Although fiscal year 2020 presented many unforeseen challenges, Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health made significant progress toward achieving our annual system goals. This was only possible thanks to your dedication and resilience despite some very difficult circumstances.
As you might expect, the COVID-19 pandemic also affected LG Health’s timeline for developing our system-wide goals for fiscal year 2021. In this column, I will briefly outline those goals, which once again align with our five dimensions of performance: Quality, Experience, Access, Finance and People.
Quality: Reduce 30-day readmissions. Reducing readmission rates is a key component of LG Health’s efforts to become highly reliable and eliminate harm to everyone in our care. In the year ahead, we will continue our work to reduce infections, complications and other factors that contribute to readmissions.
Experience: Increase likelihood to recommend. Having a positive experience with LG Health leads patients to return for future care and recommend us to family, friends and neighbors. By emphasizing the Penn Medicine Experience Standards, we will ensure a consistently extraordinary experience for all patients and families across our health system.
Access: Increase distinct lives. In order to grow the number of patients LG Health serves at any of our locations, we will continue to focus on providing convenient, affordable and timely care. The pandemic significantly impacted our efforts around access last year, as many people delayed seeking medical care for all but the most serious conditions.
Finance: Achieve operating margin. This dimension too was greatly impacted by COVID-19. A healthy operating margin is critical to accomplishing all of our goals, as well as the long-term vision outlined in our strategic plan for 2021-2025. This year we will continue our work to ensure efficient spending while pursuing new strategies to grow and optimize revenue.
People: Improve organizational retention. We will remain focused on retaining a healthy workforce in a safe environment by enhancing your compensation, benefits, wellness and development opportunities. As part of these efforts, our new Diversity & Inclusion Advisory Committee continues to seek employee feedback to establish priorities and develop an action plan.
Several specific goal targets remain to be finalized as we await first quarter results and a greater understanding of the pandemic’s full implications on LG Health. We will post updates on the System Goals resource page on StarNet.
Your leader will soon share your team’s FY21 goals, which will align with our system goals. This will help you to better understand how your own day-to-day work directly contributes to our future success.