Extending the mission remotely: integrating the values of catholic health care in new models, emerging markets.

In this period of rapid transition, Englewood, Colo.-based Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI), like many big Catholic health care systems, is partnering with both tax-exempt and for-profit organizations, creating a network of nontraditional alliances and forming national subsidiaries in areas such as research, insurance, telemedicine, home health, information technology and physician practice management. This focus on entirely new business models and emerging markets raises a pivotal question at the core of Catholic identity: How do health care ministries inculcate and integrate mission, vision and values into an immeasurably more diverse, far-flung workforce that is based in nontraditional, nonhospital sites across the nation — and around the globe? Indeed, mission leaders across the U.S. are busy wrestling intellectually and operationally with a variation on that same theme: How can health care ministries, facing an uncertain, everchanging future, sustain and enhance the rich legacy of Catholic health care in these tumultuous times? “This is a transformation that comes once in a lifetime,” said Thomas R. Kopfensteiner, STD, CHI’s senior vice president for mission. “The history of CHI is one of creating standards of mission and values to be certain that core values were integrated through the whole organization — an organization that was once primarily focused on acute-care settings. “But that hospital-centric focus in now a thing of the past,” he added. “We realized that mission integration had to begin to address a whole new range of nontraditional settings and that we needed to reach out to what has become a remote workforce, a new physician enterprise, home health agencies, virtual health services, payerrelations and many other areas. “And so we had to identify where mission is not ... and how can we guarantee that those gaps in mission, vision and values are properly addressed.” Kopfensteiner, who was involved in drafting the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (ERDs) in the 1990s, recognized both the challenges and the opportunities posed to CHI by the organization’s swift move to new models and markets across its national system of 80 hospitals and other facilities in 17 states. As CHI formed partnerships, created subsidiaries and doubled the number of employed physicians over a 12-month period through the end of 2012, Kopfensteiner quickly embraced the vital importance of reinforcing and integrating Catholic mission and identity into these new organizations — and their employees. EXTENDING THE MISSION REMOTELY Integrating the Values of Catholic Health Care in New Models, Emerging Markets