Rich Leichwig

This was all about continuing to provide great patient care, but how it was going to actually make us even better and a better caregiver looking forward.

Since we engaged with our board early on, the executive team, the leadership team, you know, knew that every board meeting, this would be a topic of discussion.

And it wasn't just going to be the CEO communicating.

It was going to be those that were leading the integration management.

office who really were deep into the specific integration work.

And that was making sure that it was a give and take, that we were creating avenues to get feedback from our team members.

As deliberate as we were, we recognize we may not be getting everything right, so we need to make sure we're hearing from all constituencies.

What's working well, what's resonating, and where do we have opportunities to improve?

We used lots of communication vehicles, whether it was video, team meetings, town halls, emails.

There probably wasn't a week that went by, particularly in the first year, where this wasn't a topic of discussion across the organization.

Well, I'll give you three ingredients that I think have worked well for us.

It starts with the executive leadership team.

In our case, we were very intentional about

that that team would be made up of individuals that came from both organizations.

And we were successful in doing that day minus one as we moved in.

Number two, and Nick mentioned this, we start up our own integration management office and an executive from each organization helping to lead that work.

Actually, Nick was the executive sponsor

for the integration work as the president of BJC.

That was sort of a key ingredient number two, was having an internal set of experts, not just the leadership, but then pulling people out of operations to help lead and be a member of that integration management office.

Third was using outside resources.