My Expectations as we Travel to our 2009 Summit

As we review our past nine years, it is clear that we will need to raise our expectations in order to accelerate our Journey to close the gaps between our present levels of success and those “stretch” goals I identified in my last post.

This will include the following 10 focuses on our behaviors. I expect these from our CHRISTUS family as we travel to our June 09 summit:
1. A greater sense of urgency;
2. Less patience;
3. More focus on the need for results;
4. More sharing of best practices;
5. More persistent and positive in the face of setbacks;
6. Consistently producing positive and measurable outcomes in our Four Directions to Excellence, Advocacy and Philanthropy;
7. More rapidly enhance quality and service outcomes;
8. More rapidly using patient, Associate and physician feedback to identify and act on opportunities for improvement;
9. More quickly develop and embrace efficient and effective models to care for the uninsured and
10. Sustain our number 1 position in community value as we continue to live our Mission.

We can no longer benchmark ourselves against our historical progress or our peers. Instead, we must know our new competitors, which now include retail pharmacies like CVS, technology vendors and the retail world at large. We must become increasingly skilled at predicting the “toxic side effects” of change, and more comfortable with the controversy change can cause. We must continue to innovate and change ahead of the curve if we are to provide high quality, excellent health care to our communities and continue on our path to becoming a national influencer.

In order to ensure this timely transformation, we must:
• Increase CHRISTUS Health’s capacity for early change by more deliberately fostering continuous renewal as part of every day operations.
• Generate confidence in early change by sharpening CHRISTUS Health’s business acuity through comprehensive market sensing and responding capacities.
• Change from “being in the health care business serving people” to “being in the people business doing sacred work by delivering excellent health and wellness care.”
• Accelerate the behavioral changes needed to start and sustain transformation by using leading-edge tools and techniques for sensing and responding to organizational change barriers and opportunities.

Our greatest challenge as CHRISTUS Leaders is that we must find a way to get 28,000 full-time and part-time Associates and 9,000 physicians, in multiple countries from multiple cultures, to think in similar terms about the purpose of our ministry and what they individually must do to accomplish that purpose and be aligned. We must all share the same mindsets, and we must believe that nothing is impossible.