Performance Excellence 2020 (PE2020) relies on the Baldrige Performance Excellence Framework to streamline and standardize our work processes in every area across Main Line Health. Our ultimate goal is to create a high reliability and high performing organization focused on safety and financial responsibility.

Our work in PIVOT, Patient Experience, Culture of Safety, Quality, Diversity, Respect & Inclusion and Financial Performance are all critical initiatives underway at Main Line Health, and they each help us achieve a specific portion of our overall goals as outlined in our Strategic Plan. PE 2020 will serve as the uniting force—the nucleus—of these parallel efforts, connecting and informing each of these projects through systemwide standards and metrics. Using the Institute of Medicine’s STEEEP principles for health care (safe, timely, efficient, effective, equitable, patient-centered), we will ensure our PE 2020 work is systematic and sustainable.

You are correct: both PIVOT and Performance Excellence 2020 (PE2020) are two efforts that will transform the way we work at MLH. The PIVOT project includes all the work that is being done—in every clinical area, patient registration and finance—to implement Epic as our single electronic health record platform across all of Main Line Health. When Epic launches on March 3, 2018, it will transform the way we perform our work in the clinical space, patient billing and the revenue cycle. As a result, each of us will benefit from enhanced connectivity and a central repository of information and clinical processes, with the patient at the center.

However, we have significant opportunities to enhance our efforts in eliminating preventable harm, to increase focus on achieving top decile performance in our key metrics, to lower our costs by working smarter and to improve the experience we create for our patients and colleagues. Our attention to performance improvement in these areas can’t wait for the launch of PIVOT, powered by Epic, in 13 months. This is work we must begin now—and this is why we launched Performance Excellence 2020.

The Baldrige Performance Excellence Program was established by the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Improvement Act of 1987. The program is named for Malcolm Baldrige, who served as United States Secretary of Commerceduring the Reagan administration, from 1981 until Baldrige’s death in 1987. In 2010, the program's name was changed to the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program to reflect the evolution of the quality fieldfrom a focus on the product, service, and customer to a broader, strategic focus on overall organizational quality—called performance excellence.

The Baldridge leadership framework provides an organized approach to decision-making, communication and deployment of work with measurable outcomes. This framework will help MLH standardize and take a consistentand streamlined approach to our future work.

The success of Performance Excellence 2020 requires the engagement and participation of each member of the Main Line Health team. The work involved is a multi-year transformational endeavor.

Ultimately, across the System, we will all share the same visual metrics of success (e.g., dashboards, scorecards) to help standardize our efforts, allowing each of us to work to our fullest capacity in creating a superior experience.

The health care industry is evolving more rapidly than ever. We will continue to experience changes in how and where we most appropriately care for patients, how we are reimbursed, and how patient expectations continue to heighten as a result of consumerism. PE 2020 sets the bar for what is expected of each of us at MLH as caregivers, colleagues and ambassadors for wellness, in order to continue our mission as the health care provider of choice for the communities we serve.

One of the keys to success in Performance Excellence is remaining patient-focused and consumer-centric, which demands keeping pace with a competitive marketplace as well as the changing community expectations and advanced care. Core to our mission isreinvesting in the communities we serve, now seen in our steps to provide state-of-the-art operating rooms and Maternity Unit at Bryn Mawr Hospital, and expand emergency medical care facilities at Lankenau Medical Center. We need to have the proper equipment and clinical space to deliver the safest and best care possible. Delivering on our reputation for superior care also contributes to our patient experience scores (which help determine our reimbursements). Another result: Renovating our aging infrastructure helps provide appealing working conditions, which is important in retaining and attracting the best talent.