2010 Regent Focus Group Meeting: "The Emperor's New Clothes"

The unforgettable childhood fairy tale, "The Emperor's New Clothes" sends an ageless, important message to any growing corporation. Management can lose touch with the very people in the field who have made such growth and success possible. Do the concerns and priorities of Management reflect those of the Employees? Or are Management and Employees locked in parallel universes, wherein Management remains blinded to the true challenges and obstacles faced on a daily basis in the trenches? Likewise, do our colleagues only tell us what they think we want to hear?

Since inception, Regent Surgical Health has placed a high priority on the assessment of patient, employee, and physician satisfaction within each individual ASC. Working with CTQ, a widely respected quality assessment company, we actively seek to know not only what we are doing right in each ASC, but also what we are doing wrong. The surveys are not treated as meaningless paperwork to be filed away to prove compliance with the next accreditation survey. Each survey is reviewed at every level of the organization, from the CEO to the on-site Business, Administrative, and Nursing Staff. More importantly, action plans are developed to correct unfavorable trends.

But we realized something was missing. We were so busy surveying satisfaction within each center that we had neglected to survey each facilities satisfaction with our own management company performance! Is Regent really wearing splendid "New Clothes"?

At an executive retreat, we realized that we needed to come up with a meaningful way to begin assessing each center's satisfaction with Regent. Our bi-annual corporate meetings would be a convenient forum, but such a formal large group assembly would hardly be conducive to getting our colleagues to "tell it like it is"! We realized that we needed to hear from not only the center's administrator, but also the center's Director of Nursing and the Business Office Manager. Maybe everyone was wearing splendid new emperor clothes!

Our solution? We decided to convene 3 small focus groups consisting of 4 DON's, 4 BOM's, and 4 Administrators. Each group would spend a day with 2 COO's, a Revenue Cycle Director, and a Regional President behind closed doors in beautiful Boulder, Colorado. Our CEO, Tom Mallon, arrived for the last day. Moreover, our model would be to have 2 long term experienced employees paired up with 2 relatively new employees in each focus group. There was only 1 rule: there were no rules! Everything would be on the table and we (Regent) were prepared to take our smack downs as well as any greatly appreciated pats on the back.

So how did it play out? Each focus group met in an informal, comfortable setting and an honest and productive dialogue ensued. While there were certainly "bruises", no one emerged with life threatening injury. It was interesting to see the carryover of concerns from BOM to DON to Administrator. Common areas of interest included enhancing the visibility of Regent functions, providing a "State of the Center" yearly address to staff (not just physician investors), difficulties involving the implementation and day to day use of our company values system, and improving communication with our human resource consultants. Areas of interest specific to our DON's included enhanced training with respect to business and financial issues, improving our patient satisfaction questionnaires, and simplifying our employee evaluation processes. Business Office Managers keyed in on Regent accounting support, information technology issues, development of company-wide business policies, and of course, ongoing challenges with insurance payers and A/R. On the final day, our Administrator focus group keyed in on operational issues including accounts payable management procedures, Human Resource training, and establishing both business and clinical benchmarking between all of our Regent centers.

Despite pre-meeting skepticism on the part of many center staff, the final assessment was that the focus group approach did indeed achieve the stated goals of helping Regent executive management to obtain a clear picture of what really matters at the center level. Honest feedback on "what works" and "what doesn't work" will now lead to the construction of an "action plan" to be rolled out for all centers to review. The final measure of our success is that all participants recommended a continuation of the focus group model on a yearly basis, with meeting dates tied to the company wide annual BOM, DON, and Administrator gatherings.

Rob Welti, Senior Vice President, Operations, Western Region
Regent Surgical Health
P. 708.492.0531
F. 708.731.5134