The following statement is a mid-year recap from Dr. Swank:
Physicans and staff of SDA
As the end of the first half of 2011 approaches, so does the president’s evaluation. For that I want to review with you my/our accomplishments and activities of the past six months.
To start with, to refresh your memories (and mine), I’ve included what I sent out to you in December (in italics) prior to my evaluation and will use it as an outline to organize my rambling.
Items that I along with the board would like to accomplish in what remains of 2010 include: 1) digesting the information received at the strategic planning meeting with an eye to making changes to ensure adequate board representation for all regions and to improve board/committee interaction to allow the committees to take care of more of the operational activities and allow the board to focus more on global/strategic issues, 2) tweak the board member evaluation to enhance this change of focus, 3) revamping and adjusting the focus of our CEO evaluation process as recommended by the consultants.
Items which I would like to accomplish with the board next year include: 1) Continue on our path of strategic growth which includes aggressively pursuing opportunities as they arise, 2) maintaining core business 3) continue to cultivate relationships with hospitals and facilities, 4) be responsive to physicians and staff, 5) work to improve board leadership development and education, 6) monitor and adjust as necessary the changes resulting from items 1,2,3 from the paragraph above, 7) be willing and able to ‘think outside the box’ as the situation dictates, 8) maintain my sanity and a healthy outlook on life. Other items will be added to this list as we move along.
I’ll deal with the 2010 stuff in the first paragraph, much of which actually happened early in 2011 instead of 2010.
1) digesting the information received at the strategic planning meeting with an eye to making changes to ensure adequate board representation for all regions and to improve board/committee interaction to allow the committees to take care of more of the operational activities and allow the board to focus more on global/strategic issues.
Using the information from Cattaneo and Stroud, the consultants we had in last September, the strategic planning meeting, a group survey, and information gleaned at the ACPE course this Spring the board after considerable discussion and thought decided not to make any changes at this time to the nature of the composition of the board and continue to let ‘regional representation’ occur at the committee level. I discussed our thought process on this in more detail in a presidential update.
The board has empowered the committees by intentionally reducing the amount of board discussion of most committee decisions. Also the frequency of board meetings as been reduced from 1 per 2-3 weeks to 1 per 3-4 weeks, which necessarily requires the committees to exercise more authority. So far this has worked very well. The committee’s have been productive and have stayed focused on their tasks. All of the new initiatives such as the physician handbook, the quarterly standards bonus plan, the new medication control policy, the new compliance plan, the liver transplant team, PSS upgrades, improved phone apps, improved cell coverage at LAH, JCAHO compliance guidelines for each facility on PSS, the roving block doc program, …and the list goes on… have been developed by the committees with very little input from the board. Make no mistake, I don’t deserve any credit for all of this work, that all goes to the committees and committee chair people themselves. All that I and the board have done is to allow them to do it, and doing so has freed the board to spend time on the larger picture. I plan to continue this scheme and will try reducing board meetings to every 4 weeks by year’s end.
2) tweak the board member evaluation to enhance this change of focus.
This was accomplished and we’ll be using the new evaluation forms for the first time in July. We plan to monitor this and tweak as required to create a tool that is truly useful in improving board member performance.
3) revamping and adjusting the focus of our CEO evaluation process as recommended by the consultants
This was led by Dr. Duggan and many changes to the CEO’s evaluation were made. Its first trial will be in a month and again in December. This too is a work in progress and we expect to be making improvements to this early next year.
Moving on to the second paragraph I wrote last December:
Items which I would like to accomplish with the board next year include: 1) Continue on our path of strategic growth which includes aggressively pursuing opportunities as they arise
While there haven’t been any huge new opportunities for us over the last six months, we are continually ‘scanning’ for them. We are actively pursuing a contract with Kaiser for their OB business at Skyridge and well as their business in the Sky main OR. The negotiation process is slow, but proceeding well. We and Dr. Rubin are continuing to exert constant steady pressure in the direction of Parker Hospital with an aim to expand our market share there. We and especially Dr. Hansen, have been actively engaged in the development of the Porter Robotics Institute, which will hopefully bring in new business for us (from Lutheran). We and Dr. Song are supporting Inspire’s office based anesthesia for minor GYN procedures. While this program hasn’t taken off as much as we and Inspire had hoped, there is still the potential for increased business there. We actively considered putting a bid in for the Vail RFP but decided against it.
I plan to continue this course and position SDA to be able to pounce on any good opportunities.
2) maintaining core business 3) continue to cultivate relationships with hospitals and facilities
These two are intertwined and when I wrote this in December it sounded good and seemed like it would be easy. Little did I know how much time and energy I’d spend on this. My focus over the last six weeks has been on Swedish and thankfully at least at this point, things are much better and looking up. In addition to Swedish, we were involved in a hardball negotiation with Porter over our transplant service reimbursement. The contract has yet to be finalized so I can’t say much about this at this point other than to say I believe we came through as good as we could have.
Over the last 6 months I have met with the CEO’s of all of our facilities (except LAH which will occur in the near future) to ensure open lines of communication. Good communication is essential if and when issues at facilities arise
For the future on this topic, I plan to increase our efforts at being proactive in our dealings with facilities, so that we can hopefully avoid getting into a position similar to the recent one at Swedish.
4) be responsive to physicians and staff
I have tried my best at this. Only you know the answer to how I’ve done. I’ve held a number of presidential forums to allow for discussion of any and all topics. While I can’t implement all of the ideas expressed to me, I’ve tried to keep people’s views in mind while making decisions. I’ll use your feedback on this and continue to do my best.
5) work to improve board leadership development and education
Honestly, I’ve been a little weak here. The board has attended the ACPE meeting, had a team building exercise in February, and we all had anti-harassment training (as have you). We’ll have a “Mergers and Acquisitions 101” with our attorney Bruce Muir in the near future. My major goal here is to improve our process of identifying, educating and orienting new and potential board members. Unfortunately, this has been on the back burner these last six months
7) be willing and able to ‘think outside the box’ as the situation dictates,
I don’t think of this as one of my strengths but fortunately there are many group members who are good at it and those same people are usually good at letting me know their ideas. So I try to keep an open mind and incorporate those ideas as appropriate.
8) maintain my sanity and a healthy outlook on life.
Usually I do ok with this although there are times when this has been an issue. I think my wife and kids would give me an ‘F’ in this area
There are other things that I have worked on over the past six months that don’t fit into the outline above. I have spent time with the Nash appeal and look forward to the time when this is behind us. I have spent considerable effort dealing with some complex personnel issues, which I believe have all worked out well for both SDA and the physicians involved. I have spent time developing relationships with the leaders of other anesthesia groups in town. Depending on the future, ‘competitors today may be friends tomorrow’. I have also continued to head up our recruiting efforts albeit that has been slow this last six months.
For the next six months, I plan to continue on the same track with the goals listed above subject to your feedback.
Respectfully Submitted,
Ken Swank
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