At the same time, Brigham and Women’s has begun an initiative aimed at reducing annual expenses by about 10 percent - twice as much as the target set for the hospital by its corporate parent, Partners HealthCare System Inc.
The cost-cutting steps range from consolidating vendors and temporary hiring agencies to monitoring the use of towels, sheets, and blankets. So far, the hospital said, there have been no layoffs, though some workers have been shifted to new positions.
“There’s a thousand opportunities to make better use of our resources,’’ Brigham and Women’s president Elizabeth G. Nabel said. Hospital executives want to be aggressive in weeding out excess costs to set an example, Nabel said, and to make sure Brigham and Women’s doesn’t lose patients to rivals that charge less for care.
Hospital employees are scheduled to hear about the moves today at a “town meeting’’ hosted by Nabel, who took the top job two years ago after running the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, a major National Institutes of Health lab in Bethesda, Md. At the meeting, she will also unveil a strategic plan that calls for shifting the hospital’s emphasis from providing “episodic care’’ to managing patients’ health throughout their lives.
Hundreds of Brigham and Women’s 15,000 employees took part in drawing up the plan, which seeks to lay out the hospital’s goals and challenges in the context of changes sweeping the health care industry. It envisions a more coordinated, team-based approach to delivering health care, as well as state-of-the-art facilities.
A central part of the strategy is the proposed 12-story “Brigham Building of the Future.’’ It would be built on a vacant Fenwood Road lot and house clinical and research operations for such areas as neuroscience, immunology, genomics, and regenerative medicine. The 350,000-square-foot building - connected by a walkway to the hospital’s Shapiro Cardiovascular Center - would also include 400 parking spaces on two or three underground levels. The hospital hopes to break ground in 2013 and complete the project in 2016.
