Below is the internal communication I have sent out detailing the ACE plan I referenced in my last post. I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback!
"Janice James, Jewish Hospital & St. Mary's HealthCare's Transitional CEO, has introduced a plan for improvement for our organization. This plan, The ACE Plan, which stands for Actions for Continued Excellence, is going to focus around making quality, financial and process improvements that will give our hospital and system long term sustainability. We've made great strides with our focus in recent years, and with the focus on The ACE Plan, I know we will continue to make more.
You'll be hearing a lot about The ACE Plan and the results it is driving in the upcoming months so I want to make sure each of you understand what the plan entails and how it affects you as team members. There are five Action Teams under the plan that will focus on a deep dive into specific areas. Those Action Teams, along with the JHSMH leader driving their mission are:
Labor and Productivity, chaired by myself
Non-Labor, chaired by Tom Gessel
Human Resources, chaired by Ed Farmer
Revenue Cycle, chaired by Ron Farr and
Physician Services, chaired by Debbie Molnar
In addition, our Chief Medical Officer. Dr. Lynn Simon, will be leading an Action Team focused on Quality and David Laird, our Senior Vice President for Strategic Planning will lead a group focusing on strategy.
Each of these committees is reporting out frequently about the improvements they are making. These updates are being communicated with your leader who will be sharing them with you.
You may be looking at the above list and wondering what our purpose is in doing this and what it means to you. Our purpose, as always, is to improve the lives of those we are fortunate to serve. The ACE Plan will allow us to make operational, quality and financial improvements. When we have
improvements to our bottom line, that in turn allows us to reinvest back into you, our team members, as well as into our capital budgets, which allows for new technology to improve patient lives. In the end, every operational improvement we strive to make is for the ultimate benefit of achieving our mission in providing the best in patient care.
You may also be looking at the list and wondering "what do I need to focus on?" We've had many shifting priorities in recent years and want to make the focus clear and simple for you over the next several months. If you grouped the Action Teams into 3 areas, you would have Operations, Quality and Strategy. These are the areas we need to focus on.
As team members, we don't work actively in strategy— however, we do work actively every day in Operations and Quality. I ask you to focus your
efforts on these areas. What process improvements can we make to best
utilize the resources of you and your team? Where are we currently not being good financial stewards of our resources? What supply changes can we make that don't harm our patient care in any way but would save the organization money?
Similarly, I ask you each to refocus your efforts on patient safety and quality. As I have shared with you, we recently had a surgical "never event" take place within our OR and since then experienced another "near miss" in our ICU. Sometimes these errors occur because a process is broken that we need to fix, but other times, errors are made simply because focus is lost or a process that is in place is not followed. The Hippocratic Oath says "first do no harm" and I ask that we all focus and rededicate ourselves to being patient-centered and bringing patient safety to the forefront of our minds every single moment of every single day. When it comes down to it, our patients are our most important priority.
This is a great deal of information to take in. In the upcoming weeks and months, I will be sharing with you what improvements we are making and how the ideas you are bringing to us are playing a part. Please remember that our ultimate mission remains to provide the very best in patient care and these improvements are aligning our efforts and resources in such a way that we can be assured that we will be doing so for years to come."
5 comments:
As an employee of JHSMH, I just thought of another way to save money without compromising patient care, safety or employee morale: We should discontinue printed paystubs and only rely on Lawson for this. Hope it helps.
Will the ACE plan have any room for nurse retention? We have nurses with years of experience being led away with no exit interview, no options; just have a good life. These people are an assett to this organization but demand the same importance of next years summer outing; something you need to do but not right now.
I know how much money it takes to train a new nurse throuogh orientation, and then the years of facility knowledge, medical knowdledge and the people skills acquired with life, you can put no price on all that. But, you are letting nurses go every day like you care less. You loss will be someone elses gain.
LH, great thought! HR is working on that as we speak. Once everyone is up and trained on Lawson the printed stubs will be discontinued. Look for more information on this coming out soon!
Anon 6:01AM,
There is always a desire to retain our best people and you are correct about how much time and money it takes to train a new nurse. I would enjoy to learn specifics about whom you say we are losing each day as I can also share many stories about those we have retained.
As I have said at work, we have had a very unusual summer between the flood at St. Mary's, multiple new facilities opening up in town, and an unusually high census due to the insurance dispute happening with our neighbors. All of this has placed a great deal of stress on our staff and created opportunities for people to see if the grass is truly greener elsewhere, which I can appreciate and understand. While I don't like to see good people leave, I also don't think it is good practice to coerce people to stay where they are not happy. We all work in a stressful environment by the nature of what we do. Our focus has to be on our patients and that requires people to be engaged mentally in their work as well as physically. Ultimately that is a personal decision. That being said, if there are matters we can affect to positively address someones concerns, I welcome the opportunity to get involved. I have done so multiple times recently, and almost all have been amicably resolved with retention! Please feel free to email me with more details. Thanks!
I am not loooking forward to only seeing my paystub on Lawson unless you can get it fixed so I can see and print it at home. EVERYONE I talked to who tried to do the open enrollment for their insurance at home on Lawson couldn't.
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