Jonathan Davis developed four core strategies to align employees, physicians, and community members with the vision of this regional medical center’s future.

When Jonathan Davis came to Kansas-based Mount Carmel Regional Medical Center in 2006, the 188-bed facility was in the midst of a campus renovation comprising a new electronic ICU, cardiology center, and cancer center. However, when speaking with employees, the newly appointed president and CEO noticed a startling trend.

Jonathan Davis

While the overall vision of this Catholic-based healthcare center is to be a provider of choice in Southeast Kansas, Davis realized the organization was missing the tools to align that mission with employees, physicians, and community members. Davis began holding town hall meetings that included several of of Mount Carmel’s physicians, board members, auxiliary, foundation, employees, and middle management directors. Their mission: to assess where they saw Mount Carmel going and where they believed the organization needed to go.

“After answering a series of questions, our board pinpointed several core themes and pushed those into four core strategies of service, quality, stewardship, and growth,” the CEO said. “Each core strategy is a building block that gives our organization a clear direction and our employees a greater understanding of our vision.”

Building blocks
Service is loosely defined as the action of helping, or doing work for, someone. With an overall goal of using staff partnerships and collaborations to meet the community’s need, one of the first places Davis looked to enhance service excellence was to make sure Mount Carmel was truly a physician-friendly workplace. The next step was analyzing the organization’s HR processes to ensure its recruitment and retention efforts were aligned with the organization’s mission.

“We need to live and breathe service in our daily interactions with each person who walks through our doors,” Davis said. “Our next core strategy, quality, is difficult to measure in healthcare, so we approached it from a unique direction.”

Mount Carmel already ranks higher than the Kansas and national averages in all of its quality indicators, including acute myocardial infarction care, heart failure, pneumonia care, and surgical infection prevention. Not yet satisfied, Davis is working with strategic planning groups to develop objectives and measurable indicators for each department to ensure the organization maintains those rankings. Middle management implementation teams roll out strategic objectives to employees by department, providing definable accountability to each team member.

“In early June, we began distributing an employee newsletter, and each week we roll out the objectives behind each core strategy,” Davis said. “We also use employee quotes to define each strategy so other employees can relate the objectives to their everyday work environments.”

Davis defines the third core strategy, stewardship, as the cumulative steps his organization takes to be the best healthcare provider in the region. “We want to catch the balance of having good financial performance so we can invest in our capital improvement projects while not diminishing service and quality,” he said. “Effectiveness and efficiency go hand in hand.”

In February, Mount Carmel’s administration began benchmarking against 20 other similar national hospitals using Solucient’s tools. Within those benchmarks, the administrative and leadership teams are finding ways to improve efficiency in categories such as ordering medical supplies and tightening staffing ratios. Davis’ goal for Mount Carmel was to measure below the 50th percentile in efficiency benchmarks. As of June, many of its measures were below that mark.

Seeing the light
After introducing each of the first three core strategies, Davis then turned his attention to growth, comparing what it meant when he first came to the organization in November and what it means now. “We had a good growth approach with our architects last year, but it wasn’t connected to a strategy or path into the future,” he explained. “Now we can hone in on where we want to be in 10 years and plot out how to get there based on our current strategic plan.”

With the new eICU, cardiology center, and cancer center in place, Davis is looking at enhancing Mount Carmel’s women’s and OB/gyn services. He is also looking at transforming the medical center into an all-private-room facility, as well as enhancing the organization’s cardiac and surgical step-down areas.

Although Mount Carmel’s has maintained a positive reputation in the community, Davis felt the need to develop a marketing campaign that not only shared his organization’s history but also shared its vision for the future. In 2007, he contracted with Arkansas-based marketing firm Mangan Holcolm Partners. Davis said he was attracted to the firm’s process because it supports Mount Carmel’s four core strategies while conveying a sense of service and purpose to the community.

“We’re one with our community and united as a team of healthcare professionals, employees, and physicians; we’re here to serve. We want to be collaborative partners, which means we want each group to define their collaborative roles at Mount Carmel,” Davis concluded.