Good Samaritan Hospital of Los Angeles wins Paradigm Award for labor excellence

Nov 26 2010

The Paradigm Award Committee (www.paradigmaward.org) announced that Good Samaritan Hospital of Los Angeles (www.goodsam.org), a leading hospital based in Southern California, was recently selected to receive the prestigious Paradigm Award.

The Paradigm Award was created to honor hospitals that have gone above and beyond in their efforts to foster efficient labor practices without resorting to workforce reductions or dramatic top-down mandates. Knowing how difficult this is, The Paradigm Award was commissioned to encourage the recognition and celebration of institutions who have managed to reach and sustain consistent levels of labor efficiency while illustrating their ability to balance the often contradictory needs of their three main constituencies: their patients, their staff and their need to remain financially viable.

The Paradigm Award is presented to hospitals that have made the greatest measurable strides in improving labor efficiency and done so in a manner that promotes the measurement, governance and sustainability of their results.

"Winning the Paradigm award is no easy feat," claims Charlie Dawson, President of Workforce Prescriptions (a labor utilization consulting firm).  "As a member of the Paradigm Award Committee, I can tell you that of more than 100 hospitals that have applied for the award in the past 36 months, only Good Samaritan reached the level of sustainable change necessary to achieve it."

Good Samaritan began its journey to labor excellence with the October 2008 decision to engage Workforce Prescriptions (www.workforcerx.org) in performing a Labor Utilization Audit.  The Labor Utilization Audit™ is a service offering designed to allow an acute hospital to identify areas of labor waste/redundancy that can be eliminated without creating a derogatory impact on staff.

"The goal of the audit was to move the organization away from examining how many people were being paid in favor of how they were being paid and for what work," states Dan McLaughlin, VP of Professional Services at Good Samaritan and chair of the initiative.  "Our successful outcomes derived from first measuring what mattered then reducing the cost-per-hour of labor and overall labor dependence rather than from attacking people or programs."

Andrew Leeka, Good Samaritan's President & CEO goes on to state, "The creation of sustainable change required the organization to first take a step back and evaluate our current understanding of the processes (and their corresponding measures) that drive labor utilization.  It then became easier to address labor waste at the root cause rather than at the visible symptom level. Both the Labor Utilization Audit and the 84 labor competencies of the Paradigm Award Evaluation Process provided us with the ability to focus our efforts on waste reduction and put us in control of driving the results we desired."

Such results of Good Samaritan's efforts are unequivocal.  In a deeply challenged payor environment, with a significant level of organized workforce, state mandated staffing ratios and an abundance of uncompensated care, Good Samaritan has managed to create a change in operational bottom line performance of over $7M annually and the emergence of the first true sustainable operational profitability in over a decade.  They have done so without layoffs, pay cuts or radical policy changes that mandated program elimination.

"This is exactly what the Paradigm Award is intended to recognize," claims Dean Kristiniak, Paradigm Award Committee member, "finding an organization that has transcended the standard measures of productivity, waste measurement and labor management to arrive at that meaningful destination on the far side of change . . . controllability.  We can't wait to write the $10,000 Award Check to Good Samaritan and celebrate their amazing achievement with them!"