 Welcome to Hack and Sack Meridian Health's podcast series for Women's History Month. I'm your host, Jody Mayberry. I have the pleasure of interviewing Nancy Corcoran-Davidoff, who is Executive Vice President, Chief Experience Officer, and Chief Human Resources Officer. With Nancy, we're going to explore the topic of researching and implementing best practices. This podcast is part of a series of dynamic short interviews sponsored by the Hack and Sack Meridian Health's Women in Leadership Team Member Resource Group. In fact, this group identified the topics of this series they felt were important areas to explore. Let's get started with Nancy Corcoran-Davidoff. Nancy, tell me the importance of researching and applying best practices from an organizational level. Obviously, when you're working in a healthcare industry, you know, it's science-based. Probably over the last 20 years, coming to any meeting or any initiative, people expect you to come to the table having done your research, having come with either best practices, leading practices, or a business case for why you're recommending a certain path or a certain method or a certain policy. So I think that research is part of a responsible way of making changes in an organization. It's not just willy-nilly that you've done research. You've validated that this is a meaningful recommendation. In my role as the Chief Experience Officer, we never really go to the table without doing our research to know that what we're recommending or suggesting is going to get us an outcome or a result. There's a lot of activity in the healthcare industry and certainly in hospitals. And so when you are asking people to do something, you want to be relatively certain that you're going to get a good result or an outcome or you're going to improve some process or resolve some issue. And I think you can't really do that unless you've done research and have high probability of success. What type of research and where do you look for best practices that might be a good fit for the hospital? In healthcare, there's a number of companies that do a lot of research, such as the Healthcare Advisory Board. I like to do a lot of reading. The Harvard Business Review Magazine and literary searches is quite lucrative also. But I do a lot of reading. I also have relationships with the Barrel Institute, which is an institute that is dedicated to improving healthcare for patients. We also have a relationship with an organization called the Experience Innovation Cafe. And their mission is also research-based to help organizations to improve the delivery of care and to humanize the delivery of care, improving communication and empathy and compassion, and reducing emotional harm for patients. IHI, the Institute for Health Improvement, is another organization. So in healthcare, there are numerous organizations that dedicate their mission is to provide us with research and basically provide us with best practices or leading practices that have improved outcomes. I mean, healthcare for as long as certainly as I've been involved in it, it has always been very transparent in terms of the science and the improving of outcomes. People are very willing to share how they've improved the way they deliver care for patients because they want it to be more of a systemic change adopted by the industry as opposed to just one organization. We are not at a loss at all in this industry for organizations that are dedicated to doing research and sharing that research with us. When you do come across a new best practice, something that's making a difference through the research that you do, how do you go about applying it? Because that's obviously the next step. You found something that matters and now you need to implement. There's two things I'd like to share with you around that. One is we have put together what we're calling our Experience Innovation Cafe. This is a venue and an event that we hold monthly. At that event, we choose a topic. It may be a problem or it may be something that we want to implement in the organization. We do research and we narrow down the solutions or the vendors to the top in the country that we believe are really delivering. We bring those vendors and those solutions to the Experience Innovation Cafe and we invite stakeholders from throughout the organization, all levels of the organization, including our team members, to come to that event and we have each of the solutions presented. We get feedback from the stakeholders and then we basically review all of that feedback. The next step after that is either to implement if the case is so strong and we believe that we should just deploy and move forward or we start to do pilots. We may pilot it in different areas of the organization to be sure that this is a right fit for our organization. It may have been successful in other places but maybe it's not right for us. We sometimes take a next step and we will pilot it and based on the results of our pilot, we make a final decision as to whether or not we're going to spread it organization-wide or in certain segments of the organization. That's one way that we validate the research and we pick the right solution for our organization. The other way that we're doing it is about a year and a half ago, we made a decision to establish a governance structure in the organization for the human experience work that I was going to be leading. That governance structure was a way for us to deploy how we get the work done. Once we make a decision that something is appropriate for the organization and should be deployed throughout our continuum of care, we take it through our governance structure. That's basically at the highest level of the organization we get buying for the strategy. We then go to the operations leaders and we get funding and we get approval for our deployment plan and then we basically, through a human experience governance committee, we then cascade that information out into the organization to groups that we call our quadruple-aimed councils. Those councils lead dyad leadership groups throughout their organizations that deploy this best practice or this solution. That governance structure is set up as a way for us to get this work done consistently and also our way to continue the research to make sure that we are monitoring the results and that we're getting the outcomes that we're expecting. It's a very robust structure and it also is bidirectional so it's not always top down. Sometimes the ideas will come from our team members or from middle management and they will bubble those ideas up to the human experience committee and then up to leadership. It's a very robust governance structure put in place to help us deploy and execute and continue our own organizational research. This is so helpful because it just shows that when something new is being implemented, how much of a process it passed through. It's not taken lightly that something new is being put in place. I love hearing how much it passed through to get to the people that are out doing the work. The Experience Innovation Cafe has been a tremendous success because the stakeholders can see the presentation and then we have time during the day for them to interact with the solution, to talk to the vendors, to talk to the people who have done the research or who have deployed the solution in their organizations so they can kind of touch and feel the solution or the product. There are very robust feedback and very clear opinions about whether they think it's good or bad or indifferent. That venue has been very successful for us. Actually our last venue, we had to cut off the attendance because we ran out of room for people to come. We actually also provided transportation because we wanted really to get people to come. Our organization spans the coast of New Jersey, I think 150 to 200 miles, and so it's quite a distance for people to come, so we decided to provide transportation to show the commitment that we have to get people there because their opinions are so important. One of the things that I'm also responsible for, human resources here in the network, and our team members have expressed to us time and time again during their engagement surveys that we do annually, that they want to be involved in decisions that involve or affect their work. This is an opportunity for us to demonstrate to them that we want their opinions, that we want them involved also and that their opinions are meaningful and that it will help us make a right decision. It also helps that they go through this process and then when we deploy, they feel like they had a hand in it and so they have a more vested interest in making it successful. They engage in whatever it is because they endorsed it or they felt that it was the right thing to do. We've examined best practices, how to research, how to apply as an organization what you do. How important is it though for individuals to take the same approach? Well, I think it's very important. I mean, anytime as a leader in the organization, anytime any of my managers or team members come to me with an idea or suggestion or a problem, I encourage them to come to me with their own research. First, how did they substantiate that this was an issue and is it an issue that is isolated or is it a systemic issue or is it an issue that's only affecting a small group? So they have to do some level of research because you can't react to every idea or every suggestion or every problem that someone brings up. You have to determine what's really meaningful to the organization. I think the recommendation or the suggestion or innovation also has to be supported because you want to be able to request resources. One of the ways that we're encouraging our team members to get involved in this process is we're starting what we're calling innovation grants. When we did focus groups with many of our team members, they said that it was sometimes difficult to get their ideas heard. So the Experience Innovation Cafe is one way for them to do that. But they also said that it was often hard also to get funds to start an idea or to test an idea or to do the research. And so we've started what we're calling innovation grants. And these grants are for team members and they put together a one-page application. Part of that application is explaining the research they did around this issue and the value that the organization is going to get from solving this issue. And if they have any ideas, where do they come up with these ideas, did they come up with them on their own, and this is their testing and their piloting and their own research, or did they get this idea from someone else and there is already research to back it up. We're supporting those grants and those ideas, again, to cultivate innovation in the organization. One of the things we want our team members to do is to be courageous and to come forward with ideas continuously on how to improve the delivery of care or the service levels that we're providing to the community. Many times team members feel like that's leadership's job or their manager's job and we don't take that approach at all. We really want the people doing the job, they're the best ones to help us to understand how we could do it better at a better value for the patients and the community. Let's say that I show up to work every day and I do a good job and I work hard, but I've never really thought about applying this, researching best practices and finding a way to improve my job personally. If this is something we haven't done yet, where do you recommend we can start? I think it's working with the supervisors and with your peers, with your other team members. I mean, there are simple things that people can do every day is examining how they're working and is there a better way for them to work. There's articles written about Toyota, right? Toyota, the Toyota production line. Anybody on the Toyota production line can stop the line if it's unsafe or if they have an idea about how to improve the production of that vehicle. We want to apply those kinds of principles in our organization to say anyone at any level is responsible to continuously improve how they're doing things. One, to make sure that our patients are safe. We are on a, I guess we call it a journey and I think it is that, of implementing high reliability throughout our organization, basically applying the airline aeronautics industries principles of checks and balances, safety huddles, getting everyone, wherever you work in the organization to think about safety, improvement and value. And I think that's where we're starting, is educating every single employee in our organization and everyone that's hired into our organization that this is one of our core values. It's to constantly be looking for ways to do things better, never to be complacent and also to be consistent. So when we set things in place that we believe create a safe environment for our patients in the community that you abide by that until you bring forth an idea that could improve it. But we want people to deliver highly reliable care in a way that our patients will value and then become loyal to our organization continuously come back. So I think high reliability is a very important way in which we communicate to every member in our organization that everyone's input is valued and that they should feel safe to bring forth their ideas. Thank you for listening. Please tune in for our other podcasts.