August 29, 2023
Hi Team –
Last week’s hot, stormy, and humid weather cleared just in time, leaving us a beautiful AND comfortable day on Sunday to celebrate the very best team in healthcare!
More than 16,000 TriHealth team members and their family and friends took center stage at Kings Island and Soak City for one “last blast” of summer fun – and what a blast it was!! Many of our leaders and I had a ball enjoying the rides and the picnic with you and your family and friends – another wonderful way to show our appreciation for all you do for TriHealth and our patients!!
A BIG thank you to Amy Ackerman, Melissa Savich, and the “Team Member Celebration” planning team for organizing yet another fun celebration of our amazing team! Click here to check out our photo gallery of all the Kings Island fun.
And a special thank you to all of our team members and physicians who were unable to make it to Kings Island, as they were continuing to provide our patients with the very best care at our hospitals, EDs, Priority Cares, and ambulatory campuses across the region!
Getting Healthcare Right
LDI Recap: Accelerating to Excellence
Last Wednesday, our leadership team participated in the 26th Leadership Development Institute (LDI), which was held virtually. This LDI focused on reconnecting to and remastering our evidence-based TriHealth Way practices, all to accelerate our journey from Good to Great for those we serve and those who serve.
Our leaders participated in engaging discussions on the tools, skills, and core competencies required to elevate TriHealth to top decile performance across all pillars – People/Culture, Safety/Quality/Population Health, Service, Growth, and Finance – by the end of FY2025.
Achieving and sustaining top decile performance (leading the way and performing better than 90% of our peers) is essential because it is evidence that we are delivering the best possible care and clinical outcomes, ALWAYS versus sometimes – and this is how we fulfill our bold vision of Getting Healthcare Right!! Top decile performance assures the level of care and clinical outcomes our patients not only expect from TriHealth but deserve – because every patient should be treated as if they were our own mother, brother, son or daughter!!
Leaders learned how utilizing proven TriHealth Way tools – from stoplight reports to huddles to open and honest two-way communication to coaching – helped us achieve strong performance across all five pillars in FY23. And they showed how even more consistent application and mastery of those same practices and behaviors will set us up on an accelerated path to breakthrough performance in the years ahead…starting now in FY24!
So, stay tuned as you will hear more from your leaders about how we will work together to further master these TriHealth Way practices in the days and weeks ahead. And this is all to better support our amazing team members and physicians in our shared efforts to accelerate our progress in delivering even better care, better health, and better value to every patient, always!
TriHealth Welcomes Fifth School to Work Program Class
Four years ago, TriHealth forged an innovative partnership with Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) to create the School to Work (STW) Program – a unique workforce development and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEI+B) initiative. STW offers CPS high school students the opportunity to gain real-world healthcare experience, earn a paycheck, and receive academic credit as they rotate through assigned departments and work beside our own team members at Good Samaritan Hospital.In May, nine CPS seniors graduated from the STW program. And thanks in part to STW, all are college-bound and are pursuing careers in healthcare – many of whom have expressed an interest in doing so at TriHealth!!
And I’m pleased to share, TriHealth recently welcomed a record 36 CPS juniors and seniors during their orientation to the 2023/24 School to Work program!! This is our largest STW class EVER – far exceeding our original pilot program of 10 students in 2019!!
Please join me in welcoming these students to TriHealth for a truly life-changing experience. I’d also like to give a special thanks and shout out to our STW Program staff and our Good Samaritan Hospital team members who will mentor these students and help to open their eyes to the purpose-filled “calling” of healthcare! We also remain grateful to our sponsors, bi3 and CommonSpirit, for their generous investments in the STW program, which alongside TriHealth’s funding, will ensure ongoing funding of the vital School to Work Program for years to come.
Initiatives such as the STW program play an important role in exposing high school students to careers in healthcare and creating a “pipeline” to build a more diverse healthcare talent pool for the future, which better reflects the rich diversity of our community – all part of our work to Get Healthcare Right!!
