Creating a culture of urgency is a fundamental issue executives face while running a hospital, two health system leaders said during a recent leadership panel.
The executives explained what they mean by a culture of urgency and how working toward creating one in their health system helped their overall performance during the Becker's Hospital Review 8th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable in November.
The panelists were:
- Alan Liber, president of Summit, N.J.-based Overlook Medical Center and vice president of Morris Plains, N.J.-based Atlantic Health System.
- John Audett, MD, CMO of Overlook Medical Center.
The first step in creating a culture of urgency is figuring out how to diagnose patients faster, so providers can start treatment as soon as possible. Overlook has built a helipad to allow providers to transport patients facing time-sensitive injuries quickly.
On the flip side of that is determining how to get patients out of the hospital as fast as possible.
The panelists explained that at Overlook, the providers ask themselves every day at 1:30 pm what the barriers to discharge are for a specific patient. Why is the patient in the hospital? What will it take to get the patient home? What is left on the list of things to do?
The providers focus on getting patients up and moving quickly after surgery, which helps shorten the patient's time in the hospital. Overlook has been able to drop three-tenths of a day from the patient length of stay, saving about $4 million, the panelists said.
The leaders said mortality rates were lower than they had been in a long time ,and there's been an improvement in overall hospital performance that they attributed to creating a culture of urgency.
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