With all of the challenges facing hospitals today, we find ourselves constantly trying to evaluate and re-evaluate what we are doing and why we are doing it in order to preserve and enhance the mission of our organization. Over the past 18 months we have taken on numerous initiatives focused around patient safety, satisfaction, quality, and "balancing our checkbook" as a hospital. With that focus, I'm pleased to report that we have made a great deal of improvement in each of these areas. Our infection rates have continued to decline putting us in the top quartile nationally, our CMS core measures scores have improved markedly across the board, our length-of-stay initiatives have shortened patient stays by over a half-day (with a rising acuity at the same time), and the financial performance of our hospital and system has once again returned positive.
I hope each of our team members and physicians are as proud of these accomplishments as I am because none of these would have been possible without your tremendous input, support, engagement, and teamwork. Together, we have climbed a very tall mountain in a relatively short time which I know will prepare us well for the challenges that still lie ahead.
It's no secret that the environment in which we operate today is challenged by a troubled economy and the threats of what health reform will mean to our hospital and our patients. From my perspective, regardless of the outcome our treatment plan remains the same: seek continued strong alignment with our medical staff and together focus on improving the quality, safety, and efficiency of the care we provide to our patients. If we do these things correctly, we will be positioned as well as anyone to succeed in the future.
With that aim in mind, our system has created a new plan to simplify our focus and prioritize those actions that are most important to our long term success. Appropriately, we have named this the "ACE" plan which stands for "Actions for Continued Excellence." This plan which I have explained in the latest issue of our internal 'Progress Notes' communication (and posted in separate post here) will serve as our guide over the upcoming year and beyond to keep us focused on quality, operations, and the strategy to lead our system forward.
As you can probably guess, your comments, thoughts, and ideas will be just as important to our continued success as in the past and I can't wait to hear what you have to say! Please let me know your Ideas that we can together turn into Actions for Continued Excellence. Thank you!
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