Cathy Jacobson

The Power of Partnership in Achieving High Performance

Bar none, Vizient has the best performance improvement tools out there, from the Clinical Data Base and Operational Data Base to Sg2 and Kaufman Hall — and it's the biggest GPO in the market. There's no one even close to Vizient in having that array of resources, and it gives us a huge competitive advantage.

CATHERINE

JACOBSON

President and CEO, Froedtert Health

Biography

A culture centered around accountability is crucial to improving quality, she says.

What are the three words you would use to describe Froedtert Health in terms of high performance?

"These are the words that are in our vision statement and anchor how we lead. We're always looking to innovate around how we do our work and how we take care of our patients. We're broadening our definition of innovation beyond just being an academic medical center that does research. It's about how do we move the organization to a right care, right time, right place mindset of population health — and how do we use tools to help us do that?"

EXCELLENCE

PATIENT-FIRST

INNOVATIVE

What do you envision for the future of healthcare?

"Healthcare has spent decades throwing people at problems. Need to fix something? Hire five people — that's what we do. Well, guess what? There are no more people. So, we have to solve staffing issues by using technology to take some of the burden off our clinicians. The industry never truly accelerates until we're feeling some pain. The financial challenges in healthcare right now are making movement essential. We have to make changes."

Additional Resources

CROSSWINDS PODCAST, PART 1

CROSSWINDS PODCAST, PART 2

Catherine Jacobson talks agile decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic and deliberate system rationalization of clinical resources.

In this episode, the discussion considers a future where providers are payer agnostic and more empowered to invest in primary care.

Play

Play

Learn more in our upcoming case study on Froedtert Health and click on the icon to read our previous case studies.

LEADING THE WAY

Catherine Jacobson

Sure enough, when it comes to comprehensive academic medical center top performers, Froedtert consistently makes the cut. “There are so many metrics that hospitals are required to report on,” said Jacobson, who was named CEO of Froedtert in 2012 and is set to retire six months after the system merges with ThedaCare. “But if you aim to be a Vizient top performer, your quality is going to improve along with pretty much everything else.”

Near the beginning of her tenure as CEO of Froedtert Health, Catherine Jacobson issued every hospital within the Wisconsin-based system a clear, and nonnegotiable, objective: Be ranked as a top performer in Vizient’s quality and accountability rankings. She might have been unsure how the directive would land were it not for the commitment to high-quality care she had already instilled in the company culture.