You Asked, We Listened – Enhanced Benefits Coming Your Way!
Our Total Rewards Program is designed to help our team members and their families make the most of their health and their lives. And one of the ways we continuously evolve our Total Rewards Program is by listening and responding to team member feedback about what benefits matter most to you. So, I’m excited to share that in response to your feedback, TriHealth is adding several new and enhanced benefits during this year’s Open Enrollment that become effective on January 1, 2024:
- Parental Bonding Leave – We will offer a two-week consecutive (back to back) Paid Leave of Absence 100% funded by TriHealth for birth parents, non-birth parents, adoptions and foster care placements. This leave can be taken at any time during the first six months after the child’s arrival. And, as we were evaluating the possibility of adding this benefit, we also decided to make accommodations to retroactively offer it to parents whose children arrived during Calendar Year 2023 (CY23). We are happy to offer this new “family-first” benefit to give our new parents additional, stress-free time to enjoy and bond with their newest arrivals.
- Optional Short-Term Disability (STD) Buy-Up – Our Short-Term Disability (STD) coverage provides eligible team members who are out of work due to an illness or injury with 60% of their annual pay covered by TriHealth for up to 26 weeks. To provide team members with the opportunity to enhance this benefit, we are adding an Optional STD Buy-Up, which gives eligible team members the option to voluntarily purchase – or “buy up” – an additional 10% of coverage, which would then provide 70% of annual pay.
These new and enhanced benefits, and others added in recent years, are a direct result of your feedback and our commitment to provide our team members and physicians with an attractive and competitive Total Rewards Program – one that supports your health and wellbeing and contributes to an exceptional and inclusive work and practice environment for ALL! Stay tuned for more details about these exciting benefit enhancements coming soon from the OneHR team!
August Team Member Town Hall Recording Available on Bridge
If you missed last week’s Team Member Town Hall, I encourage you to watch the full recording here on Bridge to learn more about the launch of TriHealth’s Center for Health Equity and the important work underway to reduce and eliminate health disparities, here at TriHealth and throughout our region.
And remember, we’re always interested in your input to help shape future Town Hall agendas. So, if you have thoughts about topics of interest or have questions you want answered, please email them to TownHall@trihealth.com.
Dr. Michael Bain, Chief Medical Informatics Officer, Announces Retirement
Following a distinguished career with TriHealth that spans more than three decades, Dr. Michael Bain, Emergency Medicine Physician and Chief Medical Informatics Officer, has shared his plans to retire at the end of September. Dr. Bain’s tenure with TriHealth dates back to the late 1990s when he served as Emergency Department (ED) Medical Director at Good Samaritan Hospital and later at Bethesda Arrow Springs. In 2011, he was appointed CEO of Qualified Emergency Specialists, Inc., (QESI), the region’s leading Emergency Medicine physician group closely affiliated with TriHealth EDs. That same year, he joined TriHealth as one of two physician champions charged with helping to lead TriHealth’s enterprise-wide implementation of Epic. He was later appointed as Executive Medical Director at Bethesda North Hospital.In 2017, Dr. Bain was selected to serve as TriHealth's first Chief Medical Informatics Officer (CMIO). In this role, Dr. Bain has elevated and enhanced the use of information technology in clinical processes and promoted the use of technology to create efficiencies for clinicians and improve the quality of care for our patients – a critical factor in our ability to Get Healthcare Right!
Following Dr. Bain’s retirement on September 28, we will launch our search for the next CMIO. Please join me in thanking Dr. Bain for his strong leadership and expert clinical care through these many years of service to both TriHealth and our patients – and in wishing him the very best in his retirement!
As we head into the Labor Day weekend, I hope you all enjoy a safe and fun last summer hurrah that includes one of Cincinnati’s favorite events, the Western & Southern/WEBN Labor Day Fireworks at Sawyer Point! And a BIG THANK YOU to all of our team members and physicians who will be stepping up to work the long holiday weekend to care for every patient in need!