Strategic Plan

For Atlantic General Hospital and Health System
Fiscal 2024 - 2026
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Introduction

The health care industry has undergone a “once in a lifetime” event with the COVID-19 pandemic. In the aftermath of this pandemic, new economic forces are reshaping our economy and highlighting the need to fundamentally alter the traditional American health care system. It is a period of uncertainty around what the future of health care holds. As an organization, we must continue to adapt in our thinking, to innovate and to grow in our knowledge, to embrace new technologies, and to seek partnership opportunities that will create a more reliable and equitable health care system to adequately support the growing demands for our services.

Emerging from the pandemic, we face a new reality filled with growing and enduring labor shortages, a dramatically higher cost structure to run our core operations, growing discontent among consumers around access, equity and affordability, and the acceleration of new entrants into health care delivery that will fundamentally disrupt hospitals. Navigating these forces will require that our resources and assets be strategically aligned and coordinated. It requires a sharper focus and increased discipline for sound execution, with accountability shared equally throughout the organization.

As we learned during the pandemic, health care organizations have the capacity to innovate, evolve, transform, and meet the challenge of the moment when there is clarity of purpose, a commitment to the cause, and a resolve to making things happen. With renewed leadership and a renewed plan looking forward, Atlantic General Hospital will meet the challenges of this moment and will propel itself to a new future, bright with opportunity and poised to have an impact.

Mission, Vision & Values

Our Mission
To provide a coordinated care system with access to quality care, personalized service and education to create a healthy community

Our Vision
To be the leader in caring for people and advancing health for the residents and visitors to our community.

Our Values
We become the leader in caring through these values:

Compassion
Accountability
Respect
Error-free

The guiding principles behind our organization’s values are to demonstrate quality and safety excellence while delivering exceptional service to our patients and their families. This means communicating effectively and acting with both urgency and personal accountability. To do this as a whole, we must engage our medical staff and associates in the common goal and apply principles of sound finance to sustain our core mission.

Strategic Planning Process

Annually, the organization engages in a strategic planning process to evaluate organizational priorities and align resources to ensure the accomplishment of identified critical objectives. Under the direction of the Board of Trustees, and with participation from Medical Staff, Leadership and the community, recommendations are set forth in regard to physician recruitment, programs, services, and building projects ensuring that they are in accord with Atlantic General Hospital’s Vision and Mission.

As the starting point to the planning process, an environmental assessment was conducted in order to ascertain the sustainability of strategic decisions, address the interrelationships of Atlantic General Hospital with certain external stakeholders and identify the presence of internal barriers to success.

The external environmental assessment included a series of discussions with stakeholders (e.g., hospital leadership, board members, medical staff, and community members), demographic research, and an analysis of upcoming regulatory changes both in Maryland and surrounding states. The internal environmental assessment, in addition to these stakeholders, included an employee satisfaction survey and a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis. This assessment included robust dialogue, reflection, and consideration about the current state of our performance and the future we desire.

We have included insight and education from external consultants, experts in understanding the direction that technology, economics and medical advances are taking hospitals and health care providers. We have sought input from our community, seeking to understand what it wants in its health care system and how it would rate our performance against what matters to them. We have engaged legislative and civic leaders in our efforts to garner their support and to satisfy our role as an anchor institution in creating a community where people want to live, work and play.

As we plan for the future of Atlantic General Hospital and Health System, it is critical that we stay focused on our core mission and operate with fiscal discipline. The current economic environment, coupled with our most recent financial performance, suggests that the headwinds we face are strong, persistent and swirling. We must exercise agile decision-making skills and have the courage to confront the challenges we face with an openness to debate our course, a willingness to engage in a healthy exchange of ideas, and be steadfast in the pursuit of our goals.

Goals ​​

• Strengthen our core business​
• Improve the performance of Atlantic General Health System (AGHS) ​
• Nurture a workforce strategy that supports our mission
• Transform our revenue and cost structure
• Strive for high reliability and organizational excellence

Strategies for Achieving Our Goals

These strategies support the five strategic goals outlined previously to create a roadmap for Atlantic General Hospital and Health System through 2025.

STRENGTHEN OUR CORE BUSINESS
Provide improved operational efficiency and quality care in our core clinical services through a growth strategy in programs that are profitable to the organization.

• Develop a structured provider recruitment plan and assimilation program
• Increase market share in women’s health, orthopedics, imaging, and surgical services
• Achieve increased operating room efficiencies and adherence to evidence-based standards of care
• Strengthen care management programs to optimize patient throughput and efficiency
• Leverage information technology to support our Care Givers and our patients

IMPROVE THE PERFORMANCE OF ATLANTIC GENERAL HEALTH SYSTEM
Create a frictionless experience for patients seeking acute and non-acute access to care in our ambulatory practices, increasing patient throughput and reducing avoidable ED utilization.

• Support our medical staff with effective, professional practice management services
• Implement a new provider compensation model that aligns quality, access and patient experience, while improving productivity and reducing hospital subsidies
• Improve the patient experience across AGHS medical practices
• Ensure easy coordination of care across AGH services

NURTURE A WORKFORCE STRATEGY THAT SUPPORTS OUR MISSION
Our workforce strategy must position Atlantic General Hospital as a sought after employer by providing competitive compensation programs, professional growth opportunities, and healthy work environments.

• Cultivate an environment of trust
• Invest in our associates through competitive wage and benefit structure
• Grow internal talent through career ladders and professional growth development
• Expand workforce development partnerships with allied health care training programs
• Hardwire positive first impression behaviors and communications skills for all AGH and AGHS associates
• Implement new models of care that promote teamwork and a connection to purpose

TRANSFORM OUR REVENUE AND COST STRUCTURE
We must diversify our revenue streams and create operating efficiencies that allow the organization to generate operating margins sufficient to advance our mission.

• Conduct evaluation of all service lines for efficiency and growth
• Leverage the Premier group purchasing agreement
• Build on our partnership with Chesapeake Health Care
• Develop relationships with regional health systems to collaborate and plan services that complement individual strengths and support the growing health care needs of our service area
• Continue to work with and support the AGH Foundation to raise funds for new and expanded services, programs, and technologies

STRIVE FOR HIGH RELIABILITY AND ORGANIZATIONAL EXCELLENCE
We must create an environment that embodies a culture of safety, promotes strong associate engagement, and pursues zero harm to our patients, while delivering exceptional patient experiences at every point of interaction with our health system.

• Achieve top quartile performance in Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) for Inpatient, Outpatient, ED and Medical Offices
• Achieve a 50% reduction in patient harm events year over year
• Optimize Bar Code Medication Administration (BCMA) and expand to the Emergency Department and Surgical Services
• Achieve year-over-year improvement in employee retention
• Reduce hospital readmission rate to <9.5%
• Maximize AGH financial performance under quality-based incentive programs

Next Steps

The Senior Leadership Team will be responsible for the implementation of the Strategic Plan and will assume responsibility for each of the strategies, action plans, and allocation and alignment of resources. The strategic goals will be cascaded through the organization and each leader will be tasked with creating the appropriate operational objectives to accomplish the strategic goals. The Senior Leadership Team will determine how we measure our performance and success, ensuring alignment throughout the organization. The Senior Leadership Team is responsible for carrying out the strategies identified within the plan and will provide a regular report to the Board of Trustees as we monitor, adjust, and execute on our Strategic Plan.