Andalusia Regional Hospital on Monday announced a partnership with Studer Group, an outcomes-based healthcare performance improvement firm based in Pensacola.

The Studer Group works with more than 850 healthcare organizations teaching them how to achieve, sustain, and accelerate exceptional clinical, operational, and financial outcomes. They help bring structure and focus to organizations through the creation of cultures of accountability and help set them up to be able to execute quickly.

Andalusia Regional Hospital CEO John Yanes said the working partnership will include a number of approaches.

First, he said, Studer Group will coach the ARH team on the implementation and hardwiring of evidence-based leadership, a framework that aligns organizational goals, behaviors and processes in a way that moves and sustains results.

“ARH’s coaching team will be comprised of specialists with backgrounds matching those of ARH’s own team,” Yanes said. “Key phases of the coaching plan will include the start-up and creation of internal teams, which will guide ARH the Leader Evaluation Process, Leadership Development Institutes, MustHaves®, and managing-through-performance gaps. “

The coaching team will also monitor and evaluate accountability systems to ensure these tactics become truly hardwired. ARH has been assigned a primary coach, but the model includes a multi-coach approach depending on the learning objectives.

ARH also will have unlimited access to the Studer Group National Learning Lab, which offers easy to foundational videos, industry news, articles, webinars and the latest resources, Yanes said.

Some ARH employees will participate in Studer Conferences, which are three-day, interactive learning events with tracks focused on specific areas of the healthcare organization, Yanes said.

The company’s Leader Evaluation Manager software is a web-based application that automates the goal-setting and performance review process for all leaders, while ensuring that the performance metrics of individual leaders are aligned with the overall goals of the organization. Both leaders and their supervisors will clearly understand from the beginning of the year what goals need to be accomplished to achieve a successful annual review.

ARH’s agreement with the Studer Group is for three years.

“We have made this significant commitment to excellence as we prepare to celebrate our hospital’s 50th anniversary, and strategically position or organization to serve future generations of Covington County residents,” Yanes said.

“At this point, our leadership team is in the midst of establishing their respective goals based on our overall organizational goals which will results in our Leadership Evaluation Manager,” Yanes said. “This will be our ‘playbook’ for the year. Each director will meet monthly with their one-up leader to review their respective department’s results.

“This is the hard work, but having successfully completed this process at other hospitals, the results are transformational for each leader and the organization.” Yanes said. “We’re embarking on an excellence journey. Journeys have a starting point and can be a lot of fun. We’re going to have fun and celebrate our successes.

“This process allows us to align our goals and actions based on what’s important,” he said. “And that’s building a culture of engagement, service, patient safety and clinical quality. Patients have to come first.’

Studer Group works with more than 850 healthcare organizations in the U.S., Canada and Australia.