Operational Excellence Cohort

Finding Solutions for Everyday Health Care Challenges

Finding Solutions for Everyday Health Care Challenges

From left, Joseph Scherrer, PhD; Leroy Love; Nitin Anand, MD; Jim Berges and Elizabeth Mannen Berges; Ann Abad; Aaron Bobick, PhD. (Photo by Diane Anderson.)

The Operational Excellence (OE) cohort at Missouri Baptist Medical Center empowers clinical leaders to tackle hospital challenges and improve patient care through business insights.

Through the generosity of the Berges Family Foundation, these leaders develop operational excellence skills to achieve the most efficient, compassionate and effective processes for delivering care.

“We saw the OE cohort as the optimal way to combine the resources of people, their talents and the efficiency of their time to work toward solving everyday problems that could significantly benefit patient care. That made it a slam-dunk investment for us,” say Jim and Elizabeth Berges.

Together, the Missouri Baptist performance improvement team and Washington University McKelvey School of Engineering professors have created a curriculum that teaches leaders about analytics, culture and optimization for excellence.

Each OE cohort has participants from various departments. Working together, they present problems, find solutions using engineering principles and implement changes.

Since 2020, OE cohorts have addressed challenges such as bed management and laboratory turnaround times, among others. As a result of the program, the waiting time for in-patient beds for patients in the emergency department has improved. Also, MoBap’s lab result turnaround time has become the most efficient in the BJC system, and its process has been adopted by other hospitals in the network.

Elizabeth Berges describes the medical professionals in the cohorts as “extraordinary individuals dedicated to improving patient care.” After seeing the results achieved at MoBap, the OE methodology is being adopted throughout the BJC HealthCare System.