Drawing On a Vision

Today, many healthcare leaders are reshaping their vision, strategy, and model for healthcare care delivery. There are three critical success factors that enable an institution to meet its strategic goals in this challenging healthcare environment: leadership, focus, and expertise. University Hospitals (UH), located in Northeast Ohio, is a model system that exemplifies the application of these critical success factors in the development and implementation of its Vision 2010 strategic plan.

University Hospitals’ 1,032-bed, tertiary care academic medical center, University Hospitals Case Medical Center, is the primary affiliate of Case Western Reserve University. Included in UH Case Medical Center are UH Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital, among the nation’s best children’s hospitals; UH Seidman Cancer Center (formerly Ireland Cancer Center), part of the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center; and UH MacDonald Women’s Hospital, Ohio’s only hospital for women. More than 21,000 physicians and employees constitute University Hospitals and its partnership hospitals, ranking it Northeast Ohio’s second-largest private sector employer. UH performs more than 4.5 million outpatient procedures and nearly 63,000 inpatient discharges annually.

A new vision, strategy, and model

In 1993, UH developed a new vision, a new strategy, and a new model for healthcare delivery. This new vision called for UH to better meet the healthcare needs of a significant portion of Northeast Ohio through geographic expansion and an increase in the types of services offered. In the process, UH was transformed from a traditional, single-site academic medical center into a broad-based healthcare system.

To complement its nationally prominent services in tertiary medicine, UH added prevention, primary care, and early screening. To strengthen its clinical capabilities, the health system expanded established areas of excellence and developed new service areas. To improve access, UH forged new hospital partnerships, developed the region’s largest primary care physician network, and increased the number and size of outpatient health centers. To enhance care in the communities served by its new partners, the health system opened satellites of key centers of excellence—initially for cancer care, cardiac care, pediatrics, and women’s health. Finally, to make quality care more affordable, UH redesigned its healthcare delivery model, reducing inefficiencies and redundancies.

Broad strokes

In 2005, UH developed a strategic facilities master plan—Vision 2010—to identify facility requirements in support of its new operational vision, strategy, and healthcare delivery model. Key drivers included: increasing market share in a competitive healthcare market; developing a hub-and-spoke magnet system that collocates its various centers of excellence while capturing additional demographic areas; promoting a more recognizable brand within the region and parity among its various facilities; and enhancing physician recruitment.