One of the requirements of a Medical Staff is to meet annually. In addition to fulfilling the responsibility outlined in the bylaws, it is also a good event for social interaction and education. I am usually given some time to give an update of some sort. The following is a copy of what I intend to speak to the group about. The level of physician leadership and involvement at GHS has steadily increased over the years. This talk gave me pause as I read it….I am struck by how engaged our physicians are. Perhaps it is one of the reasons this past year that, as a group, our physicians scored in the 99th percentile of engagement in our annual survey administered by Moorehead.
• Acknowledge
o Governor Tom Ridge, keynote speaker
o Medical Staff Officers
• Chris Wright, MD -President
• Marty Lutz, MD – Vice President
• Bruce Snyder, MD – Immediate Past President
• Thank Lee Van Voris, Shirley Crawford and all the staff responsible for tonight’s event.
• My assignment: Offer brief comments about the state of our system.
• Start with our goals – both the multi-year and annual goals. They offer a framework for understanding where GHS is heading – both near and long-term.
o MULTI-YEAR GOALS….Our Five Big Ideas:
1. Become a Total Health Organization.
2. Transform core organization structures and processes into a highly integrated delivery system.
3. Become an Accountable Care Organization.
4. Improve care and delivery and workforce development through innovation in academics.
5. Ensure a sustainable financial model that supports our vision and mission.
• …and our Annual Goals which center around six pillars of excellence:
1. People
2. Service
3. Quality
4. Growth
5. Finance
6. Academics
• Not enough time time to move through them one-by-one; but let me talk about one important theme that emerges for me when I think about these goals.
11-17-11
• Theme: The Role of Physician Leadership/ Engagement at GHS
o Highest level of physician engagement here at GHS compared to any other health care setting I’ve known.
o Examples
1. At the senior-most levels of the organization
• CEO Staff Meeting (Youkey, Taylor, Sinopoli)
• President’s Council (Youkey, Taylor, Sinopoli, Marshall, Diller)
• Operations Council (All Clinical Chairs)
2. At the unit level
• Physician/Nurse Manager partnerships addressing work-unit specific operational goals
3. In Practice Settings
• Physician leadership is critical – nothing new here
• In concert with the vision and larger goals of the system – that’s different today than ten or twenty years ago.
o What’s been possible as a result?
1. Consistently high results related to quality of care – CMS All Care Measures
2. Improvements in our culture of safety – still room to move forward here.
3. Year-over-year growth
• Access to care
• Volume
• Outpatient activity accounts for more than half of our revenue today
4. Strong system-level financial results in a very challenging economy
• Credit goes to the hard work of the Operations Council led by Greg Rusnak and Jerry Youkey
• Clinical Chairs and Campus Presidents working together to sort through difficult decisions
• Finance team willing to reinvent itself in collaboration with physician leadership
5. Measurable evidence of high levels of physician engagement
• Our employed and closely aligned physicians rank in the top decile of all health care works across the country – Morehead Workforce Commitment Index
6. Collaboration and innovation within the system and across the community
• YMCA PATH program focused on coordinated intervention for chronic conditions such as diabetes
• ITOR – bringing private sector research together within the delivery system…a vision of translational research and personalized medicine
• Nurse-Family Partnership – an evidence-based community health program
• Our Total Health philosophy influences many of these partnerships…
7. Significant movement toward higher and higher levels of system integration
• Care coordination throughout the system
• Information systems
o EMR
o Centralized Scheduling
o Acknowledge the growing pains…that are being felt across the country
8. Accreditation of the USC School of Medicine – Greenville
• The energy behind this achievement belongs to Drs. Youkey and Taylor and several others who were driving this process
• Our ability to even entertain the idea of a four year medical school was predicated upon the exceptional commitment to teaching and academics that exists within the GHS physician community – we had the foundation and it was you!
o These are just a few examples of what we’ve been able to accomplish with physician leaders who are highly engaged and aligned with the GHS vision and mission. There are many more examples.
• Thank you for what you do to put patients and families at the center of all we do; for the contributions you make and for your commitment to our mission to heal compassionately, teach innovatively, and improve constantly.
