UChicago Medicine is on a mission to become the “gold standard for APPs,” Brooke Schweitzer, DMSc, PA-C, the system’s chief advanced practice officer, said in an upcoming Becker’s “Clinical Leadership Podcast.”
“Our strategic goal is really to become the premier place for APPs to practice,” she said. “There’s no one clear place where, when every PA or nurse practitioner graduates from school, they think, ‘That’s the place I want to go to.’ We want UChicago to become that place. So we want to make sure we’re setting up a platform where our APPs can thrive, where they feel that professional identity — because we know that translates into better patient care. That’s our goal: to create an architecture and a framework where our APPs can really thrive.”
Becoming a destination workplace for APPs isn’t just about APP transformation — it’s a health system strategy, she said. The APP workforce landscape has changed dramatically in the last 10 years, with more APPs practicing at the top of their license and CMS changing related billing. APPs have emerged as “that scaffolding to support all the different pieces of a patient’s journey where we don’t have physicians to fill those roles,” she said.
Creating a work environment that recognizes these changes and improves APP practice has been a top priority at UChicago, and has shown great results. More than 70% of APPs at the system report directly to an APP leader.
“They have that psychological safety of going to someone who intimately understands their role and can advocate for them for the highest scope of practice,” she said.
The system also cut advanced practice provider turnover by 10%, saved $25 million in direct costs and increased clinic patient access by 200% with its systemwide APP transformation.
Dr. Schweitzer encourages other hospitals to closely examine their current APP practice to improve role clarity, define the best skills APPs should be performing and redesign care models to align with those efforts.
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