Aligning Healthcare Systems

Abstract

Developing the capability to support, influence, and re-engineer the care delivered across the span of a health system, including employed and affiliated physicians, owned and private acute care hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, ambulatory surgical centers, rehabilitation centers, home health agencies and others, requires vision, disciplined process and relationship development, data aggregation and dissemination, innovative care solutions and tools, and most importantly, energized and committed physician and administrative leaders that can transform data into information that is understandable and actionable by medical professionals, and most importantly, know what to do to get better results. It requires various elements of the integrated whole to coordinate their interactions and meet the reasonable expectations of committed partners with high-reliability over many years to sustain the improvement. It also requires continuous adaption as the market change continued to accelerate. Finally, it requires constant vigilance to prevent errors in leadership, planning, execution, and adaptation. This chapter discusses the process that one system used to transform its internal culture to one of clinician-directed, team-delivered care, data, high reliability, and innovation and then shared elements of that with its partners.