Lorraine Hutzler serves as associate program director at the Center for Quality and Patient Safety at New York City-based NYU Langone Orthopedic Hospital.
Ms. Hutzler will serve on the panels "How to Make Bundled Payments, Risk-Based Pay a Win in Orthopedics" and "What it Takes to Build a World-Class Orthopedic, Spine Program" at Becker's 19th Annual Spine, Orthopedic & Pain Management-Driven ASC Conference. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place in Chicago from June 16-18.
To learn more and register, click here.
Question: What issues are you spending most of your time on today?
Lorraine Hutzler: Since I specialize in quality and patient safety, I'm looking at hospital-acquired conditions and readmissions. We ask the doctors to review each of those for proof of accuracy and we find issues with the administrative data, so we're able to go back and correct that.
Q: What are your top challenges and how will they change over the next 12 months?
LH: I think we've moved past COVID-19. Right now, it's about revving up the surgical volume, getting more block time, expanding the ASCs, and looking into other areas for facility expansion and offices as many of the hospitals in our area have expanded out to New Jersey, Long Island and Connecticut.
Q: What are you most excited about right now?
LH: Well, since I'm at a large academic medical center, I'm at the forefront of everything going on. Having a firsthand view of the policy changes and how that affects us, how we can make a difference on-site by implementing new protocols, working one on one with our physicians, and seeing how that's affecting the patients is essential. Also, just being in a large metropolitan area, the diversity of the patient population and seeing the effect on our metrics and how that helps the patients as well is extremely exciting.