Leading Change in Health Care:
There is a Better Way Healthcare Seminar

One-full day seminar
by
Paula Friedman
Senior Vice President, Strategic Development, SSM Health Care
and
Sr. Mary Jean Ryan, FSM
CEO/Chair, SSM Health Care 

What does it take to achieve high performance?  Is it talent identification? Persistence? Consistency of strategy development or implementation?  Or is it the tools we use to assess ourselves and improve across the entire organization?

As we look to the future, we can learn from the past. Nearly two decades ago, SSM Health Care looked for a way to ensure consistent, positive outcomes throughout its large and complex organization. Continuous quality improvement (CQI) was hailed as a way to improve systems and processes. Several years later, the organization bolstered its improvement efforts by using the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria (nearly identical to the National Quality Institute Framework for Organizational Excellence). These two tools have been mainstays in helping SSM make remarkable strides to improve care and service across 20 hospitals and related businesses in 4 mid-Western states within the U.S. In 2002, SSM became the first health care system in the United States to earn the prestigious Baldrige Award and it continues to use the framework for performance excellence to sustain high performance.

In this session, Sr. Mary Jean Ryan and Ms. Friedman will talk about the journey to excellence that SSM Health Care has pursued for nearly 20 years and describe the use of performance excellence criteria as a means to evaluate and improve organizational effectiveness.  The session includes an overview of the criteria and examples of application within SSM Health Care, a $3.4 billion, not-for-profit Catholic health care system.  Lessons learned from SSM Health Care’s 20+ hospitals will be shared with participants in an interactive exchange of ideas on how to improve across all aspects of an organization.  In a presentation filled with true stories, these presenters will illustrate what it takes to lead change in today’s world. They will underscore how critical it is to call forth the Spirit of Leadership as a pathway to organizational transformation.