Hot Springs Health to implement team meetings

At the January Hot Springs Health board meeting, CEO Scott Alwin congratulated pharmacy tech Kristina Nading for passing her exam to become licensed.

Dr. Mattson Mathey gave the medical staff report and said, “We have had a couple of months now of a standing report from the clinical informatics team, which has been quite helpful to the providers with server merge with the hospital and clinic system and some other IT projects going on here.” Mathey also relayed about the compliance committee and how they are reviewing their bounce-back percentages every month. Mathey added it is a useful metric for their providers. Regarding the trauma committee, they updated and disseminated the trauma severity criteria to all the providers 

For the surgical committee, Mathey reported that their cesarean section scheduling has been improved. Mathey added, “There was also a pretty good discussion about how the O.R. is working towards a family-centered C-section, which incorporates more of the family unit mindfulness and early bonding in the surgical experience. I anticipate that will be a pretty big patient satisfier when we’re able to get some of those pieces put together.”

During the discussion of the board training, CEO Alwin highlighted an element in their Service Excellence Initiative and said, “In the next couple of months we’ll be launching what we call ‘Do It’ team meetings. They’re essentially projects within departments where they look at a process or a procedure or a patient experience issue that needs to be fine-tuned and ways to improve it. So it is an improvement project within the departments that they’ll all be expected to carry out on a monthly basis. And they’re designed to be quick fix issues. They take a look as a department or as a function to take a look and see what is an area that we can improve either the efficiency of the work we’re doing or the result of those outcomes to the patient and or maybe it’s an internal patient issue. Maybe we have other coworkers that are receiving information from us that we can improve the process for.”

Chairman Dr. Bill Williams added to Alwin’s comments and discussed the significance of quality in the hospital’s various systems and their function.

Williams said, “If you have quality all of that, then you get high ratings and then you end up with staff and you have good patient outcomes and you have quality patient care. It’s the underpinnings of everything that gets done in this place as far as I’m concerned.”

For the CEO report, Alwin said that they are actively recruiting for a CRNA and that they already have received an application and resume from a candidate within the region. Also, Alwin said, “We have launched the Service Excellence Initiative with our program Leadership College, that occurred on January 16. We have the chief operating officer from Custom Learning System here along with our implementation specialist… and we laid out the entire year of 2023 on all the training events that will occur, the groups and teams that will be developed to start moving forward. That’s pretty exciting.”

Alwin went into detail about a couple of groups that he said will be “very key and important.” He continued and said, “One is called the Service Excellence Council. That is a team that is responsible for basically providing focused leadership for the entire initiative in the entire organization. That consists of about 50% leadership and then 50% front line staff members.” These people are going to be helping to review all the projects that occur, providing accountability to the initiative, and then also bringing in ideas and input into things that they should do and not do as they go forward.”

“The second group that I want to just share with you is what we call Service Excellence Advisors or SEAs. These are kind of the best of the best employees that we have found. They have the best attitude, the best work ethic, and are positive influences. They are going to be trained and taught how to provide education to the entire organization. And then they’re also going to be trained and taught how to be that key leader or influencer in their own departments and out and about with the other employees. Coming in May and June, we’re going to be providing education to the whole organization about our service excellence, expectation, our goals, behavioral expectations, patient experience, goals and expectations, and then also so those strategic plans, goals that we have related to our patient experience scores….They’ll be teamed up in groups of four. And then, over the course of about six weeks, everyone within the institution will have sat through a seminar with those key advisors. Following that, those individuals will then continue on with providing that information and education to new employees.”

Regarding the Community Health Needs Assessment, Alwin said that they are moving onto the implementation phase of that. Alwin has contacted Julie Hynes, who gave that presentation the previous month about the next steps to take. They will take the information that was collected during the assessment and then put it into an action plan.

Alwin and CCO Dan Hemann held a brief discussion about their recent medical records merger. Hemann reported, “There were 40,000 merges, and we had about 800 that got kind of jumbled up on the backside. We’re about half fixed now.” Alwin added he was “Pretty pleased overall” with the results.

Alwin also said, “We have provided everything to healthcare appraisers to conduct our fair market value compensation and analysis. So all of that information has been provided to them. I’m anticipating by next month we’ll have results back and be able to share with you where we’re at with that.”

Last, Alwin said, “In terms of growth, our oncology services and our infusion services have been growing exponentially. It was nice to sit down with a couple of key individuals from Cody Regional Medical Center this last month and just have a good discussion about how the program is going, good feedback on both sides, how we can improve and what are some areas that we can work out better.”

CFO Kevin Benson gave the financial report and said their December statement was approved in their consent items but also said, “In our meeting earlier today, we did spend quite a bit of time discussing the financial performance of the organization. Where we’re not at our budget targets at this time. And what can we do to turn that around? We no longer have the Covid funds to keep us whole. So now we have to rely on ourselves and our own operations. We also covered an update on our margin improvement plan, which was a number of initiatives that are currently taking place and going to take place that should have a positive impact of $2.5 million on our operating margin...Some have been completed, some are very consistent with what we have going on in our strategic plan. And so it was just a matter of consolidating a lot of things that were going on that we know are going to have a positive impact and then quantifying it. So we can see, I think, a hopefully light at the end of the tunnel.”

Benson also detailed some open items on their construction project and said, “We got the USDA to advocate on our behalf.” There are some other projects to be completed in the spring when the weather is better. 

Benson presented an action item of some banking resolutions to be signed for the new board members’ signatures to be added and updated at the various banks. The board motioned and passed the resolution unanimously. 

In the people’s report, Linda Veylupek said, “The one thing I did want to point out is that our 2022 turnover rate is less than it has been in the past since Covid hit. So I’m excited about that. I never thought I’d look at that number and be excited, but I know it’s going in the right direction. We’ve got a long way to go, but I was excited to see that.”

In new business, the board decided to have their retreat in Cody on April 7-8. They will discuss their goals and review their strategic plan. Other items they wanted the board to contemplate were the future of the hospital without Covid funds, meeting the needs of the community, advocating the support of others, and other ideas.