Creating patient-focused, family-centered, maternal-child and pediatric healthcare

Healthcare's economic challenges, corporate mergers, and technological innovations marked the last decade of the 20th century. Both consumers and providers of maternity care faced dramatic changes in reimbursement, which threatened the quality and scope of care provided to childbearing women, children, and families. For nurses in some institutions, this meant decreases in the number of RNs caring for patients and challenges to meet patients' needs with the focus on a black bottom line, fiscal profitability rather than on the patient. New York's Mount Sinai Hospital adopted a philosophy of patient-focused care. This article describes the 5-year journey to redesign a traditional, provider-focused obstetric and pediatric program, into a new patient-focused, family-centered maternal-child healthcare center. The process, opportunities, challenges, and outcomes of this ongoing work demonstrate that a scholarly, data-driven, patient-focused process can result in improved quality, and increased patient and staff satisfaction, while decreasing costs.