia Gonzalez is a research assistant who works in the Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) program at our Fanwood site. As part of her responsibilities, she meets with parents to review the study, obtain consent, score measures, and maintain the database that we need to comply with our grant. In addition, she is frequently asked by the ABA team to help interpret with the many Spanish-speaking families we serve. 

The families at Children’s Specialized often seek her out directly, as they recognize her caring and support; which is probably why one of the families living in Toms River confided in her when they informed her of an unfortunate accident where they lost their car in a fire. Lost in the car fire was the child's specialized car seat. Without the car seat, the family could not get their child to therapy sessions safely. 

When Natalia heard of this incident, she knew she wanted to help them. Having a child with special needs, the family needed a special car seat to ensure their child was safe when in a car. With one phone call, the wonderful community of Children’s Specialized Hospital stepped in and our team in LTC Toms River—Dalthea Beavers, Carolyn Romond, Bobbi Jo Pansier, and of course Natalia—arranged to ensure that the family not only had the car seat, but also that it worked properly, was installed correctly, and the family knew how to use it. 

Because of the dedication from this team, the family got the equipment they needed to ensure their child would be transported safely. 

We pride ourselves around wrapping ourselves around the family and ensuring that all of their needs are met to the best of our capability. This is another example of those long arms and warm hearts. Great job team!

We will continue to spotlight stories of how you are living our vision, mission, and values with a specific focus on teamwork. Please share your stories with me and you may see them in a future blog post!

Patient Portal Empowers Families

One item that is a continuous source of frustration with our families is the inability to easily access their children’s medical information. From requesting reports or copies of their medical records to getting copies of test results, we know it is an area in which we can do better.

Our Strategic Improvement and IT Departments have been working tirelessly to provide a way for our parents to digitally access to their children’s information. And we’re excited to announce the launch of the My Children’s Specialized Patient & Family Portal. I’m happy to announce that the portal is live as of today!

This valuable tool was built in collaboration with our families and staff as a way to empower them to be able to continue to successfully manage their child's health care.

This patient portal tool is great. It will not only offer secure online access to the patient’s medical records, but it will also allow the families to review and pay their bills online.

Over time, we hope to introduce a feature to allow families to schedule appointments! This is a very exciting time to be able to meet the families’ demands in this way.

The team has worked diligently to ensure that this tool abides by current laws on what parents can and cannot see. Families will be able to:

• View their child’s physician and therapy reports, including discharge summaries and progress notes
• View information regarding their visits, including evaluations and discharge summaries
• View upcoming appointment dates and times as well as set appointment reminders and request cancellations of appointments
• View medications and allergy information
• View billing statements and pay bills online
• Share their health record with other healthcare providers or individuals in various formats, including e-mail and downloading capabilities

Although this solution will solve an issue for our families, it may cause unintended consequences that we will have to address.

For example, the notes that are put in the medical record –how we word things about their child's progress and whether or not we are putting things in the record that we haven't communicated to the family directly – will now be open for the family to view.

For some, this may cause concern. Perhaps you wrote something that was not communicated, or worded something in a way that could be misunderstood. We will work through these issues together. We need to ensure that we continually remind ourselves that we are responding to families’ needs and will ultimately improve the information flow and the patient experience.

This is a very exciting step in how we provide care and information to our families; it will help to minimize the amount of administrative tasks that employees are responsible for, allowing them to assist families in other ways. I wanted to make sure you knew both that this was coming to fruition and the “why” behind initiative and why it is so important or our families.