FHP Forward: Rebuilding Healthcare from the Inside Out

Launched in the spring of 2024, FHP Forward is not a project or short-term initiative. FHP Forward is a transformation in how the organization leads, learns, and improves. A significant focus of the principles has been the elimination of waste in all our processes leading to increased value with the patients, our customers, at the center.

Foundation Health Partners (FHP) has always been guided by its mission: People First. Community Focused. Excellence Every Time. But in the ever-changing and often unpredictable world of healthcare, sustaining that level of excellence demanded a more structured, deliberate, system-wide approach that explicitly eliminates waste from our processes. In 2023, FHP partnered with the Virginia Mason Institute to explore the principles of high-reliability organizations and find opportunities for meaningful, sustainable improvement. The outcome was FHP Forward, a tailored, organization-wide management system rooted in evidence-based practices, built around frontline empowerment, designed specifically for FHP’s culture and community.

These efforts have directly contributed to tangible improvements in patient safety, quality of care, and operational efficiency.  For example, a staff-led team utilizing FHP Forward principles tackled a longstanding challenge in our STAR rating measures – Catheter Associated Urinary Tract Infections (CAUTI). Through reliable implementation of the CAUTI bundle (a set of evidence based CAUTI prevention practices) and elimination of the “waste” of patients having catheters for longer they needed the team has eliminated CAUTIs in the Hospital for over a year now. 

In addition, the team’s work also resulted in far fewer patients being discharged with urinary catheters resulting in fewer infections in the Home Health and Denali Center (a long-term, skilled nursing care facility) populations as well and elimination of the “waste” of caring for unnecessary catheters for those providers as well.  This one project has significantly improved patient safety outcomes, improved patient experience with fewer catheters being placed, and improved efficiencies for not only the staff in the Hospital but also caregivers and families in the communities who no longer must attend to the challenges associated with urinary catheter.

FHP Forward is not viewed as a separate project, it is the new operating system for the organization that is improving outcomes not just for in-hospital patients but also for patients in the community. It has become the foundation for leadership development, workforce planning, and system strategy.  But most of all, it is ensuring that “Excellence Every Time” is not just an idea on a marketing page, but a reality for our patients made possible by the people who live it every day.