Greater New York Hospital Association Foundation

Hospital-sponsored teaching clinics face an inherent challenge.

They seek to provide strong continuity of care for patients, yet they largely rely on a discontinuous workforce comprising of medical residents. In 2010, NYHealth provided a planning grant to Greater New York Hospital Foundation, Inc. (GNYHF) to identify opportunities to improve the quality and continuity of patient care without compromising the educational requirements with which residency programs must comply. The planning grant repeatedly identified the resident scheduling format as the single biggest hurdle to improving continuity of care for patients. In 2011, NYHealth awarded GNYHF a grant to work with 15 residency programs—25% of all the programs in the State—to improve resident scheduling and care continuity through the implementation of models that have been successfully employed in other parts of the country.

Under this grant, GNYHF worked to provide technical assistance on scheduling and assignment redesign, creating teams to coordinate patient care, and collecting and using patient utilization data to inform practice. Through the use of national consultants, the project developed a compendium of resources to guide residency programs and clinics in implementing the changes; included in these materials were models of successful scheduling formats, paired with a step-by-step guide on how to integrate these formats into yearly resident schedules. GNYHF also offered educational workshops and customized technial assistance to those 15 residency programs.