Introduction
David
I am going to tell you a little bit about the Foundation - who we are and why we are doing this work and what we want to get out of this work. This is an incredible gift you have given us. Thank you for being here. We really appreciate it sincerely.
You've all given up something to be here and we are humbled by that.
This meeting came out of something we did about a year ago and some of you participated in that as well.
Our organization was established in 1997. We are an outgrowth of the original Packard Children's Hospital. There has been pediatric healthcare south of SF for a long time. The first convalescent home for children with special needs opened in the 1920s. Over the years the convalescent home developed some sub-specialty programs.
In the 1950s the Stanford School of Medicine moved to the Peninsula from San Francisco and that grew to be called the Children's Hospital of Stanford.
Lucille Salter was a Stanford undergraduate and she worked at the convalescent home and the children's hospital before she married David Packard.
She has a vision to bring together the care that was delivered at the convalescent home and the services provided by the hospital.
The Packard Children's Hospital opened in the 90s. In the mid-90s University of San Francisco and Stanford medical center decided to merge their healthcare services. The board at the Packard Children's Hospital decided it didn't make sense to be outside this entity. So the board gave the Children's Hospital to Stanford to be part of this merged agency around 1997.
They did this with some reluctance. They feared dilution of the mission. So to preserve that mission focus and to protect the mission of child health at the Children's Hospital they created this foundation. We were created to be an independent fund raising organization for the Children's Hospital and child health programs at Stanford.
There was a very large gift given to our foundation and the transformation that has taken place from a strong community based center to something that gets mentioned in US News and World Reports is a result of that. The hospital has been transformed in that time.
The board of the children's hospital reorganized into the current board. They gave the physical assets and kept the monetary assets ($60m). Some of the financial assets were given to the hospital in small grants. The interest income off this endowment was small compared to the local philanthropy.
We created two programs with these assets. The board thought we could create a consolidated source of health information (at the time for local youth). This hallmark program is called kidsdata.org. That web site contains several hundred health indicators in a single source.
In addition, the board said we should use some of our income to give grants. The communities we served at the time were defined pretty locally. We asked ourselves if we have a million dollars where would you best invest? We decided on child abuse and advancing the social health development for kids.
We wanted to get into areas that broadened the array of services the Foundation was working in. One of the consequences was silos in the Foundation.
The board asked us to think strategically a few years ago and think about what we did in the community in our development work.
Where should we put our money? We ended up focusing on children with special health care needs. The magic is looking more broadly. The rest of the system doesn't work outside of the hospitals and episodic care.
We weren't aware of any other foundation that focused on this.
What we are doing is also looking at the information programs. We asked ourselves why we were doing the kidsdata.org site. Decisions are now made at the state level and we were providing local data. We needed to broaden our scope so we're going state wide with our data and information services.
The other thing with information programs is we are going to be a little guilty with our information. We developed some core beliefs and we will call out data that shows whether we are actually performing to those core beliefs.
Once we decided we had this interest in kids with special needs we needed to figure out what to do with that. We decided we would be a catalyst for the development of a vision for a better system. We will develop a model or some key components of a model that we can advocate for as people look at redesigning the system.
We may also use our grant making resources to focus on where within this sea of opportunity we might intervene. What we are looking for are models or a model and some help on how to spend our resources.
We have another meeting in October to further condense and synthesize some of the work from this meeting.
That meeting, by design, will have people that are in the room today and some who are not here - and that leads to our board retreat in November. We are going to have our board take a deep dive into some dense material. We want to make our model accessible to the board and we'll see what comes of it.
Question - how did the board come to the idea of special health care needs versus all children?
Answer - if you look at our web site, our mission and vision is to make sure that all children reach their health potential. If our goal is to do that we see this population as the canary in the coal mine. These are the kids that populate our children's hospitals. Packard Hospital has the highest acuity for kids in the country. These children are the most susceptible to system failure.
It is our bias as a foundation that when we talk about our work we use a broad definition of children with special health care needs. When we get into grant making we'll probably be more specific and it will likely be focused on hyper complex issues.
Question - will the model you come up with be statewide as well?
Answer - yes. We can't manage grants too far afield. Our vision is national but we have to start in California.
Question - what avenues exist to promote this vision?
Answer - We've got the web site and convenings and some advocacy capacity.
Question - I originally thought this was going to be building out the capacity of the hospital and this is a significant shift from that.
Answer - if we implement a program it will have to be local. We don't know if we will be making operational investments as that will take all our resources.
Question - do you consider the issue of transition of care as part of your focus?
Answer - we could spend our whole life doing nothing but transition issues.
Thank you.
Langdon
You already know more or less how we will work together. Have you ever been in a meeting that was boring? This is not going to be that meeting. You will be doing a lot of what you've already done so far this morning. It's really about what this group of people can do collectively and invoking your knowledge to develop solutions and models. We use the word ideal and that's purposeful.
We don't schedule formal breaks. Please take a break when you need to. Please keep your focus on the process and keep the interruptions to a minimum. We'll have a working lunch.
The way we design a process like this is to ask you to you develop products. We will take the work you've done and you will be iterating it. We ask questions and if the questions are the wrong ones then have the conversation you need to have.
Our firm is InnovationLabs. We do this kind of work around the world. We think we're experts in collaboration and design processes. We do processes like this and also coach organizations in developing innovation capacity.
Michael, Jay and Chad are producing a web site. You will be able to access the work you've done at that web site. If you find something we captured incorrectly please let us know and we'll update it. That web site will be a resource for you going forward as we will also document the workshops in October and November as well.
Our work will include developing a system model. Bryan was taking some notes here on things that might be included in that model.
If there is anything we can do to support you please let us know.
We have another activity for you to do. This is a variation on appreciative inquiry. We're going to ask you to talk about a very positive example of an experience that you had with children with special health care needs. It's important that we get a more visceral experience
Please do a little bit of story telling and then find us and we'll give you step two.