Baptist Health System in San Antonio, Texas, is the Studer Group’s Fire starter of the Month for October. This five-hospital system was selected because of significant strides it has made in improving patient satisfaction, employee satisfaction and market share in the past 20 months. Among the achievements noted as reasons for selecting BHS as the October Fire Starter are: inpatient satisfaction rating at the 90th percentile, outpatient satisfaction rating at the 82nd percentile, and emergency department patient satisfaction at the 99th percentile - all higher than the Vanguard Health Systems’ ratings and the national ratings. These improved ratings also have contributed to a two percent increase in market share for Baptist Health System hospitals.
Those improvements were due in great part to a concentrated effort to improve the corporate culture among staff. And, although the achievements have been notable, BHS leadership is far from ready to say they have completed their mission. The fire has been started, and now it must be tended and fueled into a blaze that continually lights the way toward excellent patient care.
The journey to improvement began in January 2003, when Vanguard Health Systems acquired Baptist Health System and named Kent Wallace as the new president and CEO. Kent quickly observed that the preceding years of financial struggle and attendant problems had caused a "learned helplessness" among staff. He understood that the significant planned financial investment in new facilities and equipment alone would not be enough to push Baptist Health System to the top of its market. Kent committed to changing the corporate culture to one where employees wanted to work, physicians wanted to practice, and patients wanted to come for treatment.
Baptist Health System partnered with the Studer Group to create a culture of excellence, and together, have used many tools to move toward that goal. A real commitment to training has been key. Each manager attends a quarterly, two-day, off-site Leadership Development Institute where these tools are introduced, and leaders have a chance to explore how they will implement culture change within their own departments. These 64 hours each year have introduced Baptist leaders to such techniques as rounding with a purpose, the value of thank-you notes, rewards and recognition, scripting and key words for better patient satisfaction, service recovery, and more.
Another key to Baptist’s current success has been a very focused alignment of system goals to the Pillars outlined by the Studer Group. At every level of the organization, staff are expected to direct their activities toward meeting their individual department or area Pillar Goals that support the Pillars of People, Finance, Quality, Service, and Growth. In keeping with the long-standing commitment by Baptist Health System to supporting its community, and Kent’s desire to increase the visibility of faith in the hospital system, Kent added a sixth Pillar - "Community."
And, in order to move the organization forward quickly and to make best use of the human capital available, system leaders began an active program of rewarding the "A" players, encouraging the "B" players to improve, and of reducing the number of "C" players employed in the system.
All these efforts, along with ongoing activities to engage physicians in the improvement process, have moved Baptist Health System from a position of growing weaker, to a position of growing stronger in an unprecedented way.
Congratulations to Baptist Health System for working together to make significant improvements in the way staff provide health care to their patients.