Teaching University Hospital/Clinics
Chicago, Illinois
This large teaching university hospital and clinics provides a high level of care and individual attention to patients and their families, giving special consideration to their unique medical challenges, emotional needs and cultural sensitivities. Their diverse medical teams bring the world's latest advancements to patient care, research and teaching.
Culture
This extremely large medical complex was positioned in a very competitive health care environment. With the decreasing revenue of the health center, it had to undergo some significant cost reduction.
The CHANGEffect:
Working with the Hospital Executive Team and the Vice President of Administration of the University, we tried to address the dual needs of income increase and expense decrease. For the income side it was decided that the University would focus their marketing on two or three specialized services as opposed to the total grouping of medical services. The two that were chosen were the Eye Clinic and the Cardiac Services within the hospital. From a long term perspective this has proven to be very effective. From a cost reduction perspective we decided to work together with the biggest union, Service Employee International to create mutually agreed upon policy and procedures related to employee alcohol and drug use. This mutually created policy reestablished a new university and union progressive discipline policy. This spirit of cooperation continued over into the collective bargaining process, where wage and benefit concessions were agreed to after two months of negotiations.