How our Belief Statement Impacts our Independent Medical Reviews

Whether optimizing quality assurance measures or onboarding physicians to our nationwide physician reviewer network, everything we do at Advanced Medical Reviews is guided by our belief statement- We believe every patient should receive quality healthcare.

We sat down with our leadership team- Leah Williams (Manager of Recruitment and Credentialing), Emir Rubi (Operations Manager), Stephanie Nguyen (Operations Manager), Nora Kleiman (Operations Manager), Natalya Dawkins (Director of Client Success), Lu Crowder (Clinical Quality Director). and Megan Kaufman (General Manager) to discuss how our belief statement influences our work.  

What does AMR's belief statement mean to you?

Emir:  Reading the belief statement verbatim, to me, it makes a big difference when you say every patient versus all patients. Every patient drives the idea of each individual deserving my undivided attention. Thinking about this in my role as an Operations Manager, our belief statement means that while most of my decisions and actions will impact how we handle all cases, I have a responsibility to create tools and develop a team that is well-equipped to ensure every patient receives the best and most appropriate care for their specific clinical situation.  

Megan: It is such an important distinction, all versus every. It’s someone’s mom, someone’s brother, someone’s friend, someone that is equally deserving of time. When you start thinking about “all,” you start thinking about numbers. It's a grouping of them versus “every,” which really drives home that individuality of each case that we come across.  

Leah:  It can be a significant challenge for any healthcare professional to keep individualized care in the forefront, especially when healthcare can feel like a numbers game at face value. It's easier than it should be to forget that there is a patient that deserves to be the focal point of everything that we do in healthcare.

Stephanie: When I hear our belief statement, I think about how this is about making sure patients are receiving safe care and high-quality care more than it is about making patients “happy.” I use this as a guiding principle. There are going to be a lot of challenging things we face as an organization, and, using that as a guiding principle, it helps us enter some of those difficult conversations we need have with clients at the end of the day. Looking at the operational side of things, if I’m unsure of the best approach to a situation, I think that helps guide me and my team members to take the best approach, given the situation.  

Leah: I connect with what you’re saying. I take pride in being able to encourage our physician reviewers to see the importance of AMR’s individualized approach. It’s paramount to our mission that physicians we partner with in peer-reviews connect to the beliefs and values our organization lives by. Each case completed by AMR is not just a number, it’s a patient we have an opportunity to assist.

Nora: Our healthcare system is so vast and complex and can be daunting to the consumer. A couple of our team members have made reference to the individual, person-specific element of the belief statement, and I agree that’s really the heart of it. AMR is only one piece of that large system, but for the time that a patient’s case is with us, we are committed to giving that person the attention they need and deserve.

Lu: It’s a guiding principle I see in our work every day. While our services impact the management of health care cost, our objective in each case is to ensure that every person we touch gets the right care at the right time. To me, that is the central premise of quality health care.  

Natalya: Similarly, from the client’s side, I try to keep it as more of a daily reminder- what's at the heart of a client’s request? Each of the cases that come in, there’s a reason why they are coming to AMR. We are keeping patients at the center of everything that we do, so I think that it helps to reinforce that quality. As Megan pointed out, these are real living, breathing people, like somebody's relative, somebody’s sister, somebody's uncle, so it definitely helps to inform the way that I approach the day-to -day work, keeping that in mind.

Subscribe to the AMR blog to read subsequent excerpts from our leadership roundtable discussion. Part two more closely examines how we define “quality,” with respect to our service, our technology, and our outreach.