3. Connect.Innovate.Lead.
A bit about ME:
• We love lobster
• Depend on the fishing
industry
• Made up of many small
communities where my
career started
11. Who We Are
• Not-for-profit
• Provide both health
care and coverage
• 15 worksites
• Nearly 900
employees
12. w
What We Do
Primary and Specialty Care
provided at Martin’s Point
Health Care Centers
CARE
Medicare Advantage Plans
for Medicare beneficiaries
TRICARE Prime® Plans
for military beneficiaries
COVERAGE
21. Net Promoter
Score
(-100 to 100)
How likely is it that you
would recommend
Martin’s Point to a
friend or a colleague?
64NPS SCORE
85%
RESPONDED
EASY/VERY EASY
Customer
Effort
Based on your most
recent interaction, how
easy or difficult was it
to interact with us?
Were you
able to accomplish
your goal?
+88%
Customer
Success
24. As you can see…
• We faced quite a few
headwinds
• There was a time for
course correction
• Time for our own
health check-up
• Focused on four key
elements
29. Employees are
our greatest asset.
Together, we have a
greater impact.
At-a-glance information guides decision making.
Respect is shown through
communication.
Process standardization is
the basis for improvement.
30.
31. Start Where You Are (But Start)
Be Intentional and Make it Your Own
Design a System for All
Allow Time for Change
Management System Checklist
32. Strategy and Alignment
• Structure in executing our
strategic priorities
• Focus and alignment through
strategy deployment activities
• Use of the balanced scorecard
• Front line staff have
measurable goals tied to
organizational goals
33. Focus on the Critical Few
Align and Coordinate Efforts
Bring Strategy to Life at all Levels
Adjust Swiftly by Defining Expected Results,
Understanding Barriers
Strategy and Alignment Checklist
34. Culture as a
Differentiator
• Consistently monitor
our climate
• Solicit feedback
regularly
• Reward our employees
• Celebrate successes
• Encourage community
involvement
35. Culture as a Differentiator Checklist
Define Your Culture
Ensure Effectiveness, Is it Leading to Success?
Recruit, Develop, and Retain the Right People
Understand Your Community Impact
36. • We measure success
through a system of
metrics
• The real proof is in
the impact on our
customers’ lives
• Meet Ma Cook …
39. Tweetable Takeaways @GPTW_US
When employees and the
customers they serve are
both happy – great things
can happen!
#gptw2020
#martinspointhealthcare
#notacoincidence
@GPTW_US
@MP_HealthCare
Does your company need a
health check-up? Examine
your values, management
system, strategy/alignment,
and culture.
#gptw2020
#howhealthyareyou
#isittimeforacheckup
@GPTW_US
@MP_HealthCare
Ask me about my Martin’s
Point Health Care beanie
– all the way from Maine!
#gptw2020
#maineiscold
#wearabletakeaway
#warmhatsforall
@GPTW_US
@MP_HealthCare
Editor's Notes
Slide 2: Opportunity for Dr. Howes to introduce himself to the crowd
30+ Years with MPHC
President and CEO
Health care organization based in Portland, Maine.
Etc.
PICTURE: 2019 Martin’s Point Service Awards
First of three slides that set up Maine and touches on some of the commonly known stereotypes
It’s probably not a surprise to most, but Maine is very well known for lobster.
3478 miles of coast line in Maine
We actually considered giving you each a live lobster, but Maine is also cold, so we went with hats instead
All kidding aside, Maine depends heavily on its fishing industry. I started my medical career in a small coastal town called Stonington
I learned the value, and intricacies, of providing care to a small town. Working alongside friends and neighbors, I knew when I was doing well, or not so well, cause I’d bump into people in the store, at restaurants, etc. They weren’t shy about sharing feedback.
These small communities exist throughout our entire state.
PHOTO: Bass Harbor, Maine
Second of three slides that set up Maine and touches on some of the commonly known stereotypes
Again, maybe not a surprise to most, but Maine is known for its coastline.
Sailing and shipbuilding is a big part of our culture
I am a sailor, and am building a small boat now, and love to see Maine from the vantage point of the water.
PHOTO: Marshall Point Light Station in St. George, Maine
Third of three slides that set up Maine and touches on some of the commonly known stereotypes
We’re home to some great brands and organizations
LL Bean is a massive brand and huge employer
We’re also home to many great small brands.
