Health & Medical
Vital signs
How Lee Penrose improved performance at St. Jude Medical Center through a system of metrics and accountability
By Matt McClellan
Smart Business Orange County | April 2009
Page 1 of 5
Perfection is a pretty high ideal to aspire to, but Lee Penrose has a plan to achieve it at St. Jude Medical Center.
“Perfect care” is one of the goals set by St. Jude’s parent organization, St. Joseph Health System. All of the hospitals in the St. Joseph Health System were tasked with that goal, and Penrose is responsible for making what some see as a pipe dream into reality at St. Jude.
It’s a big task, to be sure, but Penrose has methodically improved St. Jude’s performance by focusing on three key areas: finding opportunities for improvement, setting standards for employee performance and motivating St. Jude’s nearly 3,000 employees to reach those standards.
“We’re not perfect yet,” he says of the organization, which posted more than $300 million in net revenue last year. “I don’t know if any hospital in the country can say they provide perfect care 100 percent of the time. But we are heading in that direction.”
Penrose says there probably isn’t a single recipe for a CEO who wants to adopt a metric-based system of measured performance, but he does offer his best starting point.
“I always look at the data,” he says. “Try to start by understanding how well you’re doing. We wouldn’t be an organization run by humans if we didn’t have opportunities for improvement. Virtually every organization out there is going to have opportunities for improvement. The trick is trying to find that right opportunity.”
