Fit for the future: Transforming a health system leadership model

A leading health system identified an urgent need to adapt to organizational challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Read how Vynamic helped to redesign its organization for the benefit of thousands of employees and patients.

The challenge

Following the impact of the pandemic, Vynamic’s client – a health system with 12,000 employees across four hospitals and 80-plus medical practices – wanted to better leverage their leadership resources. To do this, their focus was on reducing management inconsistencies and inefficiencies, addressing leadership burnout, creating a more fair workload balance, and building and promoting more streamlined, interconnected teams across the system.  

Health system leadership recognized that the existing organizational structure no longer reflected today’s healthcare system or supported their expressed priorities of quality, safety, patient experience, employee engagement, and value to accelerate future performance.

The approach

Vynamic applied its extensive experience helping healthcare clients navigate change and design fit-for-purpose organizations to develop an approach that met the needs of this large health system. Given the multi-faceted and highly sensitive nature of the topic, we established a transparent, collaborative, and meticulously planned approach to ensure senior leaders were engaged throughout the process and the organization was ready to embrace the proposed changes.

Analyzing the current structure

Vynamic dove deep into the organization, thoroughly examining departmental structures and interviewing senior leaders to understand their perspectives on challenges and opportunities related to existing reporting relationships. These discussions also provided Vynamic a true sense of the client’s unique culture.

Making recommendations for the future

With an appreciation of the organization’s challenges, the needs of its people, and its unwavering mission, Vynamic used our extensive provider experience and industry benchmark data to highlight structure inconsistencies, identify shadow management positions (duplicative leadership roles), and highlight areas that would benefit from aligning with department-specific Span of Responsibility ratios. Vynamic collaborated extensively with health system leaders, one-on-one, to define and develop evidenced-based recommendations for restructuring and rebalancing teams to bring the system structurally in line with other organizations of similar size and scope.

Producing a tangible roadmap and communications strategy

An incremental, phased approach was developed for implementation of defined opportunities. Each service area was provided both current and future state organization charts that were used as a roadmap for execution. Natural attrition (through resignation and retirement) was the driver of reorganization and therefore created an organic, yet low-impact way for executing identified recommendations. As service area roadmaps were completed, implementation began. Vynamic and the executive team repeatedly circled back with leaders to ensure messaging was clear and that all levels of the organization understood what was happening and why, and what it meant for them.

The result

The health system leadership is confident that the redesigned organization structure will provide an opportunity for spend reallocation by way of reinvesting in employees and patients, while creating a more lean, modern organization that is well positioned to tackle the healthcare challenges of the future. With all recommendations fully supported by industry benchmarks and aligned to the organization’s culture transformation strategy, the client asked Vynamic to stay on to help bring this future vision to life.