Jenna Buchanan, MD; Vice Chair of Clinical Affairs, Banner—University Phoenix Family Medicine
Our clinical division at Banner—University Medical Group Phoenix includes practices in the Edwards Medical Plaza and our new primary expansion clinic in the Arcadia Health Center Plus facility. While the clinical component of the department represents a subset of the faculty, it’s an important tie to the “real world” of busy practices, complex patient, and primary care provider shortage areas that many of our faculty work in. We maintain close partnerships with the Wesley Community & Health Center, collaborating in the management of maternity care and delivery and clinical education for our residents. While the Family Medicine residency sponsors the Addiction and Sports Medicine fellowships, these clinics are operated separately, with some physicians providing services in both clinical settings.
Work in our outpatient practices has focused on strengthening our base operations while striving for clinical innovation. This work includes facility updates, lean process and quality improvement, team-based care, and addressing work satisfaction for staff and providers. The practices have implemented facility updates, scheduling improvements, streamlining of supply and procedure handling, and developing ways to optimize common workflows. We have targeted clinic message routing, charting and “after hours workload,” paperwork management, panel sizes and patient/provider continuity. Streamlining this work remains complex and is key to improving the outpatient clinical experiences in our department.
We are committed to identifying clinic innovations as we embrace the dual agendas of both patient access and value-based care. This work has long been a goal in Family Medicine, focusing on care that truly improves the health and well-being of our patients. With this goal comes new care activities, new team members, new resources and challenging new coding and payment methodologies. We aim to retain the positive aspects of these changes while reducing the frustration our teams experience in the pursuit of comprehensive care.
The practices have incorporated pharmacy, social work, behavioral health providers, Wesley Community & Health Center 24 population health-focused medical assistants, Transitional Care nurse navigators, and will soon be adding a registered dietician. We have also introduced a team of advanced practice providers who support same-day access, in-basket and paperwork management, and convenience care (after-hours) schedules. Team members have completed additional training and board certification in Obesity Medicine to better integrate this care into our practices, following our previous work in opioid addiction MAT.