At Northwest Kidney Centers’ Lake City clinic, Nurse Manager Tara Scott demonstrates a commitment to innovation and patient-centered care. As a newer leader in 2024, she sought a way to increase patient engagement while improving key quality metrics. Her approach – simple yet transformative – gave patients ownership over their health and led to measurable improvements in clinic outcomes.
Tara knew that starting dialysis could be overwhelming for patients, so she waited until they settled into a routine before sitting chairside with each one for a “What Matters to You?” conversation. During these meetings, she guided them through a worksheet to outline their motivations, goals, and treatment priorities. She also took the opportunity to explain the clinic’s Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement (QAPI) process, helping patients understand how dialysis care is measured and why these benchmarks matter.
Once she patiently walked them through how their health choices connected to QAPI data, something changed. Patients started asking how they could contribute to improving the clinic’s metrics. “Giving them that information really empowered our patients to take charge of their own health,” Tara explained. “We saw a huge turnaround in how engaged our patients were.”
The results spoke for themselves. Patients who participated in the exercise showed remarkable improvement. In 2024, Lake City celebrated 27 catheter removals, and three long-term catheter users successfully transitioned to permanent access – significant milestones in dialysis care that decrease patients’ risk of infection or complications.
One patient’s journey perfectly illustrates the impact of Tara’s innovation. In 2023, he struggled with severe health challenges, including multiple hospitalizations and frequent ER visits due to infections. When Tara sat down with him in early 2024, he expressed clear goals, including reaching his target dry weight, staying out of the hospital, and becoming eligible for a kidney transplant. He had also noticed how other patients’ dialysis milestones were celebrated with balloons and asked if his progress could be marked the same way.
Tara and her team made it happen. Each time he achieved a goal, the team brought him a balloon with hand-drawn illustrations and congratulations in Spanish, his preferred language. It was a small but tangible way to mark his successes, and milestone by milestone, his health stabilized. He had his catheter removed; remained hospitalization-free for six months, then a year; and moved ever closer to transplant eligibility.
By the end of the year, he proudly brought all his balloons to the clinic – they’d meant so much to him, he’d saved each one. Touched by this, the staff strung them together into a lei, a visual representation of his hard-fought journey. “To us, it’s just a lei,” Tara said, “but to him, it’s his story.”
Tara’s initiative is a testament to the power of patient-centered care. By making quality metrics meaningful on a personal level for patients, she transformed engagement at Lake City – improving outcomes for both individual patients and the clinic overall. More than anything, her approach proves that the right kind of support can turn small wins into life-changing results.
