This is an excerpt from the Compass Clinical Profile in Healthcare Leadership “A Fine Choice,” featuring Peter S. Fine, FACHE, Chief Executive Officer of Banner Health.

When Mr. Fine was hired to lead Banner Health in 2000, the newly-merged system was struggling with the chaos of clashing cultures and the complexities generated by the joined businesses. But, under his leadership, Banner – headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona – is now one of the largest not-for-profit, secular, multi-state systems in the country, generated $4.86 billion in revenue in 2009.

Peter Fine, CEO of Banner Health was in his second year of leadership when Banner’s 2020 Vision Plan was created. He discusses the details of that plan with Dr. Cary Gutbezahl, CEO and President of Compass Clinical Consulting.

Peter Fine (PF): We laid out what we  were going to do for 20 years, making it clear, simple and easy to understand.

2020 Steps to The Future

• Fix It – Turnaround, 2000-2002
• Do It – Performance, 2003-2006
• Grow It – Growth, 2007-2010
• Change It – Innovation, 2011-2015
• Lead It – Industry Leadership, 2016-2020

We spent two years focused on fixing this company, taking it from a losing operation to a financially successful organization. Then we began to plan for the next stage—focusing on performance.

We needed information systems that could gather, arrange and provide the information in a way that would allow us to benchmark ourselves against anybody.

This meant investing in IT systems.

We began to build the idea that we were only as good as the best of the best—not the best with the data. So we began to benchmark.

Transparency Motivates Positive Change

We then took those benchmarks and put them online on our intranet. It was important for every part of the organization to be able to access the data. For example, take inpatient services. The measurements we were using were shared visibly and broadly, so everybody could see. It created a lot of tension, but it got the competitive juices flowing.

Total transparency—it’s refreshing but, make no mistake, it is difficult to manage.

Dr. Cary Gutbezal (CG): So, if you were running a hospital where you were at the bottom of the barrel, with unacceptable outcomes compared to your peer group, everybody knew it.

PF: Yes. That created a lot of peer pressure—pressure to perform, motivation to change. We built this process of total transparency and accountability into the organization. It became part of the fabric of the company.

Accountability Provides Investments for The Future

Accountability produced results that then positioned us to spend a few billion dollars during a three-phase plan to grow the company by first focusing on investments in present campuses and towers—reinvesting in our facilities.

Second, we started building new campuses, or what we call Greenfield projects, that are quite advanced from an IT perspective, incorporating design and technology that have been very well accepted by our patients.

A great example is our new Banner Ironwood Medical Facility and the development of the Cardon Children’s Medical Center, the first new pediatric hospital in Arizona in decades. The third phase was acquisition, with the purchase of another system called Sun Health.

Fix. Do. Grow.

Three one-word methodologies we’ve used to grow our organization so far.

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DOWNLOAD the Compass Clinical Profile in Healthcare Leadership “A Fine Choice,” featuring Peter S. Fine, FACHE, Chief Executive Officer of Banner Health.