Aurora's Path to 'Best in Quality' among US Health Systems

For the second year in a row, Aurora Health Care (Milwaukee, WI) is ranked as the nation's highest performing health system in terms of quality, based on work in a CMS - Premier quality demonstration project involving 250 hospitals.

As a former member of the Aurora leadership team, I know the investments the system board and senior management made to improve quality. Three specific things stand out to me as root drivers to Aurora's success:

1. Aurora is patient focused. Founding CEO Ed Howe preached the importance of staying focused on the customer, not the competitors. Too often I see hospitals lose sight of the patient in their quality improvement efforts. At Aurora, quality was always understood as a partnership between provider and patient. Obviously, that partnership has paid off.
   
   
2. Aurora is clinician led. Current CEO Nick Turkal is a physician, but clinician-led has meaning well beyond the current occupant of the top post. Aurora channeled clinical leaders into creating care management protocols to attack the root causes of higher costs and poor health outcomes. Nursing leaders like Sue Ela and physician leaders like Mike Jaeger and Bruce Van Cleave pushed hard to standardize best practices, fix clinical operations, and apply technology to improve outcomes.
   
   Equipped to question current practices and make them obsolete through transformational changes, these clincians created a culture that demands (and has delivered) the best. Their leadership was not limited to managing the business; it was more importantly focused on building the value.
   
   
3. Aurora is market driven. Incremental change was never the goal of the Aurora leadership. Market leadership was the goal, and the system was willing to take risks to achieve it.
   
   The top performing hospital in quality in the US, according to the CMS - Premier study, was Aurora BayCare, a joint venture between Aurora and BayCare Medical Group, a 100+ physician multi-specialty medical group. At the time it was conceived and built it was the source of great controversy. But the senior leaders at Aurora and BayCare had a vision for something that transcended current market dynamics and made the investment to do it right.
   
   Additionally, Aurora was an early leader in finding new ways to partner with physicians; to leverage scale for advantage and strategy for long-term competitive gain and performance improvement. Not every risk paid off, but creating an environment that empowered teams to throw out the industry script and do things differently enabled a culture to go for truly different, and now, demonstrably better results.

These lessons-learned would serve many systems well. Too many lose sight of the role of the patient in improving quality; channel clinicians into governance but fail to leverage them to lead value creation; and see market advantage as a by-product, not the purpose, of transformational performance improvement.

Mike Eaton