Over the past 24 months, Lifepoint Health has strengthened employee retention, improved patient satisfaction and increased its quality scores.
These gains are tied in part to the Brentwood, Tenn.-based health system’s enterprise risk program, built on a data-driven scorecard approach designed to improve risk visibility and response, Jennifer Peters, the health system’s executive vice president and chief administrative and legal officer, told Becker’s.
Lifepoint took inspiration from other large, complex industries when developing the program. The process began by integrating key risk functions, including legal, compliance, claims management, internal auditing and people services, or human resources.
“When you think about how you mitigate risk across a very large, multi-jurisdictional and multi-service line organization, we have data points for every single facility,” Ms. Peters said.
The program tracks metrics related to quality, workplace culture, recruitment and retention, and the social and environmental factors around each facility — including homelessness, food insecurity and community violence — to assess risk.
“From there, it has allowed us to build other programs and to deploy them more easily, both across the organization and tailored to where those facilities are in their journey,” she said.
One example is turnover among registered nurses. About 18 months ago, Lifepoint — like many health systems — saw first-year RN turnover at a record high.
“If you would have taken a snapshot of our risk measures during that time, you would have seen our quality scores and our patient satisfaction scores reflecting some of the challenges we and the industry were facing,” Ms. Peters said.
In response, the system implemented retention initiatives, training programs and residency and fellowship offerings, leading to improved employee satisfaction and patient experience. For the first time, 74% of Lifepoint’s eligible facilities have earned an “A” or “B” grade from The Leapfrog Group, compared to a national average of around 56%, according to Ms. Peters.
Scorecards for each facility allow Lifepoint to tailor strategies to their specific challenges, she added.
“It’s not that we didn’t do this work before,” Ms. Peters said. “But this allows us to have a real keen sense of where that facility is and what we can do to assist them.”
The program also supports broader initiatives, including Lifepoint’s nationwide drug diversion prevention effort and security scorecards that monitor risks such as physical safety and assault in healthcare settings. With the enterprise risk model, Lifepoint can measure each facility’s progress and deploy large-scale programs to improve outcomes.
Looking ahead, the system is focusing on leveraging artificial intelligence.
“Now that we have the data and the scorecard for every facility, how do we lay AI over top to tell us in an even more refined vision where the risks are and how we can impact them?” she said. “That will be a tremendous enabler in the next generation of the programs to get to that more granular level.”
Ms. Peters added that the program is rooted in Lifepoint’s mission of making communities healthier and its core values as it strives to be a place where both employees and patients want to be.
“That mission focus will help us to mature the program in the right ways and see the impact,” she said.
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