Donor Spotlight: Mercy Clinic Featuring Mary Laubinger, RN MSN

This month’s donor spotlight highlights Mercy featuring Mary Laubinger, RN MSN.  Mary serves as VP of Population Health at Mercy, a large, integrated health system with headquarters in St. Louis, MO.  Mercy includes more than 40 acute care, managed and specialty (heart, children's, orthopedic and rehab) hospitals, 900 physician practices and outpatient facilities, 42,000 co-workers and 2,400 Mercy Clinic physicians in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. 

In her role, Mary leads virtual clinical teams who provide support for patients in value-based contracts.  She has been an RN since 1978, obtained her Master’s Degree in Psychiatric/Mental Health Nursing at St. Louis University School of Nursing and has worked for Mercy for over 40 years.   Throughout her career, Mary has been passionate about providing care for underserved populations and has implemented multiple grants for diabetes care, mental health and substance use programs.

Mercy has been engaged with all three of our national health campaigns and countless collaboratives.  How has participating in AMGA population health initiatives directly improved the care Mercy has provided its patients?

Measure up/Pressure down was the first national campaign Mercy Clinic participated in, and it formed the foundation for clinical improvement initiatives in our clinics.  Managing hypertension allows us to prevent many chronic conditions such as strokes and heart attacks that result in death or serious debility.  Through this Campaign, we implemented evidenced based guidelines with specific areas of focus that addressed blood pressure equipment, medical assistant competency, patient engagement and physician guidelines for treatment.  We experienced significant improvement in our baseline measure of patients with blood pressure in control (from 60% to 80%) as well as the number of myocardial infarction (MI) and strokes prevented and we accomplished these improvements during a time of rapid growth in primary care clinics.  We also learned to focus on health disparities and added social workers and diabetes educators to our clinics with significant social determinants of health barriers.  Following Measure Up/Pressure Down, we were excited to participate in Together to Goal to improve management of patients with diabetes.  Our partnership with AMGA initiatives have been so successful for Mercy that we look forward to participating as new programs are offered.  To date, we have participated in 11 programs that have improved care for patients with hypertension, cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, diabetes, obesity and more.

How is our Rise to Immunize Campaign™ impacting Mercy’s vaccination rates?

With the Rise to Immunize Campaign™, our patients are more aware of the importance of getting their vaccinations.  This campaign allowed Mercy to obtain the most up-to-date pneumococcal vaccine guidelines that integrate into Epic to guide our clinicians at the point of care.  We also set up an immunization registry in Epic that allows us to pull vaccine data from state immunization registries so we have up-to-date information on patient vaccines.  Guidance in the development of standing orders for vaccines has also dramatically improved our vaccination rates.  And, with better vaccination data we can more accurately identify patients with vaccination gaps and conduct text-based outreach to patients to close those gaps.

Mercy has been a longstanding supporter of AMGA Foundation including becoming a recent major contributor to AMGA Foundation’s Campaign for a Healthier America.  For our Year End Giving efforts, why would you encourage other members to join you in investing in the Foundation’s work?

AMGA Foundation collaboratives have been instrumental in identifying significant health issues and provide the expertise to bring evidenced-based guidelines into clinical practice.  The ability to provide data, clinical expertise, networking and implementation support is essential to make substantial improvements and to sustain those efforts.  Our support to the Foundation assures that this work will continue to improve health care both in our community and on a national scale.