by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | July 14, 2015
From the July 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
For our women’s health issue, HCBN caught up with Maribeth McLaughlin to learn a little more about one of the highly respected women’s hospitals in the country.
HCBN: How did you get involved in health care?
MM: I actually started my career 30 years ago this past May. Being a nurse was the only thing I ever wanted to be. I grew up with an uncle who was a veteran and had been wounded in the Korean War – he lived with us and was bedridden. He later developed MS. We had nurses in the house every day. I helped feed him and care for him, so that’s how I grew up and he had a big influence on me and my brothers and others, and we almost all ended up in careers in some form of health care.
HCBN: What is unique about Magee-Womens Hospital?
MM: It’s a tertiary care teaching hospital. We are a full-service hospital. We’re very focused on women’s health. We also have a research institute across the street that is totally dedicated to women’s and children’s health. The proximity of our hospital and research institute allows us to really translate research from the bench to the medical and practice side. We are also very focused on patients and their families. We do practice patient and family-centered care (PFCC) methodology. We design all our care around teams that focus on the patient care experience. We shadow patients and closely monitor the care they have.
We conduct collaborative interdisciplinary rounds. In our high-risk NICU, we are using iPads and other technology to do unit transfers from the patient care units to the recovery floors so the patient can see the room they’ll be in and learn which nurses will be there. We have the physicians following for hand-off as well. Patients are also directly involved in helping us to develop our care pathways. These pathways help them to make decisions about their care plans and these plans are worked on in conjunction with their providers.
HCBN: What does being a women’s hospital entail? Are there any set criteria to meet?
MM: We’re over 100 years old and Magee-Womens has always been our title. It was established for women who were “lying in” or giving birth. Our focus has always been on women’s health. The services, however, definitely go beyond reproductive health. We also have expertise in geriatrics, bariatrics, women’s cancers, research and specializing care, to just name a few fields.
HCBN: Are there any developments in the works that you can talk about?
MM: Magee is leading women’s health service lines for all of UPMC across our coverage area of the places we serve – about 29 counties in Pennsylvania and some of the surrounding states – Ohio, New York. We partner with hospitals in our networks as well as hospitals in the region. We’re heavily involved in education, and exploring new models of care in a way that improves patient outcome. So basically, population health, if you will. It allows us to expand the care for the women we serve into a larger area. To me, that’s taking Magee and all our expertise even further, and that’s going to lead to a lot of innovative models of care as we expand across our region.
