Sara Elizabeth Payne

While the health care debate heats up around the country, several health systems in the United States are blazing trails in the health care industry and forming models for other health providers to follow.

Three of these health systems have been recognized by the president as recipients of the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige Award. AtlantiCare, a New Jersey-based system and Heartland Health, based in Missouri, received the coveted award for 2009. Last year Rulon Stacey, CEO of Poudre Valley Health System, met with vice president Joe Biden to accept his 2007 award on behalf of Poudre Valley Health System, based in Northern Colorado.

While the three health systems’ success followed a similar path, each one highlighted a unique approach to management that helped them build their reputation as a top health system in the nation. And at this time when the country’s glaring eyes are fixed on health care, success stories are a much-needed gem.

Stacey has been spreading his success story around the globe for the past year, presenting the rags to riches success story of a tiny, average hospital in the west that nearly quadrupled revenues in ten years and became the only health care provider awarded with the Baldrige Award in 2007.

“I wanted us to be the best we could be and achieve the most we can,” Stacey says. “I didn’t expect perfection, but we were successful as long as everyone was engaged and we were all moving in the right direction.”

Stacey focused most of his efforts on employee satisfaction. He says that when employees are satisfied and work as a team, quality health care for patients is a natural result. When Stacey began in 1997, Poudre Valley had cycled through five CEOs in four years and dealt with a 24 percent employee turnover rate.

To combat this, he motivated employees–whether custodians or board members–to feel like they were working every day to improve the organization. Management also implemented an open-door policy, where employees felt free to offer suggestions and voice concerns with top level employees.

Now employee turnover is reduced to 8 percent, which places it in the top ten percent of health systems in the nation for lowest turnover rate. Modern Healthcare magazine also placed Poudre Valley in the top 100 places to work two years in a row. Last year Poudre Valley earned the Engaging Employees in Excellence Award from Medical Services of America.

“I feel like I went to war with these people,” Stacey says of bonding with employees. “We are so close because this organization is so close, synergistic, and mutually beneficial.”

Even with the emphasis on employee satisfcation, employees never seemed to lose sight of their ultimate goal–to provide world-class health care to each patient.

“We are making people live,” Stacey says. “I really believe there are people alive today who would not be if there were not people committed to providing world-class health care.”

In 2009, Thomson Reuters noted that mortality rate were lower than the lowest ten percent in the population. Patients have acknowledged Poudre Valley’s exceptional service by continually ranking the health system higher for eight consecutive years, a feat only two percent of health organizations have been able to achieve.

Without top-notch management, however, Poudre Valley could not have succeeded. Stacey, who earned a master’s in health administration from Brigham Young University’s Romney Institute, says with the nation’s spotlight shining on the health care industry, it’s particularly important to place people in leadership who have a collaborative mentality.

“I encourage health administrators to shed the control-and-dominate approach to management,” Stacey says. “I prefer to adopt the abundance mentality: if everyone gets more, there’s no contention. Eeveryone’s happy, and people are better served.”

Creating a collaborative atmosphere was initially a concern for AtlantiCare. But its eventual community-based approach helped it receive last year’s Baldrige Award. In the mid ‘90s, AtlantiCare took pride in its innovative individual departments. But the CEO noticed that in order to be successful, the departments needed to work as a team.

“We realized we were good individually,” says Joan Brennan, vice president of quality and performance excellence. “We had very innovative individual business units, but we weren’t necessarily functioning as a system.”

So the CEO solicited ideas from management to find the best way to transform AtlantiCare from a good healthcare system to a great one. Management decided that the criteria embedded in the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award program best exemplified the standards that they wanted to set for AtlantiCare.

Run by the Office of the President, the Baldrige Award recognizes a handful of organizations each year that excel in leadership, management, service, and other notable categories.

AtlantiCare adopted a vision to create healthy communities and inspired its employees to work together toward this common goal. To start off, new AtlantiCare employees are required to take a one-day Baldrige course to learn about how to implement the vision in the workplace. Management also made sure that departments help each other excel.

Their work paid off. In 2001, AtlantiCare won a bronze award on the state level. Over the next few years AtlantiCare continued to implement the suggestions given to them by Baldrige committee member until they received the award in 2009.

“We had been raising the bar in all areas in the past few years,” says Brennan, who worked as a nurse before joining AtlantiCare’s management. “We also worked on prioritizing the messages to staff, helping them understand the importance of our ultimate goal, which is to create a healthy community.”

Then, realizing collaboration within the health system alone was not enough, AtlantiCare collaborated with surrounding communities in order to meet their vision.

“Health care is inherently local,” Brennan says. “Everyone is working toward quality local health care no matter what part of the system they work in. But it’s not just about the healthcare model; it’s about how we partner with our community members.”

AtlantiCare runs several community program s to educate citizens on appropriate health care practices. It has partnered with local schools, chambers of commerce, and casinos–which employ many community members.

Because of the health system’s community involvement and its commitment to patient satisfaction, it now shows up on the national radar for exceptional health care performance. Brennan says they will continually improve and innovate, maintaining its spot as a nationwide leader in the health industry.

“Most Baldrige recipients are constantly thirsty to learn what others are doing that are innovative, new, or exciting,” Brennan says. “Then they bring those ideas back into the health care environment to nurture those ideas. Everyone can listen, but the successful health care providers bring it back and tests the ideas.”