Community Health Northwest Florida

Over 127,000 of our friends and neighbors in Northwest Florida had no health insurance in 20211 while another 43,000 relied on medicare2. This number represents children, women and men who go to our schools, work in our community and are part of the rich tapestry making Northwest Florida a great place to live, work and play. This uninsured and underinsured population creates the need for a healthcare organization capable of providing vital services before they become an emergency and require a hospital visit. 

As our region’s largest Federally Qualified Health Care system, Community Health Northwest Florida is able to provide a wide variety of sliding scale and no-cost services to the uninsured and medicare patients. However, the need is great and the organization must continuously innovate and find new ways to serve the patients while recruiting and retaining the best employees, providers and community partners. 

It had been several years since the organization updated its brand to better reflect its purpose and vision and it had since gone through a period of rapid growth. The leadership needed to engage its employees and stakeholders in building the next five-year strategic plan to ensure that all people in our community have equal access to quality healthcare. 

Having worked with Community Health Northwest Florida on the rebranding project, management consulting, patient experience through Limelight Performance and some marketing communications, we were eager to help support their next phase of growth. 

To ensure that the strategic plan engaged their stakeholders/employees and created a sense of unity and excitement for the future, we proposed an Integral Strategic Plan. The Integral Strategic Plan engages an organization's most important resource–stakeholders–in the development of its most valuable asset and ultimate competitive advantage–a relevant, trusted and respected reputation.

For Community Health Northwest Florida, the identity-based strategic planning process cascaded the core identity of the organization–its purpose, values and vision–into its five areas of strategic focus, 16 goals, 15 key performance indicators and 28 objectives. 

The intent of the plan is that the actions of the employees across every level of the organization will be in alignment with the goals and strategic priorities set by leadership. 

Key touchpoints of the process included a stakeholder dialogue and a survey asking for insights and opinions of every employee. The roots were strengthened with an organization-wide rollout–a single day when every facility was closed for a four-hour window with all 400 employees in a large room. Every second, every word and every step was intentionally choreographed by idgroup and the CHNF team to deliver the desired effect. From the “Let’s do this” rally cry to the surprise and special motivational presentation from one of the famous Blue Angels pilots who talked about gratitude and performance excellence, a high level of engagement was created to instill a sense of pride and ownership in the employees. 

By providing the leadership of Community Health Northwest Florida with clarity around its intentions and an energized team, idgroup helped position the organization to activate success in year one of the plan by aligning purpose with the execution of the organization’s performance and perception strategies.