Case Study

Published March 2008

SSM Health Care: Learning Programs to Achieve Exceptional Patient Care

Jeff Snipes and Dawn Runge, Ph.D.

SSM Health Care, one of the largest Catholic health care systems in the United States, has a long-term commitment to employee learning and development.

The organization operates 20 acute care hospitals and two nursing homes in Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin and Oklahoma and employs 23,000 workers, including 5,000 physicians, to provide a wide range of health care services.

SSM Health Care’s other health-related businesses include information systems, home care management and support services, such as supply chain management and clinical engineering. The organization also has an owning interest in Premier Medical Insurance Group Inc., one of Wisconsin’s largest health maintenance organizations.

SSM Health Care’s mission and values call for the highest level of customer service in the health care industry and encourage all employees to develop the leadership, management and communication skills needed to support their goals. To make this mission a reality, SSM University, the organization’s internal education arm, provides learning and development programs to employees across all levels and departments.

To help employees understand how to do the things that matter most to patients, SSM Health Care developed a strategic, organization-wide program called Achieving Exceptional Patient Care (AEPC). AEPC defines the actions employees should take to ensure the highest level of customer service at every SSM Health Care facility.
AEPC was initiated in 2006 as a result of a review of the organization’s patient and employee satisfaction metrics.

The review revealed that while performance was high, it had been flat for several years. With the desire to improve, the organization’s leaders took a hard look at processes and standards around patient services and assessed whether performance levels were, in fact, truly exceptional.

In addition to the internal review, SSM Health Care also benchmarked other high-performing organizations and researched ways to improve patient satisfaction, learning from organizations such as IHI, Plaintree and Baptist Health Care. The organization selected the best from this research and used that as a platform for discussions to create its own program.

With representatives from every SSM Health Care entity, eight teams gathered together to discuss how to leverage, adapt and modify the findings from the internal and external research for use by SSM Health Care employees systematically across the entire organization. The end result was the AEPC initiative, which includes eight elements:

•�� Exceptional service standards.
•�� Exceptional conversations.
•�� Exceptional rounding.
•�� Exceptional recognition.
•�� Selecting exceptional employees.
•�� Exceptional patient experiences.
•�� Exceptional service recovery.
•�� Exceptional ideas.

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