Becker's Hospital Review

43 Executive Briefing The essential components of a successful infrastructure An infrastructure that supports operational alignment to an organization's strategic direction requires three essential components. 1. Health system boards must be engaged in the strategy. A typical board holds strategic planning committee meetings with a C-suite leader who provides input on the direction and guides the discussion. The majority of the time spent during these meetings should be around strategy, not updates and report outs. 2. A range of senior leaders, including clinicians, need to contribute to the development of a data-driven organizational strategy. Organizational strategy discussions require leaders across the continuum to weigh in and provide insights around the system's mission and vision, performance, industry trends, organizational resources and market positioning in order to prioritize the most impactful operational transformation efforts. 3. Mature day-to-day operational oversight groups, such as value analysis and workforce management committees that understand how to leverage data to make informed decisions, must be developed to align and support the work. These groups should oversee efforts to improve performance, serve as change management experts to guide progress, hold leaders accountable to executing on approved changes, support communication and use reporting to guide action planning. Ms. Briola said, "Effective leaders have high expectations for every stakeholder involved, with a focus on sustainability and success across their organization. They are making critical decisions on long-term margin management and performance improvement strategies. The risks are real if organizations do not implement change and execute on their strategy in a deliberate way." Ms. Briola leads transformation work at Premier – her team partners with healthcare organizations and helps them assess, design and implement strategies to improve their margins, without compromising their commitments to their missions. This requires a top-down approach, with foundational priorities determined at the highest levels and clear plans that are aligned with and communicated across interdependent work streams. Boards, for instance, must be engaged to ensure strategy discussions are taking place at the beginning of every meeting. Boards should consistently evaluate new projects, ventures and initiatives against the mission and vision of their organizations to ensure consistency with the strategic direction. "Effective leadership requires clearly defined expectations and measurable performance criteria," said Guy Masters, MPA, principal performance partner at Premier. "As we know, the board, for example, sets a culture of accountability to the degree that it holds the C-suite accountable to specific performance standards. This culture should be consistently applied and nurtured across an organization. Accountability practices around mutually agreed upon expectations will help eliminate silos and incent collaboration across entities, departments and individuals at all levels." Leaders also need to ensure staff have the right information and tools to be successful. For example, an accomplished bedside nurse who is promoted to department manager will require support to understand and be successful at managing productivity, staffing, scheduling and budgeting. An established infrastructure can serve as a mechanism to ensure emerging leaders are able to manage day-to-day operations as they also learn how best to make progress on longer-term organizational priorities. Additionally, these leaders play a critical role in informing which analytics and change management capabilities are needed to support them and the work an organization is undergoing to improve. Mr. Ash said, "Once an organization has its action plan with all the interventions that are needed to operationalize change, it has to be hardwired into the workflow using technology to create sustainability. If staff do not have some kind of hardwiring mechanism, they can often slip back into the old way of doing things." Tailoring analytics to an organization's needs is essential for leaders, oversight entities and frontline staff to drive timely, evidenced-based care decisions while delivering on cost savings and revenue generating opportunities. The path to profitability Ultimately, healthcare's turbulent environment requires strategic plans to be developed and aligned across an organization. The key is to ensure a healthcare organization has a decision-making infrastructure that is empowered with the right people at the table, business intelligence and support solutions to minimize operational risks and enable financial success in the future. n Premier Inc. is a leading healthcare improvement company, uniting an alliance of more than 4,000 U.S. hospitals and health systems and 165,000 other providers and organizations to transform healthcare. With integrated data and analytics, collaboratives, supply chain solutions, and consulting and other services, Premier enables better care and outcomes at a lower cost. Premier plays a critical role in the rapidly evolving healthcare industry, collaborating with members to co-develop long-term innovations that reinvent and improve the way care is delivered to patients nationwide.

• Cover