February 01, 2018
Hi Team,
Happy New Year – I hope you and your family are off to a terrific new year and that you remain on track with all of your resolutions! I entered 2018 with a great deal of optimism and excitement for TriHealth, and I hope you did too. We have many great reasons to be excited about the future as we enter the second half of our fiscal year. And as I shared during our Team Member Forums, we begin the second half of our fiscal year with growing momentum and improving performance.
Wins
Top Docs? We Got Them: Cincinnati Magazine’s annual TOP DOCS issue hit the newsstands the first week of January, and TriHealth led the way with more than 140 physicians being recognized by their peers for clinical excellence. Also in the edition was an outstanding feature story on our own Dr. Michael Marcotte, profiling his work at Good Samaritan Hospital helping opioid-addicted pregnant women get the help they need prior to and after delivering their newborn child.
The TriHealth Way– Leadership Effective Assessment Results In: The results of our second LEA – which solicits team member feedback on the degree to which our leaders are consistently applying the TriHealth Way leadership practices – showed an encouraging improvement from March 2017. Overall positive scores increased from 86.5 percent of responses in March to 88.9 percent in November. The results show that we are building a sustainable foundation with the TriHealth Way as our leaders work to consistently apply and master these best practices, which are leading to improved performance.
Milestone for Heart Institute: The TriHealth Heart Institute this month celebrated the 20th anniversary of the open heart surgery program at Bethesda North Hospital. The heart surgery team, along with TriHealth leaders, held several celebrations during the week Jan. 21. Congratulations to the entire team of caregivers who continue to provide the best heart care anywhere in the region.
Record-Breaking Attendance at Team Member Forums
Earlier this month, we held 11 forums at 9 locations across the system, including a live streamed forum on LinkNet. The video of that session is now posted on LinkNet for those of you who weren’t able to participate last week. We were excited to see a record number of team members, physicians and volunteers in attendance with standing-room-only at number of the locations – a wonderful sign of your growing commitment to and belief in the TriHealth Way – which is how we are getting healthcare right for our patients and our community. More than 5,100 team members joined us for the forums, including over 3,600 on the live stream. Just as important, we had a record number of questions and wonderful dialogue, which is one of the important objectives of these Forums.
You can expect to see a summary of forum Q&As published in the coming weeks. I want to thank each of you for making time to attend a session. David Cook, Gail Donovan and I thoroughly enjoyed sharing our progress and talking with each of you during and after each of the forums!
System Updates
For those who could not attend a forum, I’ll recap the system updates that I shared with our team members last week here in this monthly update. Our strong pillar performance to date and the progress we are making on our journey to get healthcare right, particularly our work to build our population health infrastructure and new competencies, positions us well for another successful fiscal year which will conclude in June
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As a country, we spend too much on healthcare and we receive too little. And, our nation’s healthcare delivery system is focused far too much on curing disease and illness and not sufficiently on promoting health and preventing or better managing illness and disease. This is why we’re so committed here at TriHealth to adopting a better way, and that better way is a population health model of care. At TriHealth, we are evolving from a historically reactive and somewhat fragmented approach to delivering care to a much more proactive and coordinated approach to improving the health of our community and those we serve. Considerable work has been done behind the scenes over the past couple of years.
We are bringing this work much more to the forefront in the coming months and years, and you will soon begin seeing more communications and visible progress on this work. In fact, we will be launching an informational series of short videos in just a few weeks to educate and inform our team members and physicians about this clinical transformation underway throughout TriHealth.
In addition to discussing our journey to get healthcare right by delivering on the “triple aim” of better care, better health and better value, our Chief Operating Officer, Gail Donovan, discussed areas of current focus as we work together to achieve all of our system Pillar Goals over the remaining five months in fiscal year 2018. Pillar Goals in the areas of service, quality, people, growth and finance are how we measure our progress from good to great in better serving and caring for our patients and community. David Cook, our Chief Human Resources Officer, then explained the work underway to improve our Total Rewards Programs—which includes compensation, benefits, career development, and work-life balance—as part of our vision to become the health system where our people most want to work, where physicians most want to practice and most importantly where the community turns for healthcare. David and the HR team are planning a series of HR Forums in March to share even more detail about the new investments and the real improvements we are making in our Total Rewards programs.
Finally, we shared a short video during the forums showing how team members are embracing the Trihealth Way and making positive and lasting impressions on our patients and their families. I encourage you to take a moment to watch the video on LinkNet, which you can access from my Monthly Update posted there.
Leadership Development Institutes Are Having an Impact
On Feb. 6 and 7, we will once again be convening our more than 800 leaders at our third Leadership Development Institute (LDI) of fiscal year 2018. These quarterly training events represent our ongoing investment in our leaders and team members to build a unified, high-performing TriHealth culture that is taking our system from good to great. The encouraging feedback we have received from you through the November Leadership Effectiveness Assessment (LEA) Survey and other performance measures shows that our leaders are working hard to adopt and master the TriHealth Way. The February LDI is intended to continue to support leaders in this mastery of the TriHealth Way with the theme “Mastering the Skills, Leading the Way 2.0.” These LDIs would not be possible without the many TriHealth team members and physicians who continue to provide exceptional patient care and perform the important day-to-day functions, as our leaders take this necessary time away from their daily responsibilities. Thank you for your dedication to carry on in your leaders’ absence. Your leaders will be sharing with you highlights from the LDI when they return.
As we begin the eighth month of our fiscal year, I want to thank you for everything you do to make TriHealth a model healthcare system regionally and nationally – getting healthcare right by delivering better care, better health and better value – for our patients and the community we serve! Know that you are making a real difference and that I remain deeply grateful and so impressed for the amazing transformational work we are doing together!