Leadership, Culture, Governance

It’s often human nature to look for a culprit or hero when there’s a setback or success. In healthcare, however, this punishment-and-reward formula puts patient outcomes at risk, as it doesn’t consider all factors that contribute to a result and lead to a better process.
The key to failure or success is most likely a chain of events, and not an individual action. To avoid the same mistake again or build on good practices, healthcare leaders must look at the system, not the individual or their actions. Effective improvement leadership will standby a systems approach, even under the most challenging circumstances.

Many healthcare organizations invest for financial, strategic, and operational reasons. These investments cover a broad spectrum of opportunities, from medical technology, to delivery models, to promising new research. Health Catalyst follows these investment avenues, building long-term relationships, and connecting with its partners in three ways:

As owners.
As innovators.
As customers.

The sole focus of these investments and partnerships is outcomes improvement—a unique approach in healthcare—supported by the operating principles of ownership, pragmatic innovation, and transparency.
In this first article of a series, Kyle Salyers, Health Catalyst Senior Vice President of Business Development, explores the partnership “flywheel” and the collaborative nature that underscores a successful healthcare investment platform.

As access to healthcare data grows, healthcare leaders are using more data to make decisions. Executives and front-line clinicians need a decision-support tool that meets the demands of today’s increasingly data-rich environment. Healthcare dashboards once filled this niche, but no longer keep up with ever-growing data demands. Fortunately, an innovative visual reporting system, Leading Wisely™, picks up where dashboards fall short—enabling faster reporting and customized, self-service capability for comprehensive data-driven support.
Leading Wisely’s key next-level features include:

Customization, allowing the individual user to personally tailor measures.
Proactive alerts, prompted by personalized notification settings.
User friendly layout, with easy-to-read highlights that indicate if a measure if moving off course.

The next step in the evolution of executive decision support is here—introducing Leading Wisely. With real-time alerts and customizable reports, healthcare leaders now have access to the actionable insights and meaningful information they need to make strategic decisions. Unlike traditional dashboards or static reports, Leading Wisely helps executives avoid being blindsided, giving them complete control over their data.

For healthcare organizations looking to achieve outcomes improvement goals, effective governance is the most essential must-have. This leadership culture ensures success by enabling health systems to invest in outcomes improvement and allocate resources appropriately toward these goals.
This executive report is an outcomes improvement governance handbook centered on four guiding principles (and associated helpful steps) health systems can follow to achieve effective governance and start achieving more with less:

Stakeholder engagement
Shared understanding
Alignment
Focus

With these four principles, organizations can build a foundation of engagement and focus around the work, where they maximize strengths, and discover and address weaknesses. They establish an improvement methodology, define their goals, and sustain and standardize improvement work.

How do healthcare organizations create a systemwide focus on outcomes improvement? They build a healthcare outcomes improvement engine—a mechanism designed to drive successful and sustainable change.
Creating this outcomes improvement engine requires four critical components:

Engaging executives around outcomes improvement.
Prioritizing opportunities most likely to succeed.
Adequately staffing initiatives.
Communicating success early and often.

Once up and running, multidisciplinary engagement and standardized improvement processes fuel the outcomes improvement engine in its mission to produce sustainable, scalable improvement.

What most often restricts IT innovation at a healthcare organization? It’s not limitations of the tools for innovation (the data infrastructure) or the workforce, but the organizational culture of the health system. A culture that’s too focused on past failed initiatives and their consequences won’t identify opportunities that lead to new ideas. They likely have the right parts for a great idea, but aren’t enabling those parts for innovation.
Organizations can build and environment that fosters innovation in healthcare IT by operating with three principles:

Give teams the freedom to fail.
Remember the adjacent possible.
Leverage organizational networks.

Successful outcomes improvement in healthcare requires strong leadership to make decisions, allocate resources, and prioritize initiatives. For improvement to succeed and endure, health systems can’t leave any part of leadership to chance. Instead, effective governance requires thoughtful, deliberate development. Otherwise, improvement initiatives stall or fail to launch, as stakeholders debate goals and strategies. To succeed, governance structure must be solid enough to withstand any challenges to improvement initiatives—from resource constraints to skeptics.
Effective governance in healthcare operates with four guiding principles:

Engage the right stakeholders.
Establish a shared understanding of objectives.
Align incentives and rules of engagement.
Practice disciplined prioritization.

A mission-driven culture is a must-have in today’s rapidly changing healthcare environment. Culture is a vital component of a successful organization, as it builds an engaged and committed workforce that’s capable of adapting to shifting demands.
Four principles form the basis of a mission-driven culture:

Engage life-long learners and great listeners.
Assume positive intent.
Avoid entitlement.
Aim for long-term commitment.

A strong employee wellness program is the first step to encouraging better health and creating meaningful, positive change in the lives of employees and their families. A well-designed healthcare insurance plan, a comprehensive wellness program, and creating a culture of personal accountability for wellness can optimize healthcare spending and improve employee health. It can also bolster the understanding and shared accountability for healthcare costs between the employees and the company.

Healthcare organizations are establishing data-driven improvement processes to improve the quality of care at a lower cost. Implementing an analytics infrastructure, clinical content, and deployment processes required to achieve success can be a challenge. Surprisingly, building the technology infrastructure is the relatively easy part. Ensuring clinicians are utilizing the data in every day decision making and creating a data-driven culture is more difficult. Senior leadership engagement is crucial, driving the organization to undergo a purposeful change, and making analytics and improvement everyone’s responsibility.