Past Winners

• View the 2009 Winners
• View the 2008 Winners
• View the 2007 Winners
• View the 2006 Winners
• View the 2005 Winners

2008 Awards Winners

Winner: Scripps Health, San Diego, CA: Large Hospitals and Health Systems (500 or More Beds)

When Chris Van Gorder stepped into the CEO role at Scripps Health in 2001, he had his work cut out for him. His predecessor was forced to resign after receiving five votes of no confidence by the medical staff, the health system had lost $21 million, and morale was at an all-time low.

Van Gorder constructed a new management team (mostly from within the organization), and together they instilled a culture that focused on transparency, accountability, and teamwork. “Our individual hospitals probably spent more time competing with each other than they did with the outside world,” says Van Gorder.

To foster a collaborative atmosphere between the system’s five acute-care hospitals and other facilities, executives focused their efforts in the middle of the organization.

They created the physician leaders cabinet, which allows doctors and administrators to discuss operational issues. They also established the Scripps Leadership Academy, which accepts 25 managers annually for a monthly daylong seminar on healthcare leadership.

The Scripps team also decentralized operations by delegating decision-making to the business units closer to the patients. Under this new structure, each business unit became accountable for its budget, quality, satisfaction rates, and physician relations. The head of each business unit is also on the executive cabinet as a corporate senior vice president, so each leader is accountable for the success of their units and the organization’s systemwide goals. “Each of our campuses in a way are sets of teams, and we all have to work together as a team to make the entire system come together and grow,” Van Gorder says.

The results speak for themselves. In 2006, the system posted an operating margin of $129 million. Employees who rated Scripps as a great place to work increased from 58% in 2002 to 85% in 2007. And the percentage of docs who are satisfied with Scripps hospitals rose from 78% in 2003 to 86% in 2007.

Jim Stokes, senior partner at m21partners and a judge for the program, describes Scripps’ leadership as having “outstanding stability, enthusiasm, and commitment.” Not only did Scripps turnaround its operations, he says, but it has “strong platforms for sustainability.”

—Carrie Vaughan

Winner: Griffin Hospital, Derby, CT: Community and Midsize Hospitals (100-499 Beds)

Griffin Hospital’s senior leadership team is a close knit group—five of its members have worked together for nearly 30 years, and the others have years of service ranging from four to 25 years. Under the leadership of CEO Patrick Charmel, the executive team transformed a struggling 160-bed community hospital to a thriving and nationally recognized healthcare facility for its Planetree patient-centered care model.

Griffin Hospital is located in Connecticut’s most competitive healthcare market, with Yale New Haven Hospital and six other large hospitals within a 15-mile radius. The region has also seen an influx of younger, more affluent residents who have high expectations for healthcare services. In the late 1980s, Griffin wasn’t meeting that standard. It had the oldest physical plant in the state, was losing market share, and couldn’t recruit or retain employees or physicians.

Senior leadership decided to transform the organization’s culture into a patient-centered model that involves and empowers the entire staff. To achieve its goal, all employees attended “Griffin Days,” which asked them to describe their ideal hospital experience. Now, every employee attends a two-day, overnight retreat designed to help them see the hospital from the patient’s viewpoint. Vice President Bill Powanda says achieving an exceptional patient experience means moving past a “normal” work effort. “It has to start in the parking lot and end in the parking lot, and every employee has to be part of that effort,” Powanda says.

Griffin also used corporate market research techniques like focus groups and community perception surveys to design its new facility to better meet patients’ needs. The leadership team had to navigate a tough regulatory climate to earn approval for the facility, which features residential kitchens for patients and families, decentralized nursing stations for every four beds, and 24-hour visitation for its critical-care unit.

Although Griffin Hospital still faces the same competitive challenges, it boasts a much different profile. Admissions have grown 34% from 1999 to 2006. Its net patient revenue increased from $68 million in fiscal year 2000 to $111 million in FY 2007. And for the past nine years, it has been named by Fortune magazine as one of the 100 best places to work.

—Carrie Vaughan

Winner: Lakewood Health System, Staples, MN: Small Hospitals (Less Than 100 Beds)

The senior leadership team at Lakewood Health System, a 25-bed critical-access hospital, has established a culture that focuses on open communication, innovation, personalized service, and ownership and integrity. Trust has also played a key role in the success of organization—trust between the administration and physicians, the hospital and community, the trustees and senior leaders, and the executive team and employees.

Prior to 1997, the hospital and physician clinic were separate entities that were independently providing care to the community. Soon outside organizations were looking to buy the clinic. The hospital’s senior leadership worked to ensure that the two organizations could work together as a team, and the hospital and clinic successfully merged in 1997. Tim Rice, president and CEO, says the merger with the physicians really advanced the team culture. “It aligned our incentives,” he says. “The culture represents all of us—not just the management team but all employees and physicians–and our passion for caring for people.”

When Lakewood determined that the best way to meet the needs and expectations of its community was by building a new hospital rather renovating the existing plant, it took just six months to get the physicians, trustees, employees, and the community on board.

The hospital established “visioning teams,” which included employees from all areas of the facility and members of the community, that received input and ideas about what the facility should include both physically and culturally. Rice also hit the road to conduct additional community meetings and garner support for the $42 million facility. In fact, 87% of area residents were willing to take on the risk of being taxed to cover the cost of project.

However, senior leadership eliminated the need to tax the community by converting to critical-access status and increasing its net income nearly 300% from 2000 to 2007. “What’s amazing is the vast array of services that this management team has developed in a town with a population of 3,200 residents,” says Casey Meza, CEO of St. Mary’s Hospital & Clinics and Clearwater Valley Hospital & Clinics in Idaho and a TLT judge. Lakewood offers chemotherapy, OB/GYN services, a 16-bed Alzheimer’s unit, and a 10-bed inpatient senior behavioral health unit.

