Military Review English Edition July-August 2016 | Page 14

(Photo courtesy of U.S. Army)

Col. Evan Rentz (right), Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC) commander, discusses hospital performance with some of his leadership
team. As the largest Department of Defense medical treatment facility, BAMC has become an Army leader in assessing and managing
organizational performance.

Sessions to assess performance should be short and attended by key leaders, contain a balance of lagging and
leading indicators, and be focused on the actions and
decisions needed to fix underperforming areas.
Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC) at Joint Base
San Antonio, Texas, exemplifies Army best practice in
this area. Consider the number of metrics and goals that
are required to manage the largest medical center in the
Department of Defense. The leadership at BAMC must
monitor a multitude of metrics that include medical accreditation, safety, patient satisfaction, quality, and cost,
in addition to all the other mandatory requirements
of an Army organization. Without a system to manage
and act on all these assessments, any commander would
quickly become overwhelmed with data, and—in that
environment—failure to recognize a downward trend
could have tragic consequences.
To manage this flow of information, the BAMC
leadership team has developed an extraordinarily
sophisticated battle rhythm of assessments, each only
taking an hour or less. On the same day of each week,
the commander meets with his department heads and,
12

on a rotating basis, discusses areas of organizational
importance. For example, on the first Tuesday of the
month, human resources indicators such as the status of
awards, evaluations, and civilian personnel actions are
reviewed. On the second Tuesday of the month, operations indicators such as the status of taskings, quarterly
training tasks, deployments, and professional-filler-system readiness are reviewed. On the third Tuesday of
the month, the business plan is reviewed, and clinical
departments brief their performance compared to business plan targets and address actions they are taking to
correct any performance gaps.
Finally, on the fourth Tuesday of the month, quality
is addressed. Department heads provide an update on
all open major events and risk-control actions. When
reflecting on the success of the system, the current commander, Col. Evan Renz, remarked, “All meetings are
tailored for efficiency, utilize ‘dashboards’ to emphasize
only the relevant metrics in real time, and allow leaders
to get back to their mission in less than one hour.”12
Optimize your processes and supporting information technology systems. This tenet focuses on
July-August 2016  MILITARY REVIEW