Effective Performance Management with Winnebago County Health Department

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our Customer Interview webinar. Today, we are welcoming a panel of guests from Winnebago county, including Sarah Jean, a public health epidemiologist, Julia, the supervisor of the Administration Division, and Heidi, Winnebago's public health planner. They will be sharing their insights into how their county manages performance. Interviewing this panel will be Ted Jackson, one of clearpoint Strategy's two founders. The audience will be muted for the duration of this webinar, but we encourage you to submit any questions into the Q and A tab. Go ahead and take it away, Ted.

Thanks, Jenna. And thank you all for joining us today. Tell me a little bit about Winnebago County. Sure.

Hi, my name is Julia. Just for clarification, we are employees of the Winnebago County Public Health Department. We don't represent the whole county, but yeah, Winnebago County county about 171 folks. Located in the northeast part of Wisconsin. Oshkosh is our biggest city, our county seat of about 65 to 70,000 folks. And if anybody's familiar with the Green Bay Packers, Oshkosh is about an hour away from Green Bay and about another hour away from Milwaukee, which is our biggest city. So like I said before, we're from the Winnebago County Public Health Department, and we serve to protect and promote through the services and partnerships that and practices and policies so that everybody in the county can live their best life.

That's great, Julia. How's the public Health department organized? Like, what is it structured? What does it look like?

Yep, really good question because not all the health departments are structured the same. We are one department, and we are structured in terms of divisions. So we have six divisions or six teams. Like Jenna said before, we have the Administration division. I'm the supervisor of the Administration division, and this is the division where a lot of the planning occurs. The performance management work falls under this division. We also have our Communicable Disease division, who took a very active role during COVID We have our Environmental Health division. These are our sanitarians and folks that go out and inspect hotels and pools and restaurants so that we can be safe when we go to these eateries. We have our Community Health and Prevention division that really focuses on those community engagement and community practices and community health. We also have our WIC division, so our Women, Infant and children, so more of a nutrition Education division. And lastly, but not least, our Healthy Lifespan division. This is a division that really deals with babies to very elderly populations. So think of public Health through the lifespan. So every division has their own supervisor. We are a mix of public health nurses, community health strategists, sanitarians, dietitians, you name it. We're about 50 people strong, very passionate about what they do.

Such a great diversity of people, such a great mix of backgrounds. How did you think about strategy prior to clearpoint? Like what was the, how did it work? How did y' all talk about it, manage it, and, and put forth a strategic plan?

Yeah, that's a really good question. So prior to clearpoint, we did not have a uniform standard platform to handle or work through performance management. Every division track their data. We are very good at collecting data. Whether it's how many restaurants did we inspect or how many WIC clients did we enroll this this month, or how many car seats did we install, et cetera. We're very good at tracking number one. But there wasn't a unified or standard way to then look at that data and draw conclusions or make recommendations. Oh, this is happening in the data. This is compares to last year. The people working on it, they knew that. Right. They would make inferences from the data they collected. They monitored it very well. But then the communication stopped at their division.

Right.

So there wasn't a means to then share that data in a uniform, standard way, in a visually appealing way, so that all of the department could really say, wow, look at us. Even though it's that division and not mine, look at us, let's celebrate that win. Or oh, wait a minute, why is this happening? Why do we have more, you know, Covid cases, let's say, oh, well, let's see, what can we do? So there was, there wasn't a way to collectively and collaboratively look at the data as a department because everybody had their own little Excel file tracking their numbers. And so that's how we managed performance management prior to clearpoint.

And in each department did the data, was it just like, did each department have their own plan or what types of data? Or like, how do they know what to measure?

Yeah, absolutely. So each division had their way of collecting information, looking at their data, making evidence based decisions just for their division. Each division worked very well. But you know, there's always power in asking somebody who's not doing that work, hey, what do you infer from this data? You know, what do you see that I may not be seeing? And so I don't think there was that space to do that. And I think it became really clear that we needed to get everyone on the same page. So when we were looking at. And oddly enough, we went through a strategic planning process right before COVID hit. So we never really had a chance to launch the strategic plan. And you could see in our strategic plan that there was, you know, strategic plans for this division and this division and this division. And then we kind of worked together to find strategies that overlapped everybody. But you could kind of still see that it was still very siloed. It worked, but it was kind of silent.

So was was the goal with clearpoint to break down those silos.

That we are finding out? That is one of the things that is happening. And I'll for sure let Sarah Jean, you know, talk a little bit more about how we've been using clearpoint.

Yeah, so it's been. I think y' all have been a client for maybe a little bit, even less than a year. So tell me a little bit about kind of what that process has been like and kind of what are some changes that you've seen as they. As you're kind of in the beginning of using this tool.

Yeah, it has been a busy, probably nine months that we've had the platform. A lot of time just getting familiar with the platform, having those strategic conversations amongst ourselves in our team, trying to figure out how we want to best introduce all of this across our health department and how we can continue or start to really build that culture of performance management. And it has been a great year so far, or almost a year, just working with each of our divisions individually, starting out with an intro conversation of this is the platform that we're using. We haven't had that consistent reporting process for our performance measures and we need to start building that and building that culture. So some of those components have been creation of a performance management champion for each of our six divisions so that that can be our main go to person within that division so that they can then connect within their division to get that information. And it doesn't just all fall on the three of us to try and capture the information across our whole department. So that's been really helpful having those content experts for each of the divisions being our go to person because they know their work, they know their measures, what's most meaningful, a lot more than we will. So it's been incredibly helpful having our performance management champions. Just this month, we have started a new process where we are having our performance management champions attend our leadership meetings so that they can share out the work that they're doing with performance management, showcasing their dashboards, their measures within Clinical clearpoint. Part of that process that we are just now starting is utilizing the HTML exporting component within clearpoint so that we can showcase some of the measures to our staff that don't have a clearpoint account. So that has been helpful just letting people see the more intricate details behind the scenes of these measures because with those quick report outs you can't go through everything. So just being able to provide our staff that ability to understand a bit more about the work that's happening in the other divisions and then just continuing to build the space to have the conversations around performance management. So some of our Performance Management champs are now starting to have conversations at their monthly division meetings. So there's that dedicated space to have those conversations. Even this morning we had an all staff meeting. So we showed them clearpoint talked about the importance of performance management and just continuing to promote prioritization of this work across all the work that we're doing. And highlighting this for 2024.

I'd be really interested to. I was listening to you optimistically and pessimistically thinking about the Performance Management champion because you were like, yeah, we got people in each division as a performance management champion. This is what I heard to do our work for us to collect all the data. And then I heard the carrot was. And they got to be in front of the leadership team showing how they were doing. And so, so just we don't need to tell on anybody in particular. But like, was that an easy process? Like were they excited to be able to share their work or did this appear to be like trickier to get them out of Excel into another tool? Love to just hear any story that you have on that.

I think in the beginning there was some hesitation, just as there is with any new process, any new platform, just that concern of, oh gosh, how much more work is this going to add to my plate? And overall I think our PM Champs are really excited about this platform. Before this webinar, I had met with one of our PM Champs and was helping prepare her for her upcoming report out at Leadership and she was telling me about the work that they're doing behind the scenes to improve their data collection process. And so she seemed really excited, which then makes us excited just being able to see that this is slowly all coming together. The excitement that we have about performance management and about clearpoint is now trickling into our other staff. So I'm feeling really optimistic for this year and the work that we have with performance management.

One of the things that. Sorry, sorry to interrupt, Julio, but one of the things that got Me intrigued to ask the question is it sounds like you're not telling them what to measure. They have their own measures and so now you're giving them the opportunity to share that in a way that they can construct in clearpoint. Because a lot of the, a lot of the times we've kind of seen organizations that are struggling with this is when, let's say an administrative division is telling other divisions, here are the measures that I want. And then everyone's kind of disgruntled, fighting it and may or may not be complying in a great way. But when you allow people to showcase what they're doing, then it becomes a little bit more of a way to get engagement.

Exactly. And there has been a lot of collaboration with the measurements. When we first went to these divisions to start talking about performance management, we may have provided some draft measures just for them to understand how this can play out within the ClearPoint system. And then it's been a lot of collaboration back and forth of, well, that doesn't actually mean that much for the work that we're doing. And so allowing them to really lead a lot of this, to put in the measures that mean the most to them, that are impactful and tell the story about the work that they're doing and not just things that don't matter as much.

And I think Sarah Jean has done a really good job of communicating that clearpoint is not a spreadsheet. It's not that platform where you're going to keep all of your data you have, you know, you're still going to have that Excel sheet for all the data. What we're really focusing in on what data points tell the story, what data points tell the story you want to tell others. And I think Sarah Jean, with the help of Heidi too, have been very instrumental in explaining or defining what KPI means, key performance indicator. Because we throw these jargons and terms out and we really have to explain it to them so that it's meaningful to them. And I think we're getting there. I think we've done a really good job with that. So I just wanted to add that, oh great.

I was going to ask a question, but now I'm going to combine it with a audience asked question as well. So, so, so my question was going to be about have the, how have they manipulated the data in clearpoint? So like our, like. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna explain. So, so in Excel, right, you typically could imagine a ton of, you know, rows and columns of, of data and you May or may not even build the chart with it. But in clearpoint, we have, you know, some charts that pop out automatically. