There’s no particular reason why a patient- and family-centered care program would start off in a hospital’s orthopaedic surgery department, but if you’ve had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Tony DiGioia you’d know immediately why that’s the way things went. Passionate about improving care for patients, Dr. DiGioia first saw all sorts of opportunities right in front of his nose at Magee-Womens Hospital, part of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). The rest, as they say, is history.

There are now some 16 working groups in the UPMC system innovating and implementing communication and navigation processes that smooth the way for patients having elective surgery, dealing with urgent care, or facing a transition home. There’s an online Innovation Center to capture learning AND to share tools and resources and strategies with anyone interested. And, perhaps most importantly, Dr. DiGioia and his colleagues have developed a methodology for implementing patient- and family-centered care programs, taking a lot of the guess work and starting from scratch out of the picture.

WIHI host Madge Kaplan welcomes Dr. Tony DiGioia and Dale Shaller, one of the country’s foremost experts on improving quality and safety in health care and increasing patient satisfaction. If your head is spinning with so many definitions of patient- and family-centered care that you’re not sure whose interpretation to believe, OR you fear the concept is in danger of becoming more a matter of good intentions than actual results, this is a WIHI discussion you don’t want to miss.