Kate Goonan, Joseph Clancy, Rulon Stacey, John Wiest, and Martha Davis
In 2017, Main Line Health set an ambitious goal: eliminate disparities and preventable harm while achieving top-decile results around quality and performance, reduce costs through more informed operational decisions, and improve the patient and employee experience.
Main Line, a not-for-profit health system serving portions of Philadelphia and its western suburbs, adopted Baldrige as a framework in 2017 to better serve these communities. The health system sought to apply Baldrige best practices to reduce operational costs by millions of dollars and achieve next-level performance excellence throughout the system.
Main Line partnered with Guidehouse on the initiative, “Performance Excellence 2020,” due to its deep expertise in assisting healthcare organizations in cultural transformation and operations improvement.
Beginning in 2017, Main Line worked with Guidehouse to apply the highly structured Baldrige performance excellence framework to:
Early in the initiative, Main Line identified $120 million in financial performance improvement opportunities: $60 million in clinical transformation, $28 million in workforce efficiency, $27 million in corporate services, and $5 million in physician enterprise. For its FY 2018, Main Line’s goal for cost savings is $33.5 million.
The health system then reviewed their regional Baldrige program feedback and Guidehouse’s Baldrige assessment to determine priorities for improving organizational capabilities. The reviews cited areas of improvement around “systemness,” or continuity in processes and services delivered throughout the system:
“Our work with Guidehouse is helping us save tens of millions of dollars and making our processes safer, allowing us to better build the capabilities critical to our long-term success while positioning us very well for our Baldrige journey.
”
Jack Lynch, FACHE
President and CEO, Main Line Health