550-bed Academic Health Center

The client is a 550-bed academic health center and primary teaching hospital for an Ivy League medical school in the Northeast. It has an open medical staff including both full-time academic faculty and a large complement of private practice physicians. This organization has been a Bard Group client for nearly ten years, and we have collaborated on a series of engagements to sharpen business performance and create new systems of care. 

The Challenge:

When this center faced a dramatic financial crisis – considered by many at the time to be the worst such crisis experienced by any academic medical center in the United States – we were engaged to address performance improvement as part of the comprehensive turn-around plan.

The Solution 1:

Physicians are responsible for performance improvement in health care. For this client to carry out its vision, strategy, and operating plan, it needed physicians aligned with its goals. But our assessment revealed that these physicians lacked a system, process, and the tools they needed to align effectively with medical center strategy and carry out their part in any performance improvement initiatives.

We addressed the lack of tools by deploying a “balanced scorecard” system for setting goals and planning activities to carry them out. We charged each chief of service with establishing goals for his or her department, a work plan for achieving them, and metrics for measuring success.

We also provided leadership coaching to the department heads to help them spearhead and monitor these changes

The Impact 1:

The medical center’s physicians were able to contribute substantially to improving its financial and clinical performance. The hospital’s budget improved by more than $60 million in within one year.

The Solution 2:

More recently, we have assisted this client in developing the business plan for a new service line. We evaluated the potential volume of business and financial performance for the service line and the impact of new technology on utilization.

The Impact 2:

Based on this assessment, the hospital has set a general strategy for developing service lines, projecting their resource requirements, and calculating the return on investment.