Progress made to transform city’s essential public health system and advance growth strategy for 2020 On January 11, Dr. Ram Raju, president and CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, announced progress toward a number of reforms that support the five-year Vision 2020 plan he announced last April and outlined 16 major initiatives underway to build the foundation for growth and long-term financial stability for the city's essential public health care system that serves one in every six New Yorkers. The Vision 2020 plan is a strategy to transform the health system and allow it to compete better in the changing health care landscape, and when financial support is decreasing for care for uninsured patients. It is focused on bringing excellence in patient experience, expanding access to services to New Yorkers who are not connected to health care, and reforming the organization's structure to become more efficient, moving from a hospital-centric operation to one that emphasizes prevention and wellness. Raju returned to Manhattan’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice – where he announced the 2020 plan – to address these reforms before hundreds of NYC Health + Hospitals employees, labor partners and other community stakeholders. "To manage our financial issues we have only two options,” Raju said. “We can shrink our system and cut our essential services to make up for the loss of federal support. Or, we can build our system and replace lost federal dollars with revenue that we’ll generate by offering expanded services, better services, more cost-effective services to a larger patient base. I am proud that we have settled on the growth option." Raju announced the following indicators of progress the system has made in the last year toward achieving the 2020 Vision goals: •Reduced wait time for patients entering the system, and cut the wait in adult medicine by 12 days; •Reached goals to lower the wait for a pediatrics appointment to five days or less at many health centers; •Increased inpatient satisfaction scores by six points; •Made health care more convenient to patients and their families with many neighborhood health centers now open 38 HOMEREPORTER.COM bROOKLYN’S TOP DOCTORS later at night and on Saturdays; •Launched primary care center expansion as part of Mayor Bill de Blasio's “Caring Neighborhoods” initiative and will build five new health clinics, and expand six existing clinics in underserved neighborhoods; •Extended Metro Plus to all employees of the City of New York, and to residents of Staten Island for the first time; •Eliminated the health system's outdated organizational networks and will replace them with a simplified structure that will achieve more efficiencies and allow the system to be more responsive to patient and community needs; •Secured $1.2 billion in state Medicaid reform funds under DSRIP to lead health care transformation in New York City and support care that reduces unnecessary hospitalizations and better coordinates care at the community level; •Launched a new brand for the health system that visually unifies more than 70 patient care locations and represents a transition to wellness-focused health care; •Will go live, on time and on budget, with a new state-of-the-art Electronic Medical Record system, to be first implemented in April in the health system's Queens and Elmhurst hospitals. “Each of these advances indicate progress, although their financial impact will take time,” said Raju. “What’s significant today is that they indicate our transformation from a provider-centered focus to one that places patients at the center of all that we do.” In an effort to help the workforce understand the numerous, complex initiatives that are building the foundation for reform across the health system, Raju referred to them as pieces of a puzzle and explained how the pieces connect and are aligned with the 2020 agenda. "Each is critically important in its own way to our survival,” said Raju. “They're all system-wide and complex. It's essential that we understand how these initiatives will connect with each other to create something that is greater than the sum of their parts. They all involve thinking differently, acting differently and looking differently." NYC Health + Hospitals is the largest public health care system in the nation. It is a network of 11 hospitals, trauma centers, neighborhood health centers, nursing homes, and post-acute care centers, as well as a home care agency and a health plan, MetroPlus. The health system provides essential services to 1.4 million New Yorkers every year in more than 70 locations across the city's five boroughs. Its diverse workforce of more than 42,000 employees is uniquely focused on empowering New Yorkers, without exception, to live the healthiest life possible. For more info, go to nychealthandhospitals.org. Stay connected at facebook.com/nycHHC or Twitter @NYCHealthSystem.
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