Driving Strategic Transformation & Embedding Accountability at Trihealth

Executive Summary
TriHealth, Inc. is a $1.2 billion healthcare organization in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 2005,
TriHealth executives made a strategic decision to transform their collection of
hospitals and other locations into a true, integrated “health system.” To do so, they needed to resolve challenges including:

• Strong growth including acquisitions, but needing enhanced integration and alignment of multiple business units
• Rigorous focus on financial performance, but less on other key areas
• Lack of consistent ways to measure success in their new strategic growth paradigm
• Fractured focus on organizational problems due to lack of insight into leading causes
• Too many organizational initiatives (greater than 200)
• Challenges with data integrity, reporting frequency, and accessibility, especially in non-financial areas such as HR, Quality, and internal processes
• Large matrixed organization creating overlapping responsibilities, leading to unclear accountability

To help the organization examine and report on progress toward addressing these issues, while striving to achieve their system strategy, TriHealth’s President and Chief Executive Officer, John Prout sought a “Balanced Scorecard” that would be a succinct and easy-to-understand report for management and especially for his Board of Trustees.

“We looked at multiple options for implementing a Balanced Scorecard at TriHealth. We needed software that addressed our technology needs and – just as importantly – strategic consulting expertise to help our organization embrace the management system,” explained Kathye Habig, Director of Performance Improvement and Consulting for TriHealth.

TriHealth selected ActiveStrategy strategic consultants to help develop a new management system based upon the Balanced Scorecard methodology and also chose ActiveStrategy Enterprise (ASE) software to automate and deploy it. Since implementing this new management system, which TriHealth dubbed their “Compass Management System,” TriHealth has seen:

• Greater focus on key strategic issues linked to the health system’s strategy
• Accountability for performance results through the Scorecard owners
• Greater data transparency and clarity, which has resulted in improved performance of key measures, as well as better organizational readiness for public reporting and regulatory audits
• More focused business reviews, using cascaded Balanced Scorecards in operational and functional areas
• Improved ability to solve high-level problems by resolving lower-level causes
• Progress toward achieving their strategic Vision of becoming a premier integrated health system