Shaping Our Future: BW/F Strategic Planning Process Underway
With health care reform on the horizon and health care access and costs under intense scrutiny nationwide, Brigham and Women’s and Faulkner Hospitals continue their strategic planning effort to ensure that the institution can deliver on its mission of providing the highest quality patient care, expanding the boundaries of research, training the next generation of health care professionals, and serving the community, locally and globally.
“Brigham and Women’s/Faulkner Hospitals must prepare for the future by redesigning the way we deliver care to our patients and embracing new payment methods,” said BWH President Betsy Nabel, MD. “We must take bold but thoughtful steps if we are to remain a vibrant, strong and vital resource to our community.”
“A strategic planning process helps us to envision the short- and long-term future of the institution and then develop and implement an approach to reach our objectives—that of supporting our mission well into the future,” said Nabel.
The BW/F strategic planning effort, which coincides with a similar strategic planning process that BWH is participating in with Partners HealthCare, will focus on four critical areas: clinical innovation and care redesign; research and education; community engagement; and patient affordability. A steering committee in each area is developing goals and an implementation plan.
“This is a challenging and important time for all of us, and we need everyone’s ideas as we journey down the path to becoming an even stronger academic medical center,” said Nabel, who added that her goal is for every service line, unit, research area and department in the hospital to be involved in some aspect of the process. “We will succeed, but we need everyone’s talents and ongoing commitment to execute on our vision.”
Do you have a question about strategic planning, or an idea for cost-savings? E-mail AskDrNabel@partners.org
Clinical Innovation and Care Redesign
Charge: to ensure BW/F is positioned to optimize the delivery of the safest, highest-quality, most cost-efficient care by coordinating our services, sites of care and providers in ways that best meet the needs of patients and families and referring physicians in this dynamic health care environment.
Steering Committee Chairs: Mairead Hickey, PhD, RN, executive vice president and COO, and Allen Smith, MD, MS, president, Brigham and Women’s Physicians Organization,
Patient Affordability
Charge: to examine areas such as patient progression, ED throughput and other efficiency and cost management efforts to make certain the BW/F consistently provides excellent quality and value to patients and referring physicians. The process has already begun, and the team is working through the end of March with content experts from Wellspring + Stockamp, a health care performance improvement organization, to identify opportunities for improvement. The short term goal is to remove $20 million in costs in FY11 through process improvement. Once this goal is achieved and can be sustained, the hospital will work to remove another 10 percent, or $165 million, during the next three years.
Steering Committee Chairs: Mairead Hickey and Michael Reney, MBA, senior vice president and chief financial officer
Research and Education
Charge: to envision what ideal research and education programs will look like over the next five to 10 years and to determine what elements need to be put in place today to ensure that BW/F is equipped to excel in these areas.
Steering Committee Chairs: Barbara Bierer, MD, senior vice president, Research, and Joseph Loscalzo, MD, PhD, chair, Department of Medicine and co-director, BWH Biomedical Research Institute
Community Engagement
Charge: to promote excellence and accountability in addressing health disparities in the local community, nation and world. Goals include providing a unifying vision for community and global engagement for all employees; developing a sense of shared ownership and responsibility for health disparities; and creating mechanisms for meaningful participation in transformative programs.
Steering Committee Chairs: Wanda McClain, MPA, executive director, Center for Community Health and Health Equity, Megan Murray, MD, ScD, associate epidemiologist and research director, Division of Global Health Equity, and Michael VanRooyen, MD, MPH, chief, Division of International Health and Humanitarian Programs
Learn more about strategic planning at BWHPikeNotes.org/about/BWHStrategicPlan