Implementing healthcare excellence: the vital role of the CEO in evidence-based design.

PURPOSE: This paper explores the role of the chief executive officer (CEO) in evidence-based design (EBD), discussing the internal and external challenges that a CEO faces, such as demands for increased quality, safety, patient-and-family-centeredness, increased revenue, and reduced cost. BACKGROUND: Based on a series of interviews and case studies and the experience of the authors as researchers, consultants, and CEOs, this paper provides a model for EBD and recommends actions that a CEO can undertake to create an effective project over the life cycle of a building. TOPICAL HEADINGS: Evidence-Based Design: A Performance-Based Approach to Achieving Key Goals; Key Approaches to Executing Evidence-Based Design; Overcoming Barriers to Innovation: The CEO's Vital Role in Implementing Evidence-Based Design CONCLUSIONS: The CEO bears special responsibility for successful facility project implementation. Only the CEO possesses the responsibility and authority to articulate the strategy, vision, goals, and resource constraints that frame every project. With the support of their boards, CEOs set the stage for the transformation of an organization's culture and fuel clinical and business process reengineering by encouraging and, if necessary, forcing collaboration between the strong disciplinary and departmental divisions found in healthcare systems.

Developing and implementing a patient-centered IT strategy.

The Army Medical Department (AMEDD), a comprehensive worldwide integrated healthcare system with an annual budget of more than $6 billion, more than 50,000 employees, and 2.4 million beneficiaries, developed and implemented a comprehensive patient-centered enterprise-wide information management and information technology strategy to facilitate information management systems and infrastructure decisions by leaders. This article describes a patient-centered model used to organize and link healthcare activities and activity leaders to portray patient care, administrative, business, financial, supply, and strategic support information systems. Activity and IT leaders applied a refined strategic alignment model to identify specific clinical, business, and IT goals and to detail the necessary infrastructure investments using a systems view. The use of patient and process outcome measures tied to the AMEDD's Balanced Score Card' helped leaders to manage IT strategy execution. Now, two years into the effort, a sample activity strategy--outpatient care--is used to illustrate the application of these tools to the development and implementation of a patient-centered IT strategy.