Change Management
Healthy changes
How Telford Thomas is driving The Washington Hospital toward excellence
By Brian Horn
Smart Business Pittsburgh | September 2008
Page 1 of 3
About two years ago, Telford W. Thomas was faced with the grim
reality of the competitiveness of the health care industry. If The Washington Hospital did not evolve to face the demands
put on it by its customers and the market, it would cease to grow
and possibly start losing business — and talent — to the competition.
“What is happening in the health care industry is we, like other
institutions, have been attacked for patient trust in the organization that has been dropping over the years because of errors that
are made ... and not paying attention to what the patient feels they
need,” says Thomas, president and CEO of the hospital, which had
2007 revenue of $225 million.
“We felt in order to stay viable, given we are in a competitive
environment with other health care institutions and businesses,
that we had to make that change. Our intent certainly is to be the
hospital of choice in our community for the patients and the doctors and our employees to work here.”
As a result, Thomas and his team started looking at ways the
organization could reinvent itself to better meet the needs of its
customers and increase staff accountability. The emphasis would
be on getting better feedback from patients to help the hospital
provide better care.
“We, as health care providers, don’t always know what is best for
the patient,” he says. “We’ve got to involve them in it. The effort to do
that and make the cultural change has to be through our education
and work with our employees to encourage that participation.”
The patients weren’t the only ones who needed more attention. To
generate excitement about the changes and to get the staff of 2,400
to buy in to them, Thomas and the upper management team needed
to do a better job of paying attention to employees and giving them
the recognition they were due. Only if the employees were on board
with the changes could patient care ultimately be improved.