PHOTO: Iconic “bean boot” outside of LL Bean’s flagship store in Freeport, Maine. These boots are still made in Maine and this one is apparently a size 410.7. The first pair were made in 1911…almost 110 years ago.
First of four slides about things people may not know about Maine
Maine is cold … really cold … but not the coldest.
We do proudly lay claim to the coldest spring in the lower 48. As a result, we know how to dress warmly and are giving you a Maine staple … the beanie.
We’re also home to the natural phenomenon … the ice disk of 2018. Rumor has it that another one is information. Not likely that you heard of it, but it did make national news
PHOTO: Presumpscot River in Westbrook, Maine
Second of four slides about things people may not know about Maine
Our state is aging.
In fact, we’re the oldest state. 21% of our population is over 65 years of age.
These athletes are taking part in the Maine Senior Games, an organization we’ve been proud to support for many years
PHOTO: 2019 Maine Senior Games, Track and Field Event at Scarborough High School
Fourth of four slides about things people may not know about Maine
Recognize this guy? It’s Yvonne Chouinard … the founder of Patagonia.
It’s little known, but he’s actually from Lewiston, Maine. His parents were French Canadian, and he was born in our state in 1938. His family moved to California when he was nine.
I tell you this not to tie him to our state, but because he’s someone who’s approach to running a business and fostering an excellent employee experience is one, I admire.
In fact, I believe Patagonia is on the GPTW list.
I knew, much like he did, that we need to run our business differently than the traditional health care company. Our community needs more from us.
We had to have principles that were different
Much like Patagonia, I knew early on that we needed to approach the health care world differently.
This is ever more important in a state like Maine and in our community. We live alongside our patients and members. They are our friends, family members, neighbors, etc.
Because of this, I knew I had to have a set of core principles that I had to stay true to throughout the years:
Provide a superior experience and outcome of care for the community.
Demonstrate that health plans and providers could work together for the benefit of patients and members.
Develop an outstanding employee experience, creating a place where people looked forward to coming to work.
Session Overview
First, I’ll provide some background about our organization; Who We Are, What We Do, and How We Do It
Then I’d like to share Our Journey. Where we started from and how we got to where we are now
Finally, I’ll walk through how you can conduct your own diagnosis of cultural health and identify the habits that may be holding you back
First of five slides about our organization
Who we are – a bit of our history as an organization
Physician-led, providing both health care and coverage to the communities we serve.
As an organization, we proactively create a culture of caring at our over 15 worksites in the Northeast.
Certified as a Great Place to Work® since 2016, Martin’s Point provides a respectful, trusting, and fun work environment for nearly 900 employees.
Mission-driven, focused on creating a healthier community
Second slide about our organization
High level overview of the products and services we provide
What we do – the products and services we provide
PHOTO: American Heart Association, Heart Walk event in Portland, Maine
Second slide about our organization
We currently operate 7 health care centers
6 in Southern Maine and one in Portsmouth, New Hampshire
We continue to invest in primary care
In addition to high end facilities, we include community centers in new buildings
Third of five slides about our organization
Health Plan coverage areas:
Our Generations Advantage plans are available to residents of Maine and New Hampshire
We’re proud to offer US Family Health Plan coverage to retired military and families of active military members across Northern New England as well as New York State and Pennsylvania
Fourth of five slides about our organization
How we do it
Local workforce & locations
Our members and patients are our neighbors, friends, and families
We administer our plans and services in-house – and members are welcome to walk-in to discuss any questions or issues with us
Locally-based relationships
We understand the dimensions of rural care
We are influential partners in evolving provider dynamics in the area
Customer service focus
We strive to provide the highest-quality clinical care and regional health coverage to our Martin’s Point patients and members
Our highly rated customer service is a differentiator for our customers
Reflected every year in CAHPS
Heard through our patient satisfaction surveys
Evident from our Voice of Customer program
PHOTO: American Heart Association, Heart Walk event in Portland, Maine
Why we do it – As a Maine-based, mission-driven organization, we are committed to improving the health and well-being of our community.
We’re uniquely positioned in our region given that we’re physician-led and provide both health care and coverage to the communities we serve.
We work to expand our sphere of influence beyond the clinical to impact the social, economic, and behavioral factors that affect health.
At the heart of it all, Martin’s Point is truly, and simply, people caring for people.
PHOTO: 2019 Pride Parade in Portland, Maine
Then and Now Set Up:
Now that you know a little bit about our organization – who we are, what we do, and why we do it – I thought I’d provide you with a bit of a look at where we are today compared to the past.
We weren’t always a high performing, highly rated organization.
In fact, we were far from it at the start.
There was a point where I had to decide which bills to pay and in which order.
PHOTO: Tidal flat in Cobscook Bay State Park in Washington County, Maine
Then and Now – Revenue
I remember when I first took over the helm of the organization, I was asked by a consultant what I saw in the future for Martin’s Point.
I remember the look of shock and disbelief when I told him I was going to make this a billion-dollar company.
Looking where we started from, his shock was not hard to believe, but I had lofty goals.
Then and Now – Customers
Here you can see that we’ve been steadily growing
We’ve grown our health care center business through some practice acquisitions and organize growth over the years.
In our health plan, we’ve steadily been growing our USHFP business and in 2010 we added Medicare advantage plans to our portfolio.
And right now we’re evaluating what are the next line extensions and new product offerings we want to get into next.
Then and Now – Reputation
These stats kind of speak for themselves.
We’re early on in our Net Promoter Score journey, but today we’re measuring an NPS of 64 – a score that is above the industry average.
A recent survey of our patients and members found that 85% of our customers found us easy or very easy to interact with
…and 88% were able to accomplish their goal during that interaction
It wasn’t always like this, though. I remember a time no too long along ago that I used to have to dive behind the potato bins in the grocery store to avoid the barrage of complaints.
Now I am fortunate to have really positive conversation in the same stores.
Then and Now – Employee Experience
We’re proud of these scores and recognitions
It’s an honor to be on lists and see the scores that show how positive of an experience our employees are having
IT’s even better, as I mentioned before, to hear in the grocery stores the positive experiences our customers are having. That’s a direct result of the experience that are employees are having.
What do happy employees look like?
Here’s a great shot of our employees at our annual Grandparents Day with the Sea Dogs event with our local minor league baseball team.
Then and Now – Wrap Up
As you can see, we weren’t always great and faced quite a bit of headwinds.
There was a time when I wasn’t sure we’d succeed
But I knew we had to. I knew things had to had to change. Had to course correct.
In the coming section, I’ll share four of the key things we focused on.
IN looking at our own organization, we had to perform a health check up on ourselves.
I’ll share that health check up with you all and provide a checklist of how you might implement some of these in your own organizations.
PHOTO: Fall along the beautiful rocky coast of Maine
Health Check Up – High Level Overview
As I mentioned, we had to focus in on four key areas.
In the next session I’ll talk about:
Our Values
Our Management System
Our strategic process and how we align our leaders and frontline staff around it
And how we use culture as a differentiator
PHOTO: Mt. Jefferson in New Hampshire (viewed from Mount Washington Road)
Health Check Up – Values
Our values are extremely important to us as I am sure they are to all of you.
We truly live and breath them every day.
Every two weeks I have the privilege of participating in New Employee Orientation. It’s always fun to see our tenured employees reiterate to new ones that these values are real and hold up. The other shoe never drops.
We were very intentional and inclusive when we created these. We built them from the ground up so that every employee at all levels was involved in the creation and felt ownership of them.
We also have a commitment from leadership and tie our values back into our competencies, 360 feedback, employee development.
It’s because of this that I feel our values are so strong
Health Check-up – Values Checklist
Examination: Take a hard look at your values. Do they reflect who you are today?
Awareness: Do you employees know them? Do they connect to them?
Modeling: Are you, your leaders, and your employees modelling these every day?
Accountability: Are employees held accountable?
If you answered NO to any of these, you should consider rethinking them. Your core values MUST be prevalent throughout your organization in order to deliver the highest value to your customers.
Our Management System provides: the standards in which we conduct our business and allows us to create strong and resilient leaders through dedicated process improvement and clearly defined leadership expectations.
