Focus on the Services

Good morning.

Before I get to today’s topic, I want to share in the week-long celebration of our faculty. Thank you for all you do for our learners and for the impact you have on science and health care in Mississippi and beyond. UMMC is fortunate to have such an esteemed, accomplished, experienced and engaging roster of faculty. On behalf of the entire organization, I extend my sincerest appreciation.

Now, on to today’s topic.

We entered a new five-year strategic plan in July, UMMC 2030. This new plan will carry on the momentum from the previous plan and help us guide our decisions and investments through fiscal year 2030. I look forward to seeing all that we will be able to accomplish.

Much in the new plan will look familiar. For example, our work around clinical quality remains of the utmost importance. The most significant difference for UMMC 2030 is strategy five. UMMC’s 2030 strategy five is “Optimize Institutional Service Areas” and is led by Dr. Brian Rutledge, assistant vice chancellor and chief of staff. This strategy will identify operational efficiencies and opportunities for the institution to make improvements in ways that all facets of the Medical Center can improve. Think of this as using a higher-octane fuel to make the engine work smoother, stronger and more effectively.

The first-year goals under this new strategy are tackling some very big and wide-reaching services that have significant impact on day-to-day operations.

Goal one is “Ensure workforce professionalism, skills and customer service” led by Frank Lenior, chief human resources officer.

This goal is about creating initiatives that reflect who we are and what we stand for. We want to raise the overall experience for everyone who engages with the Medical Center, including faculty, staff and students.

Professionalism in the workplace and learning environment fosters trust, accountability and respectful collaboration. Excellent customer service ensures that every interaction reflects UMMC’s commitment to quality within each of our three mission areas.

To achieve these goals, Human Resources is taking these steps:

• Create manager training that is focused on reinforcing workplace professionalism policies and leadership expectations
• Create a phased rollout of customer service training to set expectations and equip employees with tools for delivering exceptional service to internal and external customers
• Establish evaluation and feedback methodologies to ensure improvement and alignment with UMMC expectations for professionalism and customer service

Goal two, “Initiate comprehensive wayfinding improvements,” is led by Dr. Jonathan Wilson, chief administrative officer, and supported by a $1.5 million appropriation from our state legislature.

Wayfinding refers to all the signs, landmarks, maps, location/thoroughfare names, etc. people use for navigation. Wayfinding cues are used every day by our patients, visitors, contractors, students, employees and others to navigate our expansive campus and other locations. Even for experienced UMMC employees, getting to where you want to go can sometimes be challenging. We need to get this right if we want our patients and visitors to have a positive experience from the start of their time with us.

The overall improvement of wayfinding on our campus will be done through three key areas and with the support of a vendor, which was picked through an RFP process and is a national leader in health care and academic wayfinding:

• New large monument signs at each of our entrances
• New, optimized directional signage for vehicle and pedestrian traffic and interior wayfinding to help direct people through our many facilities, hallways, floors and units
• Digital compliments to our wayfinding strategy and traditional signage

The work on this goal is well underway, and it will be wrapped up by the end of this fiscal year.

As the state’s only academic medical center, we are unique in many ways, including the extremely high number – and diverse scope – of vendor contracts. Last fiscal year, we activated more than 2,000 contracts! We need to be as efficient and effective in our contracting process as possible to get agreements through smoothly and quickly. As such, goal three, “Improve contract administration process,” led by Stacy Baldwin, chief integrity officer, will help us improve our purchasing practices, contract negotiations and contract execution.

We are looking to improve all the systems used to initiate, process and implement agreements. That includes increasing visibility of every step of the contracts process and eventually further integrations with other systems for a more streamlined flow.

Many of the steps we use in our contracting processes have been in place for years but streamlining that process is essential. This is why it is one of the first goals in the new strategic plan.

Goal four aims to not just improve upon something that thousands of people use daily but also totally revamp it – our institutional website. A simple way to describe our website is this: massive. We have more than 160,000 pages in the umc.edu domain. Academic medical centers are complex, which explains such a large site. And having a statewide network of hospitals and clinics also increases the groups served by our site. Around 8,600 people visit our website per day, clicking on roughly 25,000 pages.

This goal is led by Marc Rolph, executive director of communications and marketing, and is simply titled “Redesign and optimize the institutional website.”

We issued a request for proposals for a vendor to work with us on redesigning our website in a way that will meet the needs of all the schools, departments, hospitals, offices, units, etc. that have a presence on our site. A preferred vendor was chosen through that competitive bid process, and contract negotiations are underway.

The primary goal for the new website will be to create a digital environment where our largest audience groups – patients, students and research partners – can easily find the information they need. The entire website’s design will be re-imagined, and the vendor, who is a nationally recognized digital marketing company experienced in working with academic medical centers, will use their in-house expertise and experience to create a modern, customized website to meet our unique needs and the needs of our audiences. They will host listening sessions with UMMC leaders and groups and do a complete audit of our current site.

Ultimately, the new site – which in most cases can take 20-24 months to complete for an organization as large as ours – will be slimmer (individual page counts should be significantly reduced), more intuitive (most frequently visited sections will be more prominent), easier to find (words and other content on the site will be developed and maintained with a focus on search engine optimization) and feature an improved user experience.

The service areas that are featured in this goal are all vital to every Medical Center operation. Improvements in these areas will be positive for everyone, even though sometimes change can be hard. I’m excited that we chose to feature service areas in our new strategic plan, and I look forward to the work that we will be able to accomplish over the next five years. Everything that is done through this strategy will have far-reaching and long-lasting impacts and will certainly push us toward A Healthier Mississippi.