MetroHealth System is embracing change and expanding its reach via a three-pronged operational unit designed to transform the system across its clinical, operational, and physical assets, Christopher Cheney writes for HealthLeaders Media.
Drive organizational change—without overloading your managers
In recent years, MetroHealth has grown exponentially, Cheney writes. The health system's total revenue increased from $941 million in FY 2015 to $1.04 billion in FY 2016. Meanwhile, MetroHealth's patient population is projected to increase from 180,000 patients in 2012 to 300,000 in 2018.
Embracing change through DoIT
"We've had remarkable success and growth over the years," Craig Richmond, MetroHealth's CFO, said. But he added that "innovations and new environments all demand new strategies and abilities." To that end, MetroHealth has invested in transformational change via its Department of Integration and Transformation, or DoIT, to "accomplish more at an accelerated pace," according to Richmond.
DoIT has three different divisions:
- The Department of Operations Research and Analytics (DORA), which assesses business processes and questions, oversees regulations for inter-departmental data utilization, and develops projections and simulations that connect clinical, financial, and operational data.
- The Results Management Office (RMO), which utilizes data-based methodologies to cut wasteful practices and facilitate innovation; uses workforce knowledge to improve decision-making quality, and helps manage projects by boosting ROI, prioritizing initiatives, and cutting risk.
- The Center for Disruptive and Radical Experimentation (DARE), which promotes staff participation in the decision-making process, such as by establishing Meeting-Free Fridays to foster spontaneous employee interactions, an Idea Lab for DoIT-specific activities, and about 40 different interdepartmental "game-changers," or staff members who promote change within the organization.
With this initiative in hand, MetroHealth from 2012 to 2018 aims to enact transformational change in three areas:
- Clinical assets, including an expansion of the health system's primary care network, and an "IT-enabled integration of care settings, care management, and assumption of financial risk," Cheney reports;
- Physical assets, including distributing the health system's anchor facilities evenly throughout the local market and building a new main campus; and
- Operational assets, including developing the health system's analytics capabilities and reorganizing based on the service-line model.
Over that same time period, the health system has also is projected to grow physically, increasing its:
- EDs from one to four;
- Inpatient facilities from one to three;
- Outpatient facilities from 20 to 30; and
- Pharmacies from three to nine (Cheney, HealthLeaders Media, 9/18).
Drive organizational change—without overloading managers
On top of an already challenging job with an often unwieldy span of control, today’s managers are also tasked with implementing an overwhelming number of new initiatives.
This report contains four strategies that will help executives increase manager capacity and make change initiatives doable.