Blazing New Trails: Alice Phillips Accepts New Full-Time Role as Director of Ambulatory Quality and Safety

If there is one thing Alice Phillips, M.D., knows, it’s how to take on a challenge. She became a doctor when others questioned her career choice, and built a successful primary care practice, serving patients for 28 years.

As a wife and mother, Dr. Phillips mastered the balance between work and home, raising two children, with one of them following in her health care footsteps. As an empty nester, she went back to school, earning a master’s degree in Public Health. Shortly after, she was named Cook Children’s medical director of Ambulatory Quality and Safety — a part-time role she filled while also maintaining her primary care practice.

Then came the pandemic, where Dr. Phillips led the development of policies to help Cook Children’s primary care physicians weather the unprecedented public health storm.

“It was a great experience in how you lead people, how you connect them, and how you develop policies and programming to keep our staff and patients safe,” she said.

Now, in true Dr. Phillips fashion, she’s taking on a new challenge once again.

Dr. Phillips has been named the full-time director of Ambulatory Quality and Safety. It’s a new position at Cook Children’s, and a move that allows her to impact a broader swath of patients in ambulatory settings all across the system, which includes primary care, urgent care and specialty care.

“Quality work fits me,” Dr. Phillips said. “I enjoy bringing people together from different areas and asking, ‘How can we make this better?’”

The transition wasn’t an easy or quick decision, as it required her to say goodbye to her beloved primary care practice and patients.

“It really took me probably two years to come to the decision that this is the right time and the right next step for me,” she said. “It was hard leaving my sweet patients and so many wonderful memories and stories that they shared with me. But I'm very at peace with it, and I left my practice to a wonderful young doctor who's going to take great care of my patients.”

In her new role, Dr. Phillips will plan, execute and lead quality improvement in the ambulatory setting. It’s a big job, given Cook Children’s vast primary, specialty and urgent care network that stretches all across North Texas and west to Lubbock.

She'll be navigating uncharted waters. While hospitals across the country, Cook Children’s included, have made quality and safety a cornerstone of their performance for years, few have dedicated the same resources to focus on continuous improvement within their ambulatory networks. It’s a huge, untapped area, Dr. Phllips says, considering there are 28 outpatient visits for every one hospital admission nationwide. She estimates that number to be even higher for Cook Children’s given its vast network.

Cook Children’s ambulatory physicians and providers are just as committed to quality and safety as their inpatient counterparts, Dr. Phillips says. However, their growing patient load limits their ability to research workflows and create new processes to address any gaps. This is where Dr. Phillips’ love for data, research and advancement will be crucial in guiding proactive improvements. She believes the enhanced focus on ambulatory quality and safety will mean the same for Cook Children’s outpatient settings as it does for inpatient — the safest, highest quality and science-based care that Cook Children’s can provide.

Dr. Phillips’ first-hand experience in the primary care setting makes her the ideal person to break new ground in this area.

“Buy-in on anything new is hard,” she said. “Physicians and their teams need to feel like they're looking at someone who's walked that walk, and that I'm not asking them to do anything that I haven't been involved in or haven't seen in my own clinic. My history, understanding how our clinics work well, I think sets me up keenly to be a great advocate for this. They need to know I'm not just giving them something to do to check a box. That it's really an identified problem, and we're going to come up with a workflow that fits the needs of the patient and the clinic as well. Because our clinics are all very different.”

Dr. Phillips says her immediate priorities will be on immunization education and access, enhancing mental health training for primary and specialty care physicians, and antimicrobial stewardship. She’ll be both a problem solver and advocator, dedicating her time to regular visits at Cook Children’s clinics across Texas, including Abilene and Lubbock.

“It’s important that I go to all of our clinic sites and talk to the frontline workers to understand their unique needs,” Dr. Phillips said. “What worries you? What safety concerns do you have for your clinic? What makes you happy at your job? Why do you come to work every day? How can we support you? Really making the teams feel like they're heard and that we understand what they're going through. And then, just spreading the quality message.”

As a self-proclaimed lifelong learner, Dr. Phillips is ready to meet the challenges ahead and excited to blaze new trails.

“You know, you’re never too old to try something new,” she said. “We need the experience of those who have worked on that frontline to then say, ‘Okay, now what? What else can I do? I've learned everything I can from that. Now it's time to learn from this.’”