A complaint I often hear is that I’m away too much. “I should tend the home fires.” “It must be nice to spend so much time at nice places.”
The time I spend away is deliberate and strategic. To lead change, I must know where we are going. While maintaining operations is crucial, leadership is fundamentally about looking ahead 3-5 years so our organization will be positioned to be successful.
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Conference Rooms: If you've seen one, you've seen them all.
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To do that, I travel to conferences where I can learn new concepts about change and leadership from leaders at the cutting edge. SVHC's leadership team travels to national events for the same reasons. We often take large teams to events that are provocative and influential. This brings the culture and learning to a broader audience earlier, and allows teams to really get moving when we come home.
My travels largely are around three themes:
1) Regional groups that create influence for our organization in acquiring resources and having policy influence. For example:
* My role on the executive committee of the Vermont Blueprint for Health. Since its inception, I have helped to shape its priorities so that the state advances primary care and electronic medical records.
* The Voluntary Hospitals of America Physician Executive Council. I meet with CMOs from around New England regularly. We make formal presentations to one another about important local topics- starting hospitalist programs; reducing mortality; standardizing orders; improving ED flow. We teach and learn.
2) National organizations that teach and share learning rapidly across the nation. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) is the best. Attending this conference has led to:
* Completely changing our strategic and operational planning structure and language, which has alowed us to be more effective managers.
* Creating the Board Quality and Safety Committee, Patient Quality/Safety Department and its training methods, and our decision to hire the Juran Institute to guide our improvement efforts. Our VP for Quality Safety, Alex Heintz, received her certification as a Patient Safety Officer from IHI.
* Better methods for engaging physicians, completing improvement projects, reducing harm, disclosing adverse events to patients
3) Specific skill building for my role:
* Legal and compliance training
* Certification in performance improvement for health care
* Science of leadership for improvement
* Communication, finance, and other dimensions of management
So travel for these reasons is a core of my job. And those ‘nice places”? Yes – some are nice. Conference rooms all look alike however, and traveling (by plane especially) has me yearning for that lovely and quiet Vermont commute every time I’m away.
SVHC Leadership tends the home fires by delegating much of the work. We plan, deploy, and support the resources in the institution to get the work done. Medical staff task forces have addressed and improved multiple operations this year: orthopedic service success, integration of med staff with health system, helping primary care doctors acquire electronic medical records, improving pediatric call and ER call, and obstetric service challenges. Our local Blueprint pilot and its management is considered the “north star” best example in the state. We have lots of very talented people in our institution. My job is to help to hire them, give them resources, plan their work to be sure it’s aligned with the goals of the organization, and get out of their way.