Spring Forward into a New Strategic Plan

Good morning!

As I mentioned in last Friday’s Campus Memo, today I’ll talk about our new five-year strategic plan, UMMC 2025.

I am very proud of the work that has been done at UMMC these last few years. During the last year or so, in particular, you have responded in superb, and often heroic, fashion to the pandemic, all while continuing to advance the good work of this organization as circumstances have allowed. In upcoming weeks, I will share via a VC Notes column some of the accomplishments of the last two years. I am so proud of this work – but not satisfied. There is much more work to be done. There are many challenges to overcome and there is great opportunity. The only way for us to realize the opportunities we have before us is to move forward in an intentional, cohesive and organized manner. And so, fingers crossed, as we wind down our pandemic response, we will spring forward to embrace the challenge of becoming a more highly functioning academic medical center in all of our mission areas.

In that spirit, we have developed UMMC 2025 to identify our strategic priorities, lay out the work that needs to occur to achieve them and articulate the investments we must make to accomplish our goals. The plan represents the best ideas from across the organization and communicates our vision, strategies, goals and measures of success.

UMMC 2025 sets out five specific strategies on which we will focus during the next five years. Many of you will notice that these strategies are not all that different from the “top five” priorities we have been working on during the last few years, and especially before the pandemic. In this new iteration, they have been restated with a little more precision and – very importantly – each strategy has been linked to a series of supporting goals and associated action steps that also spell out deadlines and accountabilities. Together, they represent an organizational “to do list” that will keep us moving in a positive direction. 

By their nature, these strategies are not expected to change significantly during the course of five years. However, toward the end of each calendar year, we will develop new specific and measurable goals associated with each of the strategies for the coming year. 

These overarching strategies include:

Maximizing value in clinical care. For this strategy, we will continue to build upon the foundations of clinical quality we began laying in 2015. The focus will be on identifying and removing variability in clinical care and outcomes, improving accuracy and consistency of clinical documentation, and controlling the costs of providing care, beginning with certain higher cost/higher volume procedures. 

Driving strategic clinical growth. An ongoing challenge has been improving patient access. We need a better understanding of what the barriers are – why some provider groups have longer wait times for appointments than others. One factor is not having enough providers to meet the need, hence our aim to develop a clinical faculty workforce plan. Another barrier to growth is physical access – the difficulties patients encounter when they come to the central campus. What’s the best mix of on-campus and off-campus clinical sites? And how do we take advantage of the explosion of telehealth usage during the pandemic and integrate that technology more broadly in our patient care experience? During the next year we will answer these questions and lay the groundwork for future growth. 

Expanding health care services statewide. Pediatrics is several years into the development of a statewide network specialty plan. We are in an earlier point in the process for adult services. This strategy involves applying business metrics to better define current benefits, opportunities and investment for future development. By the end of 2021, a three-year plan for growth in both children’s and adult services will be developed. As part of this process, we will also look to expand our affiliations with other health systems for adult and pediatric specialty services. Relationships like those in place with Starkville, Gulfport and Meridian hospitals have been mutually beneficial, and we want to deepen these and add others. Finally, we want to employ the skills we have gained in managing population health through our electronic health record to enhance preventive services for our Medicare population in the year ahead.

Positioning academic programs for the next generation of learners. Our School of Dentistry and School of Nursing have challenges with their physical space. By the end of this year, we want to be able to make data-driven decisions about whether to build new facilities or renovate/expand existing space. We need a deeper understanding of the needs of our instructional faculty and, based on that assessment, to launch professional development initiatives to address those needs. Also, as learning styles, technology and curricula have changed, we will begin to look at new models to deliver basic science content to our health professions students. Finally, in the education realm, we will build on the work we’ve done on promoting a culture of professionalism to expand that work in the clinical setting. 

Strengthening research programs. In the research realm, we will continue our work with major affiliates – such as the Mayo Clinic and Vanderbilt University Medical Center – and look for additional areas of collaboration with them and with other partners. We also plan to conduct in-depth analyses to drive allocation of resources, including optimal use of research space and faculty salary coverage expectations. Through these and other productivity enhancements, we intend to double the number of clinical trials under way and increase external research funding by 10 percent during Year One.

In the next few days, once a few finishing touches are applied to the five-year and first-year plans, we will share those more broadly. You will notice a few differences compared to our previous five-year plan. The first year is front-loaded with data collection and analysis associated with some of the goals and strategies. Also, we have enumerated about half as many strategies, goals and action steps as the previous plan so that our undivided attention and energy can be channeled toward this work. 

Again, I want to thank everyone who has contributed to this new plan, and I want to thank all of you, in advance, for the contributions you will make toward completing this work. If you’re like me, I am SO READY to put this pandemic in the rearview mirror and return full-force to striving to be the best academic medical center we can be, on our way to A Healthier Mississippi.