Our 2023 Priorities
By Marc Belcastro, DO, system chief medical officer, Premier Health
Under the leadership of our new CEO, Mike Riordan, we established three priorities in 2022: quality/safety/service, employee engagement, and financial performance. These priorities will remain for 2023, and we believe a disciplined laser focus on these three areas will lead to success.
We have labeled quality, safety, and service as the Patient Experience. Our patients are at the heart of our mission and purpose. Our first commitment to them must be to keep them safe from harm. Our following commitment is to provide them with quality care. Finally, with equal priority is to serve them with our values of respect, integrity, compassion, and excellence. This truly is the entire patient experience.
Our quality has been solid, with continued improvements over the past year. Highlights have included mortality, surgical site infections, and patient safety indicators. Our Leapfrog safety scores continue to improve. These two legs of the patient experience stool are progressing and meeting our commitments. The third leg, service, is our opportunity for improvement. Service is measured by our HCAHPS scores.
Again, to promote success, we narrowed our focus to three areas: Physician Communication, Nurse Communication, and Care Transitions. Showing our patients respect, listening to them, and explaining things to them in a way they understand is not difficult. The challenge is adopting a discipline to do this for every patient, every time, no matter what.
We administered an employee engagement survey using Gallup and focused on 12 elements. Our response rate was 71% which was 7,215 respondents. Thirty-four percent of our employees reported engagement, while 50 percent reported not being engaged. The remainder were actively disengaged. First-time surveys performed by Gallup across businesses report 32 percent active engagement. Our employees said that they know what is expected, we are committed to quality, and someone in the organization cares about them. Our opportunities are recognizing them, listening to their opinions, and providing opportunities for their career progress. There will be focused work in 2023 with future surveys to measure our improvements.
Finally, we have committed to a break-even operating margin in the 2024 budget for financial performance. We have not had a positive operating margin since 2014. From 2014 through 2019, this was improving, and we were on track. We then faced a pandemic, and health care universally was financially challenged. In addition, we remained true to our mission by electing to have Miami Valley Hospital designated as a crisis hospital during the height of a pandemic surge which added to our financial burden. That is why we chose a two-year period to compensate for the deficit. We remain committed to these priorities and the discipline to communicate our progress throughout 2023.
Back to the January 2023 issue of Premier Pulse
