3 Steps to Drive Transformation at Healthcare Organizations

To achieve fundamental change, healthcare leaders and their teams face multiple challenges such as establishing an enterprise-wide strategy.

Health systems, hospitals, and physician practices are under pressure to improve care and grow market share.

The drivers of transformational change include the imperative to deliver safer care, the shift from volume-based to value-based business models, and efforts to boost quality of care.

A Press Ganey report published Tuesday features three steps to achieve transformational change at healthcare organizations.

"We describe the key considerations for creating a transformational road map and present the steps needed to build an organizational culture that supports patient-centered care and a purpose-driven workforce that can deliver it," the report says.

1. Establish an enterprise-wide strategy
 

To achieve transformative change, direction has to come from the top of the organization and all teams must understand their role, the report says. "Healthcare CEOs and senior leaders must be aligned on the strategic vision and the path needed to reach it, and they have to consistently and transparently communicate both to the entire organization."

There are four elements to crafting an enterprise-wide strategy:

• An assessment process determines the organization's performance level and the divide between baseline performance and ideal performance. The assessment effort should have several components, including leadership surveys and stakeholder interviews.
   
• Healthcare organizations should determine the interdependencies across safety, quality, patient experience, and workforce engagement. Organizations with many silos in their operating model will face a greater need for redesigning processes than organizations that have reduced silos.
   
• Transformational plans require benchmarks and metrics to set goals, measure performance, and guide strategy adjustments.
   
• An integrated dashboard should give the CEO and other top leaders a comprehensive view of the organization's performance.

"Rolling out an integrated balanced score card is the first step to ensuring leaders begin to understand the interdependencies of various performance verticals. Starting with the Board to every level of the organization, all leaders need to have visibility to the data," James Merlino, MD, chief transformation officer at South Bend, Indiana-based Press Ganey, told HealthLeaders.

2. Build a change-receptive culture
 

Healthcare organizations that are committed to transformational change should gauge their readiness for innovation, the report says. "During periods of large-scale disruption, an organization's ability to pivot quickly and nimbly is predicated on the degree to which its culture—organizational values, beliefs, and work practices—is aligned with the strategic vision."

There are five components to evaluating readiness for change:

• Assessing the engagement and resilience of physicians, nurses, and other staff members
   
• Determining whether the workforce understands why change is desirable
   
• Finding out whether employees are aligned with the organization's transformational vision
   
• Ensuring the workforce is ready to move away from the status quo
   
• Establishing confidence in the leadership's ability to guide change and the organization's commitment to devoting necessary resources

3. Develop an integrated data and management strategy
 

Harnessing data is essential to transformational change at healthcare organizations, the Press Ganey report says. "As with all enterprise-wide, business-critical initiatives, the data strategy should have executive sponsorship and a governance structure to ensure ongoing alignment with organizational objectives."

There are six ingredients for an effective integrated data and management strategy:

• Data should be scientifically rigorous with large sample sizes.
   
• The data platform should have multiple layers that allow the organization to examine both broad measures of performance and narrow performance variables.
   
• Establishing key performance indicators is crucial to measure, evaluate, and track initiatives.
   
• Engineering cross-functional capabilities helps leaders work as strategic partners and enables engagement.
   
• A premium should be placed on communication such as sharing updates at regular intervals during the transformation process.
   
• Leaders should hold themselves and their teams accountable, even when insights gained from data indicate that adjustments are needed in strategy or implementation of change.

"Healthcare organizations can improve accountability of leaders by setting clear expectations and goals, establishing key performance indicators, and creating an accountability loop to monitor performance and course correct when necessary. These are some of the basic tenants of an operating model that every healthcare organization should have to help improve and sustain performance," Merlino said.