Baptist St. Anthony’s Health System: Celebrating Success - Health Executive - RedCoat Publishing - Inside Healthcare

You might think a hospital voted one of the 75 best places to work in Texas by Texas Monthly and a top hospital nationally for patient safety by HealthGrades could relax a bit and bask in its achievements. But if you’re talking about John Hicks’ team at Baptist St. Anthony’s Health System (BSA), you’d be wrong.

John Hicks

Amarillo, Texas-based BSA serves a large swath of counties in the Texas Panhandle, Eastern New Mexico, Southwest Kansas, and Oklahoma, and Hicks’ team is serious about constantly improving care for all of those patients through cutting-edge equipment and evidence-based clinical processes.

Three years ago, the hospital’s executive team developed a strategic plan by looking at the area’s healthcare needs five years and 10 years out. The resulting three-phase program includes a 90-bed tower that opened last summer, a doubling of the hospital’s neonatal and pediatric ICU capability by mid-2009, and an enhancement of support services such as pharmacy, supply purchasing, and personnel.

But Hicks, who has been with the hospital for 12 years, said the most important thing during this growth period is making sure core measures on customer service and patient safety continue to improve.

“The biggest challenge of growth management is not being distracted by technology purchases or new facilities and neglecting the everyday customer service and quality of care,” he explained. “You can’t set that aside while you’re doing all these spectacular things.”

Work should be fun
Hicks said one of the reasons the hospital is known for being a great place to work is his team’s emphasis on involving employees at all levels and celebrating successes Texas style. For example, in February, a huge celebration was held to acknowledge the hospital’s 12-year anniversary and its progress on a large number of patient safety areas.

“We believe in involving everyone in what’s going on, in celebrations, and having fun at work,” said Hicks. “We have signs up all over the hospital that say, ‘Work should be as much fun as fun.’ We all spend so much time at work, and if we’re having fun, we’re going to be good at what we do.”

Another phrase frequently heard at BSA is “100% safe hospital.” This is easy-to-understand shorthand for the hospital’s efforts to improve its hand washing rates, lower its rates for hospital-acquired infections, and improve its protocols for pneumonia, community-acquired pneumonia, and AMI. “Our hope is to turn BSA into an evidence-based, protocol-driven organization,” Hicks said.

The efforts are clearly working, with the hospital’s hand washing compliance rate rising from 78% in the first half of 2007 to 89% in the second half. “We always wash our hands in the patient room as part of our introduction script,” Hicks said. The $60 million bed tower is part of the effort to lower infection rates by providing all BSA patients with a private room.

Central line and surgical infection rates have been lowered, and the team is now adding a focus on blood sugar levels, which have been shown to affect surgical complications. “The evidence now shows that if you lower blood sugar rates below 150, you reduce surgical and other complications by 66%. That’s staggering,” said Hicks. In 2006, the average blood sugar reading for patients was 153; in 2007, no surgical patient had a reading above 145.

Getting a reputation
The hospital has made several large investments in the last few years, including a 64-slice CT scanner, a da Vinci robotic surgical system, and an MRI calibrated to detect breast cancer. “We’ve always had the reputation among doctors and the community as a hospital that is fast to respond to emerging technology,” noted Hicks. “We had the first 64-slice CT in this area, and it’s proven a worthwhile investment. You get much more information faster—the diagnostic capability is fabulous.”

Hicks and his team are also spending approximately $18 million over five years to implement an electronic medical record and physician order entry system. Having seen some spectacular failures of computerized physician order entry, Hicks and his team decided to begin with nurse charting and save CPOE for the last phase of the project. The plan has worked even better than expected, and Hicks said he would recommend the approach to any hospital.

The nurses are pleased with the system, which speeds up their charting process, allowing them to leave the hospital when their shift is over instead of staying to complete their charts. Each patient room in the new tower includes a computer for charting and other purposes; computers are also located at several mini nursing stations around the floor.

Happy employees are clearly a priority at BSA, to the extent that the hospital paid for tobacco dependency drugs for the 25% of its staff that smoked when it decided to go smoke free. The program began six months before the smoking cut-off, giving employees plenty of notice. “We first had to convince people we were really going to do this,” said Hicks.

The strategy paid off, with patients and employees now completely smoke free, creating an even safer environment for both. And with the recent recognition by HealthGrades and Texas Monthly, Hicks and his team are undeniably heading in the right direction. “Our presence on the top places to work list is a good indicator that we enjoy involving our employees and celebrating our work together,” he concluded.

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