Dr. Steven Gabbe provided calm leadership at Wexner Medical Center

 
More than six years ago when Dr. Steven Gabbe became CEO of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, he did something he’s done at every medical center or organization he’s worked at. He formally interviewed leaders and staff for about an hour each, meeting with around 40 people.
“The important part of that meeting was giving them a chance to tell me what they were concerned about, what they would do if they were me, what was going well, what wasn’t going well, and then I would always ask them, ‘What’s the single thing that I should do to improve our organization?’” he says.
That desire to communicate served Gabbe well in his time leading the $2.1 billion organization, its five hospitals and nearly 20,000 employees.
Now that he’s stepped down to focus on new challenges at OSU, Gabbe took time to reflect back on some profound cultural shifts and the related change management.

Major changes, simultaneously

Over the past few years, not only did the Wexner Medical Center undertake the largest construction project in OSU’s history, it also implemented a value-based purchasing system for reimbursement; moved over to electronic medical records and MyChart, a patient accessible health care record; adopted the Crew Resource Management program to standardize safety checks and protocols; and fully integrated the OSU physician practice with the university.
Gabbe says you need to show the full commitment from your leadership in order to get organizational buy-in when you’re undergoing so much change at once.
For example, over 18 months, Wexner Medical Center trained 1,400 people in the new in-patient electronic medical records.
“All of the administrators, including me, went through the training,” Gabbe says. “So we knew what the training involved and we could stand up and say, ‘Yeah, we went through this — we understand,’ rather than have somebody sitting off in an office and then complain when it doesn’t go well.”
There was some resistance to the change, but Wexner Medical Center provided extra help and one-on-one coaching to people who weren’t as tech savvy.
“It’s hard to be in a class — and we’ve all been there — and feel like I’m probably the dumbest person in this class,” Gabbe says.
After a lot of preparation, at midnight, one day in October of 2011, Wexner Medical Center made the shift from paper records to electronic in what they called “the big bang.”
Gabbe says it was very exciting and many of the administrators were out on the floors throughout that weekend to support the staff, along with coaches who could help with the conversion.
As a result of their hard work, he says Epic, one of the largest electronic medical record software providers in the world, told them it was the largest and best transformation conversion they’d ever seen.
Even with a few hiccups, which were expected, health care systems from around the country and Canada have come to Columbus to figure out what Wexner Medical Center did to make it go so well.

Impossible to over-communicate

From small and large group meetings to emails and website pages, the more you communicate changes, the better.
Gabbe says they made sure to meet with as many stakeholders as possible during the cultural and organizational changes.
With the final designs of the Wexner Medical Center expansion, not only did the leadership hold countless meetings throughout the medical center campus, but also throughout the university.
“I remember meeting in the Thompson Library, where we’d invited people to come from all over the university, saying, ‘This is what we’re planning to do. This is why we’re planning to do it. Here are some of the designs — I think we had two or three different options for how the building would look — which would you prefer?’” Gabbe says.
“This is all part of The Ohio State University campus; people have to understand what we were doing and why,” he says. “And when that building was finally built, people could say, ‘Yeah, that was the design that I favored, and look, there it is.’”