Advancing the Power of One AU Health

A message from AU Health Leadership:

Dear Colleagues,

Over the past year, all of us in AU Health have been engaged on multiple fronts in efforts to maximize quality, optimize operations and enhance patient experience across our hospitals and clinics. You have no doubt been involved in or impacted by one or more of these projects, and we greatly appreciate your hard work, dedication and patience, both over that time and in the months and years to come.

Today, we are introducing One AU Health, a framework to understand and consolidate these efforts under one unifying set of operating principles.

In our new strategic plan, Beyond Boundaries, we commit to advancing and sustaining a culture of performance excellence that maximizes operational and resource stewardship, enhances employee pride and provides outstanding service.

A culture of performance excellence rests on a set of shared principles that inform our decision-making as we grow and change as a health system within the very dynamic educational and health care environments. AU Health will make strategic and operational decisions that further the principles of:

• Alignment – Our organizations have become unified. Our people, our processes, and our resources should work seamlessly together in support of our goals. In an environment of limited resources, alignment is crucial to ensuring that we are as efficient and effective as possible.
• Accessibility – All tactical and strategic choices should be measured by how they enhance the ability of our patients to access appropriate health care services conveniently and in a timely fashion.
• Accountability – Clear expectations for performance in all aspects of our operations and transparent, current, accurate and timely data to assess that performance should be available. Accountability in these measures will keep us on track to reaching our goals.
• Agility – We must be an organization that responds to a rapidly changing health care environment thoughtfully and nimbly. We must position ourselves to leverage new opportunities that are aligned with our strategic plan.
• Achievement – Measures of excellence that are commensurate with our organizational aspirations allow us to recognize people and programs that are excelling and serve as inspiration and encouragement for all of us. Measures of excellence are also useful in communicating to those outside of our organization the value of AU Health. 

A number of initiatives are underway to transform our organization, and we will be providing more detailed information on them as we progress. We are grateful for the hard work that many of you are doing to make them a success. There will be other good ideas that are implemented as we work over the next five years to meet the challenge laid out in our strategic plan. Every proposal and potential action will be measured against these five principles. 

We encourage each of you, as you make decisions in your work, to consider how your decisions are contributing to a culture that prioritizes alignment, accessibility, accountability, agility and achievement. If you have ideas about how we can be better in these areas as an organization, your leadership team would love to hear them! 

AU Health’s greatest asset is our people. Working together, toward a common purpose with a common set of guiding principles, we can truly advance the power of AU Health for the benefit of our patients and their families.

Lee Ann Liska, MBA 
CEO, AU Medical Center
EVP for Health Affairs

Julian J. Nussbaum, MD
CEO, AU Medical Associates
EVP for Clinical Affairs

David C. Hess, MD
Dean, Medical College of Georgia
EVP for Medical Affairs & Integration