CHAPTER 1

The UCLA Health System Experience: What Everyone Can Learn from Greatness inHealthcare

Greatness is so often a courteous synonym for great success.

—Philip Guedalla

Imagine having to run a successful business that requires the innovation ofApple, the commitment to safety of NASA, and the customer service of Ritz-Carlton.Furthermore, imagine that your mandate demands that you be a world-classeducator, your work product holds life and death in the balance, and youare responsible for discoveries that shape the future of medicine. But wait;there's more! You have to achieve your complex mission in a highly political,cost-competitive industry. From imagination to reality, you are about to divedeeply into the challenges and leadership lessons of UCLA Health System!

While a book about a premier medical research and training center is obviouslyrelevant for anyone who is in healthcare, its appropriateness for otherindustries might not be readily apparent. In fact, you may be asking: what doesUCLA Health System, a leader in a complicated and often maligned sector of oureconomy, have to offer me if my business is banking, retail, hospitality, orsomething else? The short, albeit incomplete, answer is how to

• Catapult your business to preeminence at an unusually rapid pace.

• Transform the satisfaction and engagement of your customers through aservice-centric approach.

• Achieve meteoric profitability during economic downturns—despiteaggressive competition.

• Achieve decades of recognition as a quality and safety leader.

• Create revolutionary improvement in your employee engagement and empowerment.

• Redesign, elevate, and humanize your customer experience.

Despite having a background working as an organizational development specialist,when UCLA approached me to write this book I was initially skeptical aboutwhether UCLA Health System would be the "right" source for business lessons. (Ofcourse, my cynicism may have been amplified by my not having been accepted byUCLA's graduate school years ago, and instead having attended its crosstownrival USC.)

For me, an author of books about businesses that provide great customer andemployee experiences, such as the Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, StarbucksCoffee and Tea Company, and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, UCLA Health Systemseemed an unlikely subject for a book. Suffice it to say that my experienceswith the UCLA leadership convinced me that these lessons needed to be told. Infact, the profits from this book will be donated to Operation Mend (more on thisprogram in Chapter 11) in support of UCLA Health System's overallmission.

Are you ready to learn from one of America's top healthcare systems, owned by 30million citizens of California, with 4 hospitals; more than 75 clinics; inexcess of 80,000 inpatient hospital contacts; 1,000,000 clinic visits annually;1,500 physicians; 1,500 residents and fellows; 3,500 nurses, therapists,technologists, and support personnel; 1,000 volunteers; 120 physicians cited inthe "Best Doctors in America" poll; and a world-renowned medical school that isamong the top 10 in the nation in medical-research funding, the David GeffenSchool of Medicine at UCLA? If so, your lessons are about to begin. But let'sfirst examine UCLA Health System's humble start and rapid ascent to the top tierof medical excellence.

GOING WEST IN THE ATOMIC AGE

Traditionally, centers of medical excellence were found in the northeastern andGreat Lakes regions of the United States, with highly revered institutions suchas Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester,Minnesota. As World War II came to a close, however, a group of physicians beganpressuring the University of California to create a premier medical center insouthern California. In response to these influential physicians, the Universityof California Board of Regents voted in 1945 to appropriate $7 million to fund amedical school at UCLA.

In 1947, Stafford L. Warren, a professor from the University of RochesterMedical School in New York, was appointed as the UCLA medical school's firstdean. Picking a handful of exceptional faculty leaders from the University ofRochester and Johns Hopkins, UCLA School of Medicine began without a hospital oradvanced research facilities. Scientists instead worked in temporary Quonsethuts in distant locations around the campus. As construction of the new medicalcenter began in 1951, the first UCLA School of Medicine class was beingadmitted. Fifteen faculty members provided courses to 28 students—26 menand 2 women—who attended classes in a reception lounge of an old religiousconference building.

In 1950, just prior to the beginning of construction on the medical centerbuilding, a Los Angeles Times reporter called it "one of the greatestmedical meccas in the world." Newspaper reports indicated that the medicalcenter would "combine a complete undergraduate medical school, a fully equippedand staffed hospital and the most advanced research facilities possible." In thearticle, Dean Stafford Warren remarked that the medical campus would be "thefirst structure of its size and nature to be specifically designed for theAtomic Age with operating rooms and radiology department built where they serveboth the flow of function and, incidentally, protection against disaster."

That protection from disaster served the UCLA medical complex well from itsopening in 1955 until 1994, when the main medical building...