Customer Story | June 2026
MultiCare is a locally governed, nonprofit health system dedicated to serving communities across the Pacific Northwest.
By redesigning its Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation (OPPE) program with standardized workflows, automation, and longitudinal quality insights, MultiCare now manages approximately 11,000 provider reviews annually while improving consistency and physician engagement across the enterprise.
As MultiCare expanded across Washington and neighboring regions, physician quality oversight became increasingly difficult to manage consistently across hospitals, medical staffs, and review processes.
Leaders wanted to move beyond compliance-driven reviews and create a more meaningful, proactive approach to physician quality management.
“We wanted a process that was proactive rather than reactive,” said Marji Gavigan, System Director for Accreditation, Regulatory Readiness, and Medical Staff Quality at MultiCare. “The old process was essentially a check-the-box activity.”
Rather than making incremental adjustments to existing workflows, MultiCare redesigned its OPPE program from the ground up.
“We basically took it down to the studs and rebuilt the house,” Gavigan said.
Over nearly two years, clinical and operational leaders aligned peer review policies, standardized workflows, and established shared expectations across departments and facilities. Teams collaborated to define specialty-based indicators that could be automated, validated, correctly attributed, and scaled consistently across the organization.
Using symplr Statit as the operational foundation, MultiCare consolidated physician quality data into a unified review process that includes:
That visibility enables 75+ medical staff leaders to identify emerging trends earlier, prioritize validated outliers, and focus intervention efforts where additional support may be needed.
Today, MultiCare manages approximately 11,000 OPPE reviews annually using a lean centralized support model backed by automation and validated data workflows.
Automated aggregation and batch review processes reduced manual effort and helped quality teams focus attention on validated outliers requiring additional review.
Each hospital medical staff self-governs and operates independently. The standardization of roles, regulations, and bylaws are managed as a portion of the Director’s time, a full-time Statit analyst, and a fractional RN coordinator at each hospital.
“Because we don’t have unlimited staffing resources, we rely heavily on automation and validated data,” Gavigan said.
As the program matured, physician engagement evolved alongside it.
Department leaders now use cumulative physician quality histories to identify patterns earlier, support coaching conversations, and recommend focused reviews when appropriate.
Within MultiCare’s broader technology ecosystem, symplr Statit supports:
“They want more visibility. They want more indicators,” Gavigan said. “That’s exactly where we wanted to get to.”
MultiCare’s redesigned program received recognition during a Joint Commission survey review for:
The organization’s work was later recognized through The Joint Commission’s SAFEST initiative.
“When Joint Commission looked at our process, they saw that it wasn’t just an annual review exercise,” Gavigan said. “They saw a true quality program.”
Today, MultiCare’s OPPE program functions as a scalable quality framework designed to support organizational growth, strengthen physician engagement, and reduce administrative burden across the enterprise.
For physician leaders and CMOs, centralized access to performance insights has helped create greater consistency and accountability across the enterprise. Dr. Kevin Pieper, MD, MHA, Chief Medical Officer for Tacoma General and Allenmore Hospital, has seen firsthand how the redesigned OPPE program supports both operational efficiency and continuous quality improvement. “We have built an OPPE process that makes provider performance review efficient, actionable, and aligned with our medical staff’s ongoing commitment to quality and sustained improvement.”
By standardizing workflows, automating reviews, and centralizing quality oversight, MultiCare created a more sustainable approach to physician performance management — one built to support long-term operational consistency and continuous improvement.
Ask about our provider scorecards, dashboards, implementation, support, or anything else. symplr is ready to help you optimize provider performance, patient safety, and quality management.