About 7 years ago I was fortunate enough to meet up with another Dr. John Toussaint, who is one of the country’s thought leaders on applying lean management principles to healthcare. John came up to Martin’s Point and talked with our management team, and after he left, we made a few runs at it and it was not really getting traction
Fortunately, we got serious at put the effort under an inspired leader who brought it to life. We call it the Martin’s Point Management System because it is truly at the core of what we do and how we work
The heart and soul of our Management System is the lean principle of continuous improvement and problem solving. We have made incredible progress with having our leaders move from a state of not raising a problem, or saying “I’ve got it covered,” to a more collaborative model of leaders helping leaders, of finding the solutions that are best for the organization. So, I’m very proud of the work we have done in our lean healthcare management, which continues to this day. So, we owe a great deal of thanks to Toyota, as it is their lean principles of manufacturing that is underneath it all…
Engaging people at all levels in continuous improvement shows up in the way that we define our leader and process standard work. In fact, both of those areas were part of our all employee incentive plan last year. And while it may have seemed tedious to document all of the steps in a given process, it really cast a light on where we had waste, or gaps, or a development need. The standard work we documented last year now gives rise to a new challenge in 2020, where we have set specific time savings goals to our incentive plan. Not to eliminate jobs, but to make current jobs more fulfilling, less frustrating.
While this graphic does a good job of breaking down the Management System, I wanted to share a video with you that will perhaps bring it more to life.
STOP: Management System Video Will Play
Health Check-Up - Management System Checklist
Start Where You Are (but start)
Be Intentional and Make it Your Own
Design a System for All
Allow Time for Change
Health Check-Up - Strategy and Alignment
We’ve made it a priority to resource and put structure around defining and executing our strategic priorities. This helps create focus and alignment around the work for the year and methods of measuring and monitoring the work to avoid ending up with an unrealistically long list of projects, most of which won’t get done. We’ve been in that situation and I don’t want to go back. It wastes a lot of time and diminishes our leadership credibility. That’s why we focus on the critical few.
A foundational component of our Management System is Strategy Deployment, which uses a tool called the Balanced Scorecard. We use this tool to set annual goals for our business that ensure we take a balanced view of performance across our People, Quality, Customers, and Financial Stewardship. Every member of our management team tracks goals that align to our organizational goals, with each level goal being a driver of the level above. We ask people to focus on the items they are responsible for that can most impact the level above. It creates the kind of alignment, engagement, and connection to our strategy that I believe is fundamental to a great place to work. We all know the feeling of what it's like to run around with different agendas and different priorities. The Balanced Scorecard and our Management System makes it absolutely clear.
Health Check-Up - Strategy and Alignment Checklist
Focus on the critical few.
Align and coordinate efforts.
Engage all employees to bring strategy to life.
Adjust swiftly by defining expected results, understanding barriers.
Health Check-Up – Culture as a Differentiator
As many of you in this room know, company culture is extremely important to the success of any business. Some of the ways we go above and beyond are:
We constantly monitor our “climate” through ongoing PULSE surveys and the annual GPTW survey
We solicit feedback from our employees through Listening Cafes and implement Action Plans based on that feedback
To reward the hard work of our employees we’ve implemented an organization-wide incentive plan at all levels
We’ve proudly put into place a Development for All initiative
We celebrate and recognize our employees throughout the year
We actively encourage community involvement & give our employees 32 hours of paid time off for volunteering
Our culture is an incredible asset to our organization
PHOTO: 2019 Pie Day
Health Check-Up – Culture as a Differentiator Checklist
Define Your Culture – this is different in every workplace and varies greatly
Ensure Effectiveness, Is it Leading to Success?
Recruit, Develop, and Retain the Right People
Determine Your Community Impact
Closing / Wrap-Up /Barbara “Ma” Cook and Teresa
All of what was discussed is great and we measure whether we’re successful through a system of metrics, BUT the real proof is through the ways in which we improve the lives of our customers.
This is Teresa Pellicer, one of our Community Based Nurses along with Barbara “Ma” Cook. This picture is an excellent example of three things:
Our products and services: Providing coverage for someone through one of our health plans
Innovation: Improving the lives of our members by developing a program that cares for our health plan members that are most at need…and offering it for free
Caring: You can see the undeniable joy that Teresa brings Ma Cook through the care she provides for her.
Ma Cook is a special woman, a true Mainer in all respects, and I felt you should get to know a little more about her. So, before we go, I wanted to share this video with you.
STOP: Ma Cook Video Will Play