Exploring more possibilities together

In order to encourage employees to report fraud, waste, and abuse in federally-funded programs, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 (NDAA) established a pilot program for enhancing contractor employee whistleblower protections. These pilot program protections became permanent on December 14, 2016. These protections extend to all individuals working in federally-funded programs, including sponsored research.  

As an employee of CommonSpirit Health and Catholic Health Initiatives working on a federally-sponsored research project, you are entitled to the rights and remedies provided by the Whistleblower Enhancement Program. Specifically, CommonSpirit Health and Catholic Health Initiatives are prohibited from discharging, demoting, or otherwise discriminating against you as a reprisal for whistleblowing. These protections cannot be waived by any agreement, policy, form, or condition of employment.  

Whistleblowing is defined as disclosing information that you reasonably believe is evidence of any of the following:

• Gross mismanagement of a federal contract or grant
• Gross waste of federal funds;
• Abuse of authority relating to a federal contract or grant;
• A substantial and specific danger to public health or safety; or
•  A violation of law, rule, or regulation related to a federal contract or grant (including the competition for, or negotiation of, a contract or grant)

In order to qualify for whistleblower protection under the NDAA Enhanced Whistleblower Protection Program, your disclosure must be made to one of the following persons or entities: 

• A member of Congress or a representative of a congressional committee;
• An Inspector General that has oversight over contracts awarded for, or on behalf of, the federal agency concerned in the contract or grant;
• The Government Accountability Office;
• A federal employee responsible for contract or grant oversight or management at the relevant agency;
• An authorized official of the Department of Justice or other law enforcement agency;
• A court or grand jury; or
• A management official or other employee of the contractor, subcontractor, grantee, or subgrantee who has the responsibility to investigate, discover, or address misconduct. 

If you believe that you have been discharged, demoted, or otherwise discriminated against as a reprisal for whistleblowing related to a federal contract or grant, you may submit a complaint to the Inspector General of the agency concerned. Procedures for making disclosures can be found on the Office of the Inspector General’s Whistleblower Hotline (http://www.oig.doc.gov/pages/hotline.aspx). Keep in mind that you cannot file a complaint more than three (3) years after the date on which the alleged reprisal took place.  

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To help ensure that our patients have access to the care they need when they need it, we now have more than 80 virtual care and telemedicine programs. These programs provide access to specialty care as well as minimize the need to travel for those services. Virtual assistance also helps alleviate health care workforce shortages. Today, we are using virtual technology for pharmacy services, to coordinate and monitor patient care in hospitals, for urgent care, and for imaging and X-ray consultation. eHospitalists, at a number of our larger hospitals, are admitting, rounding and caring for patients in smaller rural hospitals via remote technologies. This helps patients receive a high standard of care regardless of hospital size or time of day.

For example, our rural hospitals are using telemedicine to bring specialty care to their patients through real-time, two-way electronic communications and teleradiology. Patients can have their images read by fellowship-trained radiologists hundreds of miles away. So, a woman getting a mammogram in a small town in North Dakota can have her images read by a radiologist in Des Moines seconds later—with the results returned to her and her physician in minutes. Or, a remote pharmacist can ensure that a patient’s medicines are accurate, and safe, and can educate the patient on use, when the local hospital pharmacy is closed.

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In over 48 hospitals in eight states, our virtual pharmacy is already helping to raise the level of care for patients in rural areas. Twenty-eight staff pharmacists remotely provide night and weekend coverage when the regular hospital pharmacists leave. Typically only larger hospitals could provide 24-hour pharmacy services. Patient safety increases by having pharmacists review medication orders regardless of the time of day. For added safety, we have audio-visual communication at most hospitals and last year alone we recorded 20,937 interventions for different drugs or doses and prevented many potential drug allergies or drug-on-drug interactions. This is important because in most cases these interventions would not have occurred until the onsite pharmacists reviewed the orders hours, or on weekends, even days later.

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Hello future! We can now offer our patients faster and more accurate treatments based on their individual genetic profiles. The unprecedented Precision Medicine Alliance (PMA) is building sustainable genomics-guided health care solutions that enable a higher level of patient care in all our communities.  As a joint venture between Catholic Health Initiatives and Dignity Health, two of the nation’s largest non-profit health systems, the PMA is the most expansive community-based precision-medicine program in the nation.

With an initial focus on oncology, the PMA provides patients with advanced diagnostic tumor profiling and targeted therapies. Local physicians can request guidance from experts throughout CHI’s network, obtain targeted therapies or medications, and enroll patients in molecularly matched clinical trials. Additionally, the PMA provides education and decision support to physicians and patients with data-driven clinical guidance.

The PMA will be expanding to more specialty areas where knowing a patient’s genetic profile leads to better care and outcomes. Supporting the Everyone Deserved Opportunity™ program, this platform will be available at more than 150 hospitals and care centers across the U.S., serving approximately 12 million patients annually.

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Over the past ten years, too many communities have seen increases in overdoses and deaths related to opiate misuse and a significant increase in opioid-related emergency room visits. Recently, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) published new guidelines for doctors and providers aimed at helping them treat afflicted patients. Many states have passed or changed laws to fight what is becoming an opioid overdose epidemic.

CHI hospitalists and pharmacists are helping lead the fight against opioid abuse in partnership with a number of communities. We’ve partnered with neighborhood pharmacies to provide the opiate-reversal drug naloxone, created "controlled substance teams," enlisted hospitalists to improve use in acute care settings and worked with patients to identify the root problems behind misuse. These programs and others have kept hundreds of people opiate free. We will continue to do whatever it takes to help solve this problem.

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