What's Next for Our Patient and Family Advisory Councils?

Goals for Future Quality, Safety and Overall Patient Experience Improvements

Pre-COVID-19 goals for RWJBarnabas Health Patient and Family Advisory Councils (PFACs) involved the expansion of council members onto other Quality, Safety and other applicable committees as well as more members conducting rounding by utilizing the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and Institute for Patient- and Family-Centered Care (IFPCC) for reference and guidelines.

The council would also like to consider the standardization of best practice models at each site, such as the handwashing initiative.

Board Expansion and Community Involvement

Further focus will remain on recruitment, retention and reputation (having PFAC members attend community-related events on behalf of RWJBarnabas Health).

Assessment and Benchmarking

A survey capturing quantitative and qualitative data will be developed and then disseminated to the PFAC representatives at each site in order to gauge what is working well and what needs to be improved, and to capture best practices and accomplishments for future reports.

EPIC Project Participation

Despite COVID-19, we have PFAC representation across each of our sites that participate on a biweekly call with Epic, our vendor of choice to assist with implementation plans of our new Electronic Health Record (to be implemented in 2021 with a staggered rollout across the RWJBH system over the next few years).

PFAC members have assisted with key Epic decisions such as providing input into the marketing plan for MyChart, the patient portal.

Community Outreach and COVID-19 News

Community outreach will continue to take place to ensure our communities are informed about the latest updates regarding COVID-19.