To improve quality, Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital President David Fox places a premium on measurement.
By Jeff Elliott
David Fox, president of the Downers Grove, Ill.-based Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital, carries a yardstick wherever he goes. “You can’t improve what you don‘t measure,” he says.
The yardstick illustrates a management philosophy he adopted from his mentor, Jim Anderson, founding CEO of Central DuPage Hospital: Set performance goals for individuals that are rooted in the organization’s goals, such as clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction.
- Located in Downers Grove, Ill.
- 340 beds
- 2,500 employees
- 851 physicians
Mission statement: “The mission of Advocate Health Care is to serve the health needs of individuals, families and communities through a holistic philosophy rooted in our fundamental understanding of human beings as created in the image of God.”
Recent awards: 2007 Lincoln Foundation for Performance Excellence Silver Award for “Progress Towards Excellence”
More important, measure those goals and report on them continually—even in real time, if possible. That way, individuals are extremely clear on how they’re doing in relation to their goals throughout the year, Fox says. “If we are lacking in a certain area, it allows us to close a gap in performance much earlier in the year.”
He's so convinced of the value of performance metrics that his own achievements relative to his organizational goals are available for the entire management team to view on a proprietary company web site.
Along with his fixation on measurable objectives, Fox also has an inherent desire to make sure those he comes in contact with—whether staff, physicians, or patients—are highly satisfied. As an example, Fox has a goal of ensuring that employee satisfaction ranks in the 80th percentile based on Morehead Associates' employee relations surveys.
How is he doing? “We are in the 90th percentile in employee satisfaction according to the most recent survey,” he says.
However, performance metrics also have called him to task at times. When his organization became involved with a couple of very complex performance award applications that took several months to complete, he noticed that patient satisfaction scores were beginning to slip.
“We allowed ourselves to take our eyes off the ball,” he says. “The lesson I took from this is that even when you must focus more intently on one area, you can‘t simply disregard other important areas. You need to sustain a high level of performance across the board.”
Fox has been a healthcare executive his entire career, first earning a graduate degree from the University of Chicago in healthcare management then working his way up the executive ladder, becoming president of Central DuPage hospital in 1997. He left Central DuPage to join Advocate Good Samaritan in 2003. As the son of a Chicago-area general surgeon, however, Fox has never let his mission as an executive dilute the reason he entered health care in the first place: to make a difference in people's lives.
“We are first and foremost a clinical enterprise,” he says. “I am extremely proud of the clinical results we generate at Good Samaritan Hospital.”