BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

Full Organization Engagement Enables Effective Strategic Development

For health systems to execute effective strategic planning strategies, buy-in and involvement from all corners of the organization is needed. At Regional One Health in Memphis, Tenn., part of a decade-long plan aimed at achieving the goal of becoming an academic medical center has involved developing a tailored process that highlights collaboration between physicians, hospital leadership and other core staff members.

During a presentation at the SHSMD Connections Conference in October 2024, representatives from Regional One Health detailed the steps forward—and constant reevaluation—necessary to implement such a plan.

Planning Is Only One Piece of the Puzzle

Despite hard work and best intentions, organizations often can find that the intensive effort that goes into developing a strategic plan falls flat once the going gets tough. False starts and lack of engagement can derail even the most well-intentioned efforts. 

“When you look at studies online, anywhere north of 70% of organizations say they don’t fully execute their strategic plans,” says Allison Vance, the senior vice president and chief of staff at Regional One Health. “So many organizations struggle with bridging that gap from the planning to the execution stage. For us, we were at a point in our academic medical center journey where if we failed to achieve some very important strategic initiatives, we weren’t going to be able to move forward with partnerships we were working on. This forced us to really take the time to think about what we needed to do differently to make the plan stick.”

A necessary push also came from the organization’s CEO, who strongly encouraged creatively rethinking their approach to using data.

“Our CEO really challenged us to create an environment where our leaders could make data-driven decisions,” Vance recalls. “We had a lot of different sources of data, but we weren’t doing enough to pull them together to create a true picture of our performance.”

5 Ways to Power Up

The team at Regional One Health focused on five strategies, some operational and others growth-oriented, all of which were targeted toward “powering up” the organization:

1. Leveraging cross-functional teams: As the bedrock of the plan, this involved leveraging lean, cross-functional teams. “Our first lesson was that physicians had to be engaged from day 1,” Vance explains. “Even before implementation, they needed to be at the table when planning happened.” Once physician partners were on board, they focused on the other half of the equation: hospital leadership. “We were very intentional about the people that we asked to lead teams around the strategic execution, but when it came to the broader participation of our entire leadership team, we took a different approach and allowed leaders to opt into the teams that they wanted to participate in,” Vance says. Leaning into two companywide favorites—humor and basketball (Photo)—they hosted a draft by which the teams chose their participants, and created a promotional video highlighting the key players involved in the process. “Everybody’s culture is different, but we found that silly works for us,” Vance notes. “This got us good cross-functional participation. People were so excited to feel like they were chosen to be part of something bigger than just their individual department." The partnership was used to address how to best reduce harm events at the hospital. “We realized that everyone truly has a role in reducing our harm events, so we pulled together cross-functional teams to help us decide what types of digital tools could be created to improve workflows,” adds Jani Radhakrishnan, the CEO of Regional One Health Solutions. The resulting efforts led the hospital to beat projections for pressure ulcer reductions, and resulted in a hospital best rating from the Leapfrog Group.
2. Optimizing operational structure: This step consisted of optimizing an operational structure and cadence that could be used among the teams. “This allowed us to create cascading objectives and key results for each of the large measures and outcomes for our individual strategic objectives,” Vance recalls. “It also included clear roles for what our team leads, co-leads and members were expected to contribute over the course of the plan.” This collaboration enabled the staff to address hospital length of stay reduction, developing a new dashboard that provided daily statistics, allowing for teams to access—and act on—constantly updating data. “Our previous norm for reporting often featured reports that had the previous month’s data,” Radhakrishnan notes. “It was not very efficient and our length of stay wasn’t reducing.” Changing the interface so it featured dynamic reporting, updated daily, meant that length-of-stay data were delivered with consistency and structure. Being able to lead meetings with outcomes data in real time proved a game-changer for the organization and resulted in the lowest length-of-stay numbers in hospital history.
3. Drive change management: This part focused on driving change management and fostering continuous learning. “These may be buzzwords, but we hadn’t done something like this before and it was hard for everybody,” Vance says. “We really had to pay attention to what our leaders were telling us about what was working and not working.” Admitting that they were constantly learning and becoming comfortable with acknowledging when certain approaches needed to be reevaluated was a difficult, although important, lesson. “Being able to look at what you’re seeing—and not seeing—in your data was a huge part of making sure that we were able to move forward, and a big win for us,” Vance says.
4. Strengthen communication: Frequent updates and data-driven decisions were key to ensuring alignment among all participants in the process, as was strengthening communication between these individuals. “We really want to provide a clear sense of purpose to everybody,” Vance notes. “We work hard to connect the dots with staff to understand how their contributions are linked both to their own department’s achievements, but also the broader organization’s success.”
5. Celebrate your wins: Hand in hand with this came another important element—celebrating. The hospital hosted a basketball-themed party, complete with mock press conferences where the teams had the chance to discuss their victories and share in the collective success. “This was all a huge turning point in our journey, and it was time for us to celebrate our wins,” Vance recalls. Radhakrishnan agrees: “We love celebrating and one thing we wanted to emphasize was that it was not just a once-a-year party; we really do celebrate throughout the whole year. Recognizing people allows everyone to feel valuable and shows how they played a part in hitting our goals and establishing a better community at Regional One Health. The biggest takeaway here is that your strategic plan is only as strong as the people involved. Engaging your key stakeholders is key, leveraging data when you can, and then using that to learn and pivot and grow as needed.”

Regional One Health physician-CEO Dr. Reginald Coopwood with “physician champion” Dr. David Shibata from Surgical Oncology during one of the health system’s basketball-themed events designed to boost physician engagement.