I hope that many of you were able to attend the recent physician/staff forums whose goals were to update you on the status of the Deloitte evaluation of our clinical programs and to lay out the initial blueprint for how our clinical enterprise needs to move forward in order to position itself for success in today’s changing health care environment.
The key message being brought home by the consultants is that the five key entities – the UNMC College of Medicine, The Nebraska Medical Center, UNMC Physicians, Bellevue Medical Center and Private Practice Associates – must come together and function as one clinical team. The commonly used term for this is clinical integration and it is a movement that is sweeping health care institutions, particularly academic medical centers across the country.
Although it is easy to toss out terms like clinical integration, carrying out the assignment involves a lot of time and hard work.
First, there has to be an understanding of what exactly is meant by clinical integration? Unfortunately, there are close to as many definitions of clinical integration as there are people discussing the concept.
Perhaps the simplest concept is that clinically integrated organizations are ones in which all of the components of the health care delivery system are in synchronization with one another in terms of shared common goals, patient-care culture, quality outcomes, leadership priorities, and strategic planning, and there is financial alignment of the different organizational components to accomplish these goals and to incentivize the behavior necessary to achieve them.
This can be done through a formal merger of organizations, but it is clearly not required. Numerous clinical entities across the country have successfully moved toward clinical integration without a formal merger. For those of you who wish to pursue the concept of clinical integration a little further I refer you to a recent article.
Clinical integration is a critical component of the Vision 2020 strategic plan that was endorsed earlier this year by the leadership boards of the five clinical entities that comprise our clinical enterprise.
In order to take the next steps necessary to achieve this, University of Nebraska President J.B. Milliken, Bruce Lauritzen, chair of both The Nebraska Medical Center board of directors and Clarkson Regional Health Services, as well as Bruce Grewcock, a member of The Nebraska Medical Center board, were charged with appointing a group of individuals to lead the planning process.
This leadership team, termed OneTeam, was established a little over a week ago and is co-chaired by Bill Dinsmoor, CFO of The Nebraska Medical Center, and me. The other eight members can be found in the more detailed article on OneTeam in this Issue of InterCOM. The team members were selected with the expectation that they would set aside their individual organizational affiliations and think as part of the single integrated clinical enterprise envisioned.
For the next 12 weeks they will be meeting weekly to develop the organizational framework for the new clinical enterprise. They also will be overseeing the initial steps of the process improvement initiatives that came out of the Deloitte engagement.
The establishment of a governance and leadership structure for the clinical enterprise is essential to even come close to recognizing the process improvement opportunities identified by Deloitte. These are very large tasks for such a short time period and cannot be accomplished by just these 10 individuals.
Some members of the initial Deloitte team will stay on board to help guide this effort. However, many individuals from the various organizations will be asked to contribute their time and talents as members of a number of teams and advisory committees that will report to the OneTeam group. If asked to assist, I hope you will do so. Various processes for updating faculty and staff on the progress of this effort are being established with more information to follow shortly.
I want to conclude my comments for this month’s newsletter by shifting to a different topic – the opening of the Truhlsen Eye Institute.
The ability to provide the highest level of advanced care and prevention of disorders of the eye is not possible in the absence of outstanding facilities and the latest technology, something that has hampered the growth of the UNMC Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences for years. With the opening of the Truhlsen Eye Institute, that is no longer the case.
The recent recruitment of Dr. Quan Dong Nguyen as department chair, along with his wife Dr. Diana Do, also an internationally recognized academic ophthalmologist, as well as the other world-class faculty that Dr. Nguyen plans to bring to Omaha over the next several years, would not have been possible without the assurance that the facilities in which they will work are also world-class.
To Dr. Truhlsen and all the individuals who chose to develop and support this vision we will be forever grateful. We have now entered a new era of ophthalmologic care, research and education that will benefit the residents of Omaha, Nebraska, and the region.
I encourage all of you to check out the facility for yourselves. I am sure you will be as impressed with it as I am.