Hurricane hero: Ochsner Health five years after Katrina

As part of our look at what it takes to make hospitals healthier on Friday, we used New Orleans-based Ochsner Health System as an example of one of the places that is getting it right when it comes to driving better care with increased efficiency. As the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches this weekend, today we take a closer look at Ochsner, which has grown to encompass eight medical centers and more than 35 health centers since the hurricane hit. As you can see in the video below, Ochsner was on the frontlines during the disaster relief efforts following Katrina. And in the true spirit of those rebuilding New Orleans, Ochsner didn’t just survive — it drew on its systematic approach to medicine to become an even stronger, more efficient healthcare presence in the region.

Ochsner’s CEO, Dr. Pat Quinlan — who in 2007 was named the No. 1 most powerful physician executive in the nation by Modern Physician magazine — just wrote a post for CNBC.com’s CEO Blog in which he talks about Ochsner’s post-Katrina experience. “When Hurricane Katrina hit, we faced a $70 million operating loss, more than $27 million in property damage, and 4,000 employees who relocated or were displaced,” he writes. “It would have been easy for us to fall victim to the storm. Instead, we tapped into a culture of resilience to not only survive Katrina, but ultimately grow from a single hospital in a struggling community to a thriving regional healthcare system.

Dr. Pat Quinlan

“Several years before the storm, we saw a significant opportunity to improve the way we ran our organization; while our priority had always been to serve our patients, we needed to start thinking more like a business if we were going to serve them effectively. Through a deep collaborative relationship with GE Healthcare, we focused on three core areas to evolve our culture: leadership, people, and process.”

Pat continues: “Working with GE, we developed a Leadership Institute where experts from Harvard, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and other thought-leading organizations developed content and served as instructors; the institute is constantly evolving with courses in subject areas that are relevant to various positions. General Electric helped us sharpen our focus to bring leadership and a culture of accountability to employees at all levels of the organization — ultimately helping to strengthen our operations at the front lines. In the immediate wake of Katrina, this leadership sensibility helped us fight the instinct to hunker down and instead re-engage with our community.”

Pat says that the efforts produced a people focus at Ochsner that has resulted in collaboration becoming “hardwired into our culture.” “We believe that great ideas are generated when collaboration is highest,” he writes. “We built an operating structure in which teamwork, open discussion, and sharing of best practices are encouraged, regardless of level or function. For example, we make sure that new programs and tools have buy-in from both administrative and medical staff so that both viewpoints are represented and patient needs are better served.”

“The lesson here is that when disaster hits, it isn’t just your emergency response plan that can save you — it goes far deeper than that. Our focus on leadership, people, and process that began well before the storm has led to an across-the-board improvement in cost, quality, and access that has endured ever since. Today, we’re the largest private healthcare system in the Gulf Coast Region…. As a business that faces life-and-death decisions every day, we know that some tragedies can be prevented and some simply cannot. But the steps we took to re-energize our business and prepare for the worst aren’t specific to healthcare — or to hurricanes. In the coming months, as we watch businesses emerge from this latest disaster [in the Gulf], I urge all companies to take a close look at their operations, leadership, and staff, and ask themselves how well they would fare if disaster came their way.…”

* Read Dr. Pat Quinlan’s full post

Tomorrow, we’ll take another look at New Orleans and efforts to improve healthcare for underserved communities in the area.

Learn more in these GE Reports stories:
* “Try to run a hectic ER with our ‘Patient Shuffle’ game”
* “Helping fix hospitals so they can better fix patients”
* “IDEO’s Tim Brown on ‘design thinking’ in healthcare”
* “Visualizing health with The Economist Intelligence Unit”
* “Spotting data disconnects with Health of Nations index”
* “GE systems boost cancer center case capacity by 900”
* “Inside the revolution at Intermountain Healthcare”
* “How an affinity for efficiency saved Virtua Health $25M”