Framing Your Network Through Medical Insight

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Medical facilities are all different from one another, with unique goals, plans, and cultures. Many facilities are now part of a larger medical network, as consolidation helps bring better health care and lower costs for patients and providers. The problem lies in creating a medical network culture that is cohesive, bringing together every practitioner, and every individual facility.

If you frame your network as a positive, unified system, the benefits are clear. Staff is happier, retention is improved, and patients are welcomed into a more positive environment.

Consider Your Leadership

Leaders are excellent role models for a cohesive front, as they are the people to whom the rest of your staff will look for guidance. Whether managers, lead physicians, frontline staff, union representatives, or others who carry clout in the entire network, in their facility or department, or with their peers, these are the people who can help effect a real change.

A roundtable report, Changing Culture, Leading Strategy at Healthcare Organizations, notes:

“Organizational culture is defined as a set of shared mental assumptions that guide interpretation and behavior. Healthcare leaders speak of a culture of safety, a culture of wellness, or a patient-centered culture. Often, however, culture proves resistant to change. Top executives must point the way, but ultimately culture and strategy are about leading people to a desired new state. Leaders must build trust that they are heading in the right direction.”

When you are filling leadership roles, consider who you need to recruit. What skills, personality traits, and long-term plans or goals will lend themselves well to your ideal network culture? It’s important to make recruitment and hiring decisions based on the best person for the role, ensuring that he or she will not only fit in with your desired cohesive culture, but can inspire others to integrate, too.

Reinforcing Cohesive Culture Through Hiring and Training

When you bring new hires on board they should already be vetted as a good fit for your network’s culture, screened through the recruiting process, and assessed on their skills in areas like conflict management, communication, teamwork, and any other important parts of your particular culture.

That, however, does not mean that the work to bring new hires into a cohesive culture ends there! By onboarding your new hires in a way that reinforces your desired culture, you promote those values and stress the importance of sticking with them. Any training, orientation, and other similar processes should center around desired attitudes and behaviors.

You can also incentivize these behaviors or attitudes. Consider merits like naming people employee of the month, small tokens of gratitude, letters of thanks and recognition, and other accolades that will keep new hires — and everyone else— working hard to meet cultural norms.

Your leaders, as mentioned earlier, are important in this process. As mentors and managers, they set the tone for any new hires who are integrating into your facility.

If you recognize that someone is struggling, whether a new hire or an existing employee, work with them in a non-judgmental way. Provide mentoring, coaching, and training that will improve attitudes and behaviors.

Measure Your Success

Much like we use medical metrics to measure the success of our hospitals, clinics, and facilities, we can use metrics to measure our success on a cultural level.

First, create a baseline for what your current company culture is. What is important? From there, what is working? What is lacking? You can gather this information from employee surveys, speaking with leaders, and even by looking at your medical metrics.

Then, determine what needs to be changed to realize your full potential in creating a cohesive culture. Work to identify what changes would create the largest impact for staff and patients, and/or what is in the most immediate need of change. These are your goals to close the gap between what is happening now, and the ideal company culture of the future.

Create measurable benchmarks, and action plans to reach those benchmarks. Work with the people who are involved in these actions and behaviors on a regular basis. From there, you can communicate the plan, and the goals, to everyone in your facility, and start measuring success.

Check in regularly on your progress. Provide the right tools and training. And fill open roles with carefully recruited staff who exemplify your ideal network culture, and can nurture it in others.

If things need to be changed, adjust your tactics until you find the right plans, tools, and actions to reach success. Reframing your network culture takes work, of course, but it is well worth it to foster satisfaction, happiness, and engagement.

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