The Baldrige Foundation, SOAR Vision Group, and Guidehouse to Support Hospitals and Community Organizations with COVID-19 Response

ATLANTA, June 11, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- SOAR Vision Group, the Baldrige Foundation, and Guidehouse are collaborating to help hospitals, health systems, and community organizations, such as local food banks and homeless shelters, with their immediate and long-term responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The three organizations will offer their respective capabilities to providers and community organizations to help them better anticipate and meet the needs of their staff, patients, and communities, both during and after the pandemic. The solution will include:

• Baldrige Foundation's proven experience for more than three decades, promoting the Baldrige Framework by sharing the best practices of national role-model healthcare organizations that demonstrate agility, commitment to innovation, and sustainable results.
• SOAR's Priority PuLSE, an action-based SAS software tool that organizes strategic priorities, orchestrates team action plans, and visualizes performance results into a single accessible source.
• Guidehouse's command center readiness and organizational mobilization consulting services, and its emergency preparedness and response expertise. Guidehouse's experts include former hospital, military, and federal government executives who have led organizations through previous crises.

"While hospitals and health systems always focus on patients first, to serve patients effectively they also must focus on ensuring their organizations maintain operational performance," said Guidehouse Partner Charles Peck, MD, a former health system CEO who was responsible for EBOLA emergency preparedness at this system. "The ability to communicate in real-time with accurate, enterprise-wide point-of-care data is essential to doing so. Through this collaboration, we can extend timely support to providers on the frontline of this and future crises."

Guidehouse, which acquired Navigant in October 2019, assists providers in developing centralized communication centers to better manage immediate needs related to patient flow, capacity, triage protocols, supply inventories, staffing, and other operational processes. These centers can then be expanded into fully integrated system-wide command centers.

Public Health Muskegon County (Michigan), a client of SOAR Vision Group, is deploying Priority PuLSE to support its COVID-19 virtual command center response. Dr. Roger Spoelman, senior advisor of Strategy, Leadership, and Innovation at SOAR Vision Group and a retired health system executive, was asked by Muskegon County's (Mich.) public health director to help lead this community preparedness project in order to coordinate and align efforts in managing the COVID-19 crisis. 

"Nimble changes in organizational strategy, empowering decision-making on the front lines, and a culture of speaking up and high trust are critical during crises," Dr. Spoelman said. "Priority PuLSE enables these critical functions, and we're confident it will provide the real-time vital communication we need while ensuring the appropriate stewardship of scarce resources."

"Priority PuLSE is designed to enable organizational leaders and team members to quickly detect essential gaps in their COVID-19 response, allocate appropriate resources to address those gaps, ensure accountability for necessary actions, and report results," said Ben Sawyer, president & CEO of SOAR Vision Group. "Although this special release of PuLSE focuses on COVID-19 specifically, its functionality combined with Guidehouse's command center readiness and management expertise and consulting services, enables an agile and comprehensive response to any organizational priority."

"As a retired Colonel in the United States Army responsible for managing many disasters and the overarching strategy for over 11,500 employees and 65 facilities, this virtual command center capability could have saved us significant time and resources, at a time when both are scarce," said Al Faber, president & CEO of the Baldrige Foundation.

PuLSE also enables real-time responses to the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Federal Emergency Management Agency standards. The CDC provides guidance and resources to state and local health departments, including training on a wide array of topics such as encouraging best practice guidelines at community organizations and helping educate organizations about identifying COVID-19 symptoms.  

"Guidehouse has been a trusted advisor to the CDC for more than 15 years. We continue to support the CDC as they work closely with state, local, tribal, and territorial partners, as well as public health partners, to respond to the COVID-19 crisis," said Scott McIntyre, CEO of Guidehouse. "Our collaboration with SOAR and the Baldrige Foundation further enhances our support to public health organizations by helping to promulgate the CDC best-practice guidelines and empower a coordinated response by communities and providers on the frontline of the COVID-19 crisis."

About Guidehouse 
Guidehouse is a leading global provider of consulting services to the public and commercial markets with broad capabilities in management, technology, and risk consulting. We help clients address their toughest challenges with a focus on markets and clients facing transformational change, technology-driven innovation, and significant regulatory pressure. Across a range of advisory, consulting, outsourcing, and technology/analytics services, we help clients create scalable, innovative solutions that prepare them for future growth and success. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the company has more than 7,000 professionals in more than 50 locations. Guidehouse is a Veritas Capital portfolio company, led by seasoned professionals with proven and diverse expertise in traditional and emerging technologies, markets, and agenda-setting issues driving national and global economies. For more information, please visit: www.guidehouse.com.

About SOAR Vision Group
SOAR Vision Group is a national technology and performance excellence firm that enables organizations to achieve exceptional results through deployment of its Strategy Execution System^TM. SOAR is a strategic partner of the Baldrige Foundation. For more information please explore their website at https://soarvisiongroup.com/.

About the Baldrige Foundation
The mission of the Baldrige Foundation is to ensure the long-term financial growth and viability of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, and to support organizational performance excellence in the United States and throughout the world. The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is presented annually by the President of the United States to organizations that demonstrate role-model performance. For more information, contact the Baldrige Foundation on their website at http://baldrigefoundation.org/.

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