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Emory Healthcare Seeks to Build ‘Systemness’ with Strategic and Financial Roadmap

By The SHSMD Team posted 01-19-2021 05:00 PM

  


In 2018, Emory Healthcare acquired a local health care system and formed an ambitious partnership with Kaiser Permanente to be the primary hospital for its members. Following this period of rapid expansion, the organization developed an integrated strategic and financial roadmap to achieve greater “systemness” across its many entities.

The expansions added three hospitals, 38 ambulatory care locations and 800 physicians during a time of heightened competition and consolidation in the market. With this quick growth, Emory leaders felt their annual planning processes needed a jolt to bring these disparate parts into alignment.

The health system started crafting what it calls an “integrated strategic and financial roadmap” for the next five years. The idea was to balance resource decisions and plot trade-offs to achieve a set of goals:
  • Improve patient outcomes.
  • Enhance the patient experience.
  • Address waste.
  • Support physicians and staff.
  • Pursue purposeful growth. 

Fast forward to today, and this roadmap has proven vital in enabling Emory to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. The integrated strategic and financial roadmap helped the organization through the past nine months, and it reaffirmed that the direction that it is taking is the right one.

The Process

Emory first embarked on a new planning journey in September 2018, after finalizing its acquisition of DeKalb Medical based in Decatur, Ga. The process kicked off with an environmental assessment, including input from stakeholders and the launching of 10 separate subject-matter expert teams, and reached the final steps in the fall of 2019.

The health system landed on five strategic goals for the next five years:

  1. Become the best place to work, learn and grow.
  2. Offer the best patient access and experience.
  3. Deliver the highest quality and safety.
  4. Maintain financial strength and affordability.
  5. Pursue purposeful growth. 

Emory began putting all of these in play for its fiscal 2021 planning process, but then the pandemic happened. Strategists were forced to step back, rethink things and adjust the planning process during the crisis.

New Guiding Principles

Some efforts, such as Emory’s capital planning process, had to be put on hold temporarily and revised, while the physician workforce planning needed to start all over again to account for the “new reality.” As part of this recalibration, the executive team devised six new “recovery guiding principles”:

  1. Commit to the core purpose of improving lives and providing hope.
  2. Recognize the multiyear recovery effort from COVID-19.
  3. Provide critical safety support for employees and providers.
  4. Incorporate care model enhancements and workflow improvements to expand capacity.
  5. Serve as a national thought leader on the virus.
  6. Ensure a strong system approach for decision-making on operations and strategic initiatives. 

Part of the pandemic pivot involved Emory leaders surveying each department or section about plans to hire doctors over the next two years. They also performed an extensive analysis about where the overall organization should add new physicians during that timeframe.

When COVID-19 hit, leaders had already completed this planning for 2021, but they knew Emory would not be able to budget for all of the approved physician hires. Emory strategists stepped back and used all of this information to create a medical staff “recruitment dashboard” broken down by individual service lines.

One of the takeaways from Emory’s experience is that unexpected crises can serve as catalysts to further improve planning. Plus, planning processes can always be adjusted to create a stronger system approach.

Learning More

SHSMD members can read the full article in the most recent edition of Spectrum, including details about how Emory Healthcare developed its strategic and financial roadmap. Nonmembers, learn more about SHSMD and join. SHSMD members can also share resources, ideas and questions with peers in the MySHSMD community.

In the SHSMD Bytes conference session Evolving the Annual Strategic Planning Process to Adapt to a Growing System’s Needs, members of Emory Healthcare’s Strategic Planning Office discussed how their annual planning process adapted and evolved, the challenges they faced and the lessons learned. Attendees of the SHSMD Bytes conference can watch the full session — along with all presentations and the Solution Center — through January 31, 2021. PLUS! Did you know that SHSMD’s 2021 Call for Proposals is open? Consider submitting a speaking proposal, open through February 10.

Health Care Strategic Planning Insights: A SHSMD Benchmarking Report provides insights into planning operations, department structures, budgets, challenges and successes that inform benchmarking and strategic planning operations.

Creating a Strategic Planning Process that Drives Future Success presents findings from a survey of health care leaders and highlights a number of opportunities for improving strategic planning in health care organizations.

How to Create a Strategic Plan with Organization-Wide Buy-In in 6 Months looks at how Huggins Hospital in Wolfeboro, N.H., successfully developed a strategic plan through diverse team participation, coalition building and open collaboration. 
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