Hocking Valley Community Hospital, a Joint Commission accredited, 25 bed Critical Access Hospital in Logan, Ohio, located about 60 miles from Columbus, Ohio. HVCH was established at its current site in March 1966 and is in the heart of southeast Ohio. The hospital offers the community a 24 hour emergency service, urgent care center, an onsite 30 bed Skilled Nursing Facility, and a 10 bed geriatric psychiatric unit.
Our journey began in early 2004 when, as a senior leadership team, we made a commitment to each other, our employees, and physicians that we were ready to take our organization to the next level.
We used the Studer Group's Nine Principles as our roadmap and the Must Have's as our tools to move our organization's performance. We engaged our leadership team through regular Leadership Development Institutes, focusing on the skills, tools and knowledge we needed to be better leaders. Our employee turnover was an indicator that we needed to improve employee retention. Our finances were weaker than we wanted, so we knew we needed to the raise bar of performance by all managers within the organization. Recognizing patient satisfaction perceptions were inconsistent from month to month, we focused on always creating a much more consistent experience for all who seek care at HVCH.
We expanded the Leadership Development Institute concept to our employees by creating an Employee Development Institute. Our first EDI focused on the five fundamentals of communication. Each employee participated in a four hour session that connected the dots between AIDET®, service recovery and patient satisfaction perception.
Our results speak for themselves...across all Pillars! Our patient's tell us they're more pleased than ever as our results are in the 88th percentile for Outpatient and 53rd percentile for the Emergency Department and we have consistently been in the 90th percentile for four quarters for Inpatient services.
Our employees tell us HVCH is a better place to work, as evidenced by the dramatic decrease in overall turnover from 21% to 15%, 21% to 8% for RN's, 55% to 38% for STNA's, and 53% to 6% for LPN's. Our latest employee satisfaction results placed us in the 91st percentile in the Jackson Organization's database compared to the 25th percentile just 3 years ago.
Our finances have improved dramatically, increasing our days cash on hand from 17 to 72, while decreasing our days in AR by 28%. Operating margin improved from 0.2% to 8.0%, naming HVCH one of the best performing hospitals in the state of Ohio.
We have maintained our market share in a competitive environment. In the next state- wide data base analysis, we anticipate seeing an increase in our market share. We are hearing more of our patients' stories and receiving wonderful thank you notes. The talk in our community is that there is something "different" about Hocking Valley Community Hospital.