Sutter built patient-centricity into the organizational chart, installed physician leaders in key roles, and created leadership “dyads” linking key clinical and administrative functions. It also put a new focus on patient experience, creating functions to encourage cross-silo collaboration and innovation. In this Executive Conversation, Dr. Stephen Lockhart, Sutter’s chief medical officer, and Linda Khachadourian, who fills the newly created role of chief enterprise transformation officer, explain how they guided the process by keeping the focus on the patient.
Taking down the barriers: Linda Khachadourian on creating “one Sutter”
For a long time, we've been on this journey toward being “one Sutter”—one organization. Our latest round of change was a natural next step in that progression. What's different is that we've tried to remove some of the barriers, real or imagined, that might exist out in the field to allow more sharing of best practices. We've embedded people in the right places so the right partnerships can exist so we can share resources in a better way. We've tried to eliminate barriers or silos so there are more opportunities for sharing and more opportunities to design things from a system perspective and then deploy them as appropriate across the organization.
The other thing we've been trying to work on is our dissemination processes. We really have to have a much faster cadence once we've identified something that works, so we have the right tools and processes and people that can translate an idea to action as quickly as possible. And if it doesn't work, that’s OK. We can fail, fail fast, improve, and come back out with something even better.
