Executing a strategic plan

Physicians Practice: Many organizations are struggling to turn their strategy into actual execution. Can you share any examples of actionable framework that you've used or seen used effectively that could help these teams implement strategic initiatives?

Kem Tolliver: The one initiative that comes to mind is readmission reductions. So here, I'm in Maryland, and in Maryland we're operating under a total cost of care model, and that care model requires community physicians and hospitals to collaborate on readmission reduction with that collaboration we get a higher rate of reimbursement from CMS if we meet certain criteria, so reduction of cost, reduction of hospital acquired illnesses and readmission reduction.

So, one of the the ways that, when you think about the the strategy, the strategy is to reduce readmissions throughout the state, right? And how do we implement that strategy? When you think about that strategic execution within an organization, the first thing is to set the strategy. So what do we want to do? Our goal, you know, with readmission reduction, is to improve quality and cost scores. So we want to avoid readmissions.

And I think the other thing that we want to think about here is translating what the overall objective is to our team. So for me, I set a percentage of reduction for the organizations that I work with. So we need to translate what that kind of breakthrough objective looks like.

The other thing that we want to do is we want to look at ways that we can kind of cascade those high level organizational goals into departmental and team goals, right? So we have to break those goals down, and we need to make sure that, for example, our care coordinators are following up with patients that our billing team is billing for transitional care management. So we want to break down those organizational goals into department and team level.

The other thing that we'd want to do to turn that strategy into execution is look at how we are defining the initiatives of the project, right? So what we do is we work with CRISP, which is the Health Information Exchange in Maryland and DC, so that we are alerted when a patient is discharged.

So we need to define those initiatives, how are we going to get the information? Then we want to track our performance right? So we need to have some type of a measurement. We need to have dashboards so that we can follow up and make sure that we are capturing all the data that we need. And then finally, we need to review and adjust right so looking at ways that we can meet with our teams, looking at any pivots that we need to make, in any processes that that we've come up with. So, those are the the ways that I would go about one example for executing a strategic plan.