The Client Challenge
The Chartis Group was engaged to support the clinical integration planning process for Atrium Health and Wake Forest Baptist Health after they finalized a strategic combination bringing together complementary clinical and academic capabilities to serve a growing, multiregional footprint across the Southeast.
The organizations had a vision to achieve meaningful clinical integration through a blended, academic community service line structure that would transcend geography. A purposeful approach to clinical integration was critical to achieving that vision.
THE BENEFITS OF CLINICAL INTEGRATION:
- Enhance access and quality, particularly in rural communities and shortage programs
- Improve clinical outcomes through growing research portfolio
- Expand highly specialized programs, which benefit from greater volumes
- Improve ability to compete against regional competitors and nationally ranked AMCs
- Advance system-wide efficiencies through strategic functional consolidation
Navigating to Next: The Solution
Atrium executive management had experience in shared services and operational integration, so they knew that cross-regional integration would be complex and challenging. To be successful, they needed to swiftly launch and empower their clinical integration planning teams. Chartis worked side-by-side with the Atrium Integration Management Office (IMO) to assist in organizing the clinical integration effort and provide facilitative, advisory, analytic, and project management support. The IMO worked with the executive team to categorize clinical services and service lines based on intent to move toward a cross-regional enterprise model or a highly coordinated model for those programs that are more regionally oriented.
This led to a Phase I launch of 12 unique clinical integration design teams in which clinical, academic, and administrative leaders from the legacy organizations defined the path to synergy value realization, priority growth strategies and sharing of distinct programs, quantified clinical efficiency opportunities, designed a service line operating model, and identified milestones with associated success metrics. In parallel, an executive team was also launched to design the physician enterprise and faculty integration model and name key functional and clinical leaders for the future.