—Carrie Vaughan

Winner: Bangkok Hospital Medical Center, Bangkok, Thailand: Global Hospitals

For Bangkok Hospital Medical Center, being good isn’t enough. The four-hospital system wants to be excellent—by international standards, says CEO Chatree Duangnet, MD. “To bring people who only know local things to accept and work within an international standard is a huge thing for us to do,” he says. “My own people right now are proud of running an international standard.”

After a completing a successful Joint Commission International survey in 2007, one of the challenges senior leaders faced was instilling a sense of urgency in their staff members to continue to improve. The executive team presented the staff with their next set of goals aptly named, “BMC after JCIA.”

The vision includes gaining disease-specific certification in primary stroke care, breast cancer, heart failure, and acute coronary syndrome; ensuring the staff was properly trained and credentialed; having up-to-date equipment and technology; and having healthcare products that could compete with U.S. products. To achieve these goals, the executive team focused on developing future leaders, strategic planning, and teamwork. “Working well together is one of the core competencies,” says Duangnet. “We feel it is the most important. If we cannot work well together, then we cannot serve 3,000 outpatients a day and 340 inpatients.”

Knowing that BMC’s goals depend heavily on the leadership talent within its organization, the executive team focused on leadership development, recruitment, and retainment. Employees complete an individual development plan, and the executive team is held accountable for fostering leadership talent. The executive team meets monthly with managers to discuss key performance indicators and quality improvement initiatives. These monthly audits not only give senior leaders the chance to interact with the staff members who are delivering patient care, but the employees appreciate the opportunity to communicate with the administration, as well.

To recruit and retain employees, BMC constructed a new 283-room dormitory complete with swimming pool and fitness center, which brings the number of subsidized living quarters to 700. It promotes work-life balance through activities like intramural games, yoga classes, and special interest clubs in photography and art.

—Carrie Vaughan

Winner: HealthTexas Provider Network, Dallas, TX: Medical Group Practices

For the past 15 years, the senior leadership team at HealthTexas Provider Network has successfully navigated the murky waters of healthcare—from the front of the pack. The executive team anticipated the trend toward patient-centered care, so they adopted solutions for better patient satisfaction reporting, created a department focused on patient relationship management, and adopted an ambulatory electronic health record that will play a big role in their disease management effort going forward. “The commitment to quality and service is embodied in their patient-focused and patient-friendly initiatives,” says Top Leadership Teams judge Marshal Baker.

One of the key challenges for HealthTexas has been establishing a common culture across 106 locations and communicating effectively with nearly 500 physicians. “We like governance to be as close to the local practice and that exam room as we can possibly get it,” says President Bill Roberts.

To that end, each location has an executive committee that meets weekly, and the information is broadcast to the whole group. Leveraging leadership from this diverse group is crucial, says board chairman David Winter, MD. “We depend on them to coalesce the ideas, refine them, and report them upstream. And also to take the leadership ideas from the board when we come up with mandates that we think are important for the culture of HealthTexas. We use them as a communicator.”

HealthTexas also established a physician newsletter that provides pertinent information about the organization. Each new physician is also required to attend a two-day session to learn about HealthTexas’ culture in addition to issues like coding and malpractice during their first year, says Winter. “We have monitored this through surveys, and it is remarkable that almost every physician thinks this is extremely important,” he says. “We teach them how to be a team player.”

HealthTexas provides its physicians a profile every month—a dashboard that is sent via the Web. For example, they can see patient satisfaction scores, preventive health service scores, and the company’s financial information. “Everything we do is as transparent as we can get it,” says Roberts, adding that physicians can see how other doctors are performing and “that peer pressure has driven a lot of the good behavior that we benefit from.”

—Carrie Vaughan

Winner: CareSource Management Group, Dayton, OH: Health Plans

CareSource Management Group’s mission is centered on making decisions based on what is best for the consumer. That philosophy is what ties the organization’s executive team and employees together—and it helped Pamela Morris, president and CEO, lure her chief operating officer and chief medical officer away from top positions at larger commercial managed care organizations. “It has taken me back to why I went into medicine in the first place,” says CMO Craig Thiele, MD. “The culture of our company is to serve the underserved, and that goes from the very top down to the frontline people.”

The ongoing challenges for CareSource, the largest Medicaid HMO in Ohio and the nation’s fourth largest, are meeting the needs of public-sector consumers and the regulatory and legislative demands that drive the healthcare industry. “We are relying on state regulators and legislators to determine our entire revenue stream. It can be pretty scary,” says Morris.

CareSource, which has grown from about 245,000 members in 2002 to roughly 600,000 members today, has partnered with government regulators, social service agencies, and providers to meet its members’ needs. The result of these alliances is the development of preferred option programs, the expansion of Medicaid coverage for covered families and children, and the addition of the aged, blind, and disabled population to the Ohio Medicaid managed care program.

The executive team believes in leading by example and open communication, which is why they joined other employees who were calling to welcome the nearly 10,000 new members to CareSource. Senior leaders also established the CareSource University in 2003 to help align employees under its key initiatives, unify the various departments, and increase cultural awareness. For instance, all employees were required to attend sessions that educated them on the new segments of the Medicaid population and the challenges of serving these members. Every quarter employees attend “all staff” meetings to delve into the financials and strategic initiatives.

Initiatives designed to improve benefits for its members and yield cost savings include CareSource 24, a 24-hour, seven-day in-house nurse-advice line, and a program to promote preferred medications.

—Carrie Vaughan