Hartford Business Journal

www.HartfordBusiness.com May 8, 2017 • Hartford Business Journal 11 Over the past several months I have been introducing the elements of Trinity Health – New England's PEOPLE centered strategy. So far we have spoken about People-Centered Care and Engaged Colleagues, the first two initiatives of our plan. The next initiative in our PEOPLE centered strategy is Operational Excellence. What exactly does operational excellence mean? In a general sense, most businesses share a common set of operational objectives — we are all striving for ways to do things better, faster, and at a lower cost. In health care, however, our focus goes far beyond "standard" operational challenges and includes a people-centered element that also includes clinical quality, safety, and patient experience. At Trinity Health — New England, we are focused on reinventing our clinical and business model to enable us to better serve our patients and compete more effectively in the rapidly changing health care marketplace. You may have seen our introductory marketing campaign, which states that we are "Together for a Reason." As a new regional health system, we are coming together to not only improve the way we provide health care, but to transform it. Transformation isn't about getting a little bit better—it's about creating entirely new ways of doing things, entirely new ways of thinking about our business models. By its very definition, transformation implies a reinvention, or change on a different order of magnitude. When we talk about operational transformation, we envision a broad portfolio of activities that includes re-engineering our processes for performance and scale, simplifying to develop speed, and freeing-up capacity to deal with new business complexity. Operational excellence begins with a focus on creating a better experience for the people we serve. It means making things easier and more convenient. It means using technology in ways that benefit our consumers, as well as our physicians and other providers. High quality care usually costs less, and it benefits both the patient and the provider. Operational excellence also means eliminating waste, complexity and clutter throughout our region. Over the coming years, we will purposefully examine what we do each day, how we do it and then change what needs to change to become much more efficient and effective. We also will define standards for best practices and then fill in the gaps to ensure consistent, high-quality people-centered care across our system. The health care industry is managing through a blizzard of new regulations, market dynamics and consumer trends. Most significantly, Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements are decreasing, labor costs and supply costs are increasing dramatically and the ways in which health systems get paid are changing. As a result, it is harder and harder to finance the care we are committed to delivering. The financial squeeze facing health systems today is unprecedented, and it's too big and too complex to fix by simply cutting our budgets. Fortunately, we anticipated this dynamic when we developed our People-Centered 2020 strategy, and our transforming operations initiatives are under way to help us safeguard our Mission for a long time. TrinityHealth-NE.org Christopher M. Dadlez President and Chief Executive Officer Trinity Health – New England Together for excellence. The "Hub" of Mercy Medical Center's care integration system is staffed by clinicians who are specially trained to monitor and enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the patient experience.

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