A: Everything we do in support of our four-part mission requires financial resources. Our goal is to make those commitments predictable. For example, we don’t ever want to be in a position where we commit to spending a certain amount on improving community health outcomes one year, but the following year we don’t have the financial resources to commit that same amount, forcing us to cut off that support.
We cannot have a sustained impact on patient care, research, education or support for our communities if we can’t ensure some amount of financial sustainability. The vast majority of what comes from the margin-generating parts of our operations is invested directly in activities that support our mission within the same fiscal year, with a small portion reserved for supporting our mission in the future. Some of those future investments — like the new Ragon building at Massachusetts General Hospital or the campus expansion at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital — are expenditures that upgrade our physical footprint. Others are more routine investments, like replacing medical equipment that is at the end of its life.
This goal is incredibly important to enabling investment in our mission – especially at a time where healthcare systems across the country are facing unprecedented financial challenges driven by inflation, the capacity crisis and workforce challenges. We are not immune from these challenges, which makes this goal so important.
Q: What are some specific programs and initiatives underway to support this goal?
A: There are several initiatives that improve patient outcomes and promote high-quality care, while also helping us better manage resources and ensure a sustainable future. The first is Sustain, which is focused on making thoughtful, responsible choices about how we use all our resources. Through Sustain, we are identifying new ways of working that optimize our people’s time and effort, reduce inefficiency and improve the utilization of our assets.
Our Patient Care Progression work is a great example of an initiative that promotes high-quality care and helps improve financial sustainability, so it’s a win on both sides. By helping patients safely leave the hospital sooner, we reduce their exposure to risks like hospital-acquired infections and improve throughput, which helps our financial sustainability.
Finally, we are focused on generating other sources of revenue that help our margin that are not subject to the same structural limitations as care delivery. That includes our work to commercialize innovations and the growth of our Mass General Brigham Health Plan.
Q: How can we achieve this goal more effectively by working together as one Mass General Brigham?
A: Each of the initiatives I just described is made more effective by working as an integrated system. For example, in resource stewardship, our people have done great work at the hospital level finding opportunities to be more efficient, but our impact is limited if we just focus on one hospital. By working horizontally across the organization, we can have an even greater impact. For example, through Sustain, we have identified an opportunity to consolidate our answering services across the system from 18 contracts down to less than five. This makes our people’s lives easier because they don’t have to deal with as many vendors, and it helps us be more efficient.
The other initiatives I mentioned are also enabled by working as an integrated system. Our length-of-stay work requires all our member organizations working together to move patients to post-acute settings, like Spaulding Rehabilitation’s new Acute Rehabilitation Unit. Our work to grow the Health Plan relies on seamless integration between our Population Health Management teams and the Health Plan. And our opportunity to commercialize innovations is so much greater when we draw on the expertise and leading-edge research happening across our academic medical centers and specialty hospitals.
Q: How can all employees help us achieve this goal?
A: Even for our colleagues who don’t manage budgets or make decisions around expenditures, we can still help achieve this goal by being good stewards of our resources. We often forget that the most critical resource that we have is an hour of a colleague’s time. We should be good stewards of that. When working with our colleagues, we should be thinking about engaging them on initiatives that are the highest and best use of their time. If someone is asking for your time on something that might not be valuable for the organization, ask a couple of questions so that you can help them better evaluate that need. Everyone is working incredibly hard across our system, and we owe it to ourselves and our colleagues to make sure that time is used wisely.
