Protecting a Health System’s Mission Through Smart Campus Planning
CHALLENGE
The client, a three-campus teaching health system serving two very different communities – an urban, medically underserved population, and the well-heeled suburbs in the surrounding communities – faced very real threats to its long-term survival. With some of the most advanced, highest quality care available in the state, the client struggled with a brand perception from patients hesitant to travel into the city for their healthcare if other reasonable alternatives were available. At the same time, they struggled with meeting the needs of their medical staff, a largely volunteer medical staff not employed by the health system, by nature of having to scatter services across their network in response to patient expectations regarding travel and communities where they felt safe.
70+ stakeholder interviews
Baseline strategy validation
Baseline mission, vision + values validation
Operational analysis / time-motion studies
Clinical functionality assessment
Patient consumer demographic analysis
Patient consumer experiential analysis
Provider consumer experiential analysis
Asset inventory
Facility condition assessment
Co-creation sessions to explore the expectations of the local patient and provider consumers
Customized demand projections
Site of service planning
Key room forecast
Space programming
APPROACH
A comprehensive inventory of strategic and operational work to date identified a number of challenges that the client needed to address as a part of this project. Of note, creation of a consistent, branded patient experience in all clinical verticals and across all sites of care became a major focus of the co-creation sessions and subsequent campus plans. At the same time, reactivating the campus of a 150-bed community hospital that was limping along and considering the future a skilled nursing campus that lacked optimal geographic positioning for the health system all informed what needed to be achieved. Much effort was placed on what should be done where to balance the needs of patients who didn’t want to travel into the city and physicians who didn’t want to go anywhere but the main clinical campus.
RESULTS
A rather interesting plan was developed that leveraged the client’s best assets: a vision of a safety net academic medical center informed the evolution of the city campus such that it would continue to provide the most advanced care in the region and do so with an experience that reflects the mission, vision and valued of this faith-based system.
A plan to re-energize the community hospital campus included a direct focus on the healthcare needs of the surrounding community, modernization of the campus environments and introduction of niche programming that will flourish where they can be developed around a destination feel.
Without sharing too much confidential information, the skilled nursing campus will now head down a path what will enable it to successfully respond to the quickly evolving senior living market in the region, while also serving as an integral part of the larger health system.