Bringing Two New Hospitals into the OSF HealthCare Family
There was more to merging the two new medium-sized hospitals in Urbana and Danville into OSF HealthCare besides changing names, signage and ensuring new employees don clothing with the correct logo. In fact, nearly every facet of operations had to change and for this particular project, it had to happen within the span of months. Enter the Integration Management Office (IMO), a function of Performance Improvement under the OSF Innovation umbrella.
The IMO is responsible for coordinating the smooth transition of new facilities into OSF HealthCare. That means ensuring everything from finance, human resources, technology and applications and even care delivery operates the same way as the rest of the Ministry.
“Our role, basically, is to help make sure that people are on time and on target with their tasks to complete what a day one would like,” said Susan Christian, a Director for Performance Improvement. “Day one is clearly no interruption to patient care. That is our number one goal.”
Employees within the IMO kicked off their work in September, creating teams of experts from both OSF HealthCare and the two hospitals in Urbana and Danville to work through these various functions and determine what’s needed to be fully integrated into the health care system. These teams have been meeting on a bi-weekly and sometimes weekly basis and have ensured incoming employees receive the training essential to work within the new health care system. The goal is for the changeover to be as seamless as possible for both employees and patients.
“They really shouldn’t notice a lot of difference from a care perspective because they are still going to have the same staff,” said Christian. “All of their staff will be employed by OSF and so they shouldn’t notice that difference. What they will notice is a lot of activity, and they’ll notice that people may be documenting in a different system and having maybe other OSF Mission Partners there to support them.”
Christian says everyone across OSF HealthCare has helped in some way with this effort. There were even 200 Mission Partners who volunteered to swap out computers and other devices at the two new hospitals the night before launch. Others will continue their work well into the next month. The IMO is will continue its integration work at OSF HealthCare Heart of Mary Medical Center in Urbana and OSF HealthCare Sacred Heart Medical Center in Danville for at least 60 days.
“Any integration activities that have been determined that needed to be completed up to that 60th day, we will help monitor and manage up to that 60th day. Then we will actually turn it over to the business, over to the leaders to make sure they can manage that on their own.”
Christian says overall, the integration of the hospitals in Urbana and Danville has gone smoothly and everyone has put forth a huge effort to make this possible. She says this work shows the new hospital partners what OSF HealthCare is all about.