News

Pardee to roll out strategic plan

By Bill Moss, Published: November 12, 2012

Pardee Hospital has adopted a three-year strategic plan that sets a course based on broad-based community health improvement, patient satisfaction, engagement with doctors and an agile response to the changing health care landscape.
The plan, which so far sets out seven priorities, has more work to go. The board will add action plans to each of the seven areas.
The board appointed a strategic planning committee in early 2012 to look at Pardee's current role and shape a strategy for growth. Chaired by board member Jack Summey, the committee was assisted by Pardee's chief strategy officer, Kris Peters, and guided by Casey Noland, managing director of Navigant, a strategic planning consultant for the health care industry. Pardee chairman Bill Moyer, board member Fielding Lucas and Drs. William Medina and James Horwitz also served.
"My big concern with respect to the hospital and its future was there are two things going on," Moyer said. "The inpatient beds are not being filled. Occupancy, not just for us but for a lot of hospitals, is going down, plus you have all the competition, with affiliations. Mission is moving into the market, everything seems to be getting bigger and bigger. We got Navigant to take a look at what was happening not just here but nationwide and then we tried to get everybody's understanding of what is taking place, how do you find niches and how do you compete where you have Greenville, Spartanburg and Mission surrounding you."
In interviews, Moyer, past board chairman Bill Lapsley, who is also on the UNC Health Care Board, County Commissioner Charlie Messer, the ex officio liaison to the Pardee board; and Peters, the chief strategy officer, said that priorities will be quality care, ensuring physician buy-in of Pardee's strategies, identifying profitable niches of medical services, developing partnerships with doctors and other providers and keeping and growing the share of health care users in Henderson County.
Big, highly visible capital improvements are not part of the three-year plan, chiefly because demand for in-patient care is dropping. The most expensive priority may be the cost of converting to an electronic medical records network common among UNC Health Care and its growing network of health care partners across the state.

Getting doctors on board
Navigant compiled a comprehensive set of data on the health care landscape in Hendersonville and beyond and the committee went to work. A key, Moyer said, was getting doctors on board.
"In the past you had two armed camps," he said. "You had the doctors and the administration and they fought constantly, and when things got too bad they fired the administrator and then they tried a different approach."
The addition of Dr. Medina to the board should provide a crucial link between the board and the medical staff.
"Of all the doctors I've worked with, he's in a great position to help facilitate a great working relationship with the doctors and bring them on board," Moyer said.
The Board of Commissioners last month appointed Medina, who retired last month from his oncology practice, to the Pardee board.
Lapsley, who was chairman before Moyer and has now rotated off the board, sees the strategic plan as a call for even greater focus on the business of health care.
"We've got to get real sharp in our business operations but also make sure we're capturing enough market share to support it," he said. "We've got to be even more competitive. If we're going to stay in business we've got to go get some of those people" using other providers, whether in Fletcher, Asheville or Greenville.
"We've got to get our house in order and be at the top of stack in patient satisfaction and quality," Lapsley said.
Like Moyer, Lapsley said the public might not notice many of the changes if they don't walk into the hospital. If Pardee buys more physician practices, for instance, the public would not see much change. "I think there'll be subtle changes over time. What they're going to see is over time, a year or two years, some new service lines, some we don't currently have," Lapsley said. "They're going to see improved services, just like we're doing in Fletcher. I don't think it'll be doubling the size of the hospital."
If the hospital leaders do decide to put money into the original building, it will have more to do with patient perception than the need for more beds.
"We know that patient satisfaction has something to do with the quality of facility. Maybe that means redoing some of the patient rooms, new paint, new flooring, who knows?"
And like any business, Pardee must balance a major capital plan against revenue to pay for it, the board members said.

Long-term trends
The hospital leaders agreed, too, that the strategic plan has less to do with the Affordable Care Act than the general trends of health care.
"Really, if you take away Obama-care, this thing started about 8-10 years," Commissioner Messer said. "A lot of this stuff is going to happen anyway because of the cost. The cost is just continuing to rise. Overall, the Hendersonville-Pardee-UNC plan I think it's good. I think all the county commissioners need to get involved in the plan. We've been fortunate we've never had to put any money into it" from public money.
Messer and other commissioners are talking now about scheduling a joint meeting with the Pardee Board, or some of its leaders, to present an abbreviated version of the strategy the UNC Health Care heard last month in Chapel Hill.
"I would tell you from working with (UNC Health Care CEO) Gary Parks and Jeff, his assistant, we couldn't ask for a better team in our county right now, in my opinion," he said.
Although the Mission Pardee health campus generated a lot of feedback from commissioners, some of it negative, Messer said a greater footprint in the growing Fletcher-Mills River-south Buncombe area is imperative.
"We've got 105,000 people in Henderson County, 47 percent attend Pardee, 17 percent go to Park Ridge, well, where are the rest of them going? They're going to Mission anyway," he said.
Peters, the chief strategy officer, said the board will add action plans to each of the seven priorities. The plan will be unveiled to Pardee's 1,100 employees in a series of employee forums in early December.
Moyer agreed that the strategic plan would be useful and functional with or without the Affordable Care Act.
"My view is that what's taking place in the health care industry, as one who opposed that (Obama-care), is that the key things that are taking place in the industry are not going to change whichever way the Affordable Care Act goes," he said. "If you look at United States, compared to rest of the world, the reason we're so of line, is drugs and end-of-life care. We're off the map as to how much money we spend on end-of-life care. Up to age 59, we're not out of line. The other place we're out of line is in the number of medicines and drugs people take."

Pardee Strategic Plan

• Patient experience: deliver exceptional patient experience with optimal quality, safety and satisfaction outcomes.
• Clinical portfolio: Operate comprehensive, coordinated and integrated programs in partnership with physicians and other providers.
• Health: Become "a model for delivering community-based health services" and improved health of a defined population.
• Physician alignment: Facilitate greater physician alignment, engagement and integration with Pardee.
• Value provider: Have patients recognize Pardee as a leading provider of high value health care services.
• Strategic partnerships: Expand existing partnerships and develop new relationships to address health care needs in the region.
• Organizational agility: Position Pardee to anticipate and respond to the "current, emerging and future realities" of health care.

Source: Pardee Hospital Board of Directors