Southcentral Foundation at 30th Anniversary Quest for Excellence Conference

Last week, Southcentral Foundation attended the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program’s 30th Anniversary Quest for Excellence Conference. In addition to accepting our second Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, SCF also hosted learning sessions on each of Baldrige’s six process categories, offering conference attendees the opportunity to learn the ways in which SCF has established and maintained itself as a high-performing, customer-driven organization. Following is a brief overview of what was taught at the sessions:

• Category 1 (Leadership): SCF President/CEO gave opening and closing plenary sessions in which she spoke about the history of SCF, the way SCF transformed the health care system in the late 1990s by working with the Alaska Native community, and leadership principles at SCF. She also spoke about how SCF creates a culture of innovation, takes calculated risk, and plans for succession in leadership.
• Category 2 (Strategy): This session taught attendees about SCF’s approach to strategy formulation, including our Strategic Planning Process, which brings in input from customers and employees across the organization. Also covered was the way SCF implements strategy, and the multiple tools and committees SCF uses to ensure that this implementation is smooth and effective.
• Category 3 (Customers): This session covered the ways in which SCF collects customer feedback and how we work to ensure that providers work in relationship with customer-owners to help them achieve wellness. It also covered the ways that SCF uses customer satisfaction data to aid in strategic planning and improve the customer experience.
• Category 4 (Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management): This session taught attendees about how SCF handles data, both qualitative and quantitative, and how teams at SCF use this data for improvement. Also covered was how SCF’s Data Services department works, and how and why we initially separated Data Services from IT.
• Category 5 (Workforce): This session covered the workforce competencies SCF emphasizes in employees and how they contribute to improvement and good customer service. Also covered were SCF’s onboarding practices such as behavioral-based interviewing, and how we support employee learning and development.
• Category 6 (Operations): This session covered how SCF designs, manages, and improves key health care services, and how SCF ensures effective management of operations. The session ranged from general topics such as SCF’s philosophy of health care redesign, to specifics such as how SCF provides care in remote rural villages.

SCF is grateful for the opportunity to have shared our story of improvement at the Quest conference, and also appreciated the chance to learn improvement practices from other high-performing organizations. We hope that conference attendees learned from us even as we learned from them. For further information about opportunities to learn from SCF, contact the SCF Learning Institute.