Baptist Hospital Inc.

The First Baptist Church of Pensacola, Fla., established

Baptist Hospital in 1951 as a community-owned health care

facility founded on Christian values. Today known as Baptist

Health Care (BHC), that single hospital has evolved into the

largest, most comprehensive health care system in the Florida

Panhandle. Baptist Hospital Inc. (BHI), a subsidiary of BHC,

has two hospitals, Baptist Hospital of Pensacola, a 492-bed

tertiary care and referral hospital, and Gulf Breeze Hospital,

a 60-bed medical and surgical hospital; and an ambulatory

care complex, Baptist Medical Park, that delivers a wide array

of outpatient and diagnostic services. 

A New Direction

In the mid-1990s, low satisfaction marks, not only from

patients and their families but also from staff and doctors,

were becoming a trend at Baptist Hospital Inc. BHI leaders

decided that just improving was not enough. With the lofty

vision of becoming the best health system in America, BHI

leaders decided to rebuild the organization by engaging its

staff and listening to its patients. One of their first actions was

to create a flat, fluid, and open leadership system based on

communication. Under this new system, staff are not just

encouraged, they are expected to contact anyone in the

organization, including president John Heer, at any time to

discuss work issues and improvement opportunities. 

To reinforce this message, Heer’s “open-door” office has a

large glass window facing the busiest part of the hospital. 

Senior leaders also serve as role models and are personally

engaged in creating a “no secrets” environment through

activities such as the Daily Line-up, in which all leaders and

employees gather at each shift to review information in the

Baptist Daily, and quarterly around-the-clock employee

forums.

Leaving nothing to chance, BHI has created a multifaceted, systematic approach to building customer

relationships that begins with BHI’s Standards of Performance

in areas such as attitude, appearance, safety, and even elevator

etiquette. Potential job applicants are required to read and

agree to abide by these standards before completing an

application. “Scripting” helps to ensure that all patients and

other customers receive the same high level of personal

interaction. For example, any employee who sees a visitor

who appears lost will ask, “May I take you to where you are

going?” Upon leaving a patient’s room, employees always ask,

“Is there anything else that I may do for you? 

I have the time.” 

Pillars of Excellence

Five “Pillars of Operational Excellence” line the hallways

of BHI and literally and figuratively form the foundation for

BHI’s culture of excellence and its mission to “provide

superior service based on Christian values to improve the

2003

Award Winner

National Institute of Standards and Technology ● Technology Administration ● Department of Commerce

Baldrige National Quality Program

Highlights

• Overall satisfaction for inpatients, outpatients,

ambulatory surgery patients, and home health care

services has been near the 99th percentile for the past

several years.

• Positive morale for hospital staff has risen from 47

percent in 1996 to 84 percent in 2001 (the most recent

survey), compared to 70 percent for staff at its closest

competitor hospital.

• Senior leaders serve as role models and are held

accountable for organizational performance through 

a “No Excuses” policy.

• BHI provides 6.7 percent of its total revenue to

indigent patients, compared to 5.2 and 4 percent for 

its competitors.

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quality of life for people and communities served.” The

Pillars are: People, Service, Quality, Financial, and Growth.

All of BHI’s activities are driven by and centered around the

five pillars. 

Using external and internal inputs, BHI’s senior leaders

and Strategic Measurement Team develop the goals for each

pillar. These goals cascade into leader goals, 90-day action

plans, senior management priorities, and budgets. BHI uses

90-day action plans for short-term goals. A five-year plan

helps balance the time needed for capital commitments and

state approvals, and also anticipates advances in medical

technology and practices.

Programs such as Bright Ideas encourage employees to

contribute innovative suggestions for improving operational

processes and customer service or reducing costs. Since 1998,

the number of improvement ideas has increased from 1,400

to 6,800 in 2003, and the number of ideas implemented

during this time has increased from 370 to 5,000. In 2002,

BHI exceeded both its goal of two implemented Bright Ideas

per employee and its cost-saving target of $2.1 million. 

BHI uses a variety of tools and processes to gather results,

information, and data that can lead to improvements. For

example CARE—Clinical Accountability Report of

Excellence—captures clinical quality data results and trends

in more than 50 departments throughout the hospital. One

indicator measures patients’ adverse reactions to medication,

including medication errors. In fiscal year 2000, 2.5

medication error events occurred per 10,000 doses dispensed,

while only 1.5 events occurred per 10,000 doses dispensed in

fiscal year 2002—the VHA benchmark for this measure is 18.

(VHA is a private, for-profit cooperative serving not-forprofit health care organizations nationwide.) 

BHI also makes extensive use of information technology

to gather and pass on information. The Hospital Information

System helps BHI collect and integrate data for tracking

overall organizational performance, as well as financial,

clinical, and operational data and information, and

identifying opportunities for improvement. The HIS system

is accessed through mobile terminals, kiosks, and MIDAS—

the Medical Information Data Access System for physicians.

In 2001 and 2003, Hospitals and Health Networks magazine

gave BHI its “Most Wired” award for effective use of

technology.

Excellence Leads to Results

BHI’s new approach to doing business is resulting in

significant improvements. Since 1998, the Press Ganey

survey has shown BHI to be near the 99th percentile for

overall satisfaction for both inpatients and outpatients in the

areas of ambulatory surgery, home health care, and

emergency room service. (Press Ganey Associates is a leading

independent vendor of satisfaction measurement and

improvement services for the health care industry.) Also, staff

in the hospital facilities and LifeFlight, BHI’s helicopter air

ambulance service, have earned at or near a 99 percent

satisfaction rating for the past several years for their

sensitivity, attitude and concern, and overall cheerfulness.

In a highly competitive market, BHI has become an

employer of choice by offering employees a combination of

empowerment and extensive training and development

programs. In 2003 BHI was named a “Top 50” learning

organization by Training magazine. In both 2002 and 2003,

Baptist Health Care was ranked in the top 15 in Fortune’s 100

Best Companies to Work For in America. 

Since 1997, the employee turnover rate has declined from

31 percent to 13.9 percent in 2003. These rates are more

favorable than the northwest Florida and national averages,

and are at the best-in-class level. While turnover is on the

decline, morale at BHI is on the rise, from 47 percent of staff

reporting positive morale in 1996 to 84 percent in 2001.

Healthy Community

For more than 50 years, BHI has had a strong

commitment to improving the quality of life for the

communities it serves. BHI provides a number of free health

programs for the area’s poor and uninsured. Heart risk

screenings have increased from 1,100 in fiscal year 2000, to

more than 2,400 in fiscal year 2003. BHI’s new Women’s

Heart Advantage program was established to improve

awareness of heart disease among women, provide education

on healthy lifestyles, and provide women with easy access to

cardiac testing and treatment. BHI’s goal is to provide 2,500

screenings to women in 2003.

BHI provides 6.7 percent of its total revenue to indigent

patients compared to 5.2 percent for its closest competitor. In

fiscal year 2002, 2,700 prescriptions valued at more than

$550,000 were provided to hospital patients too poor to pay,

and another $250,000 worth of prescriptions were provided

to over 1,100 low-income outpatients through its various

programs for the uninsured. From October 2001 through

September 2002, BHI’s outpatient clinic had 26,000 visits

from 16,000 indigent patients.

For more information, contact:

Baptist Hospital Inc.

1000 West Moreno Street

Pensacola, FL 32501

Telephone: (850) 469-2378

Fax: (850) 434-4841

E-mail: lhenriksen@bhcpns.org

Website: www.ebaptisthealthcare.org

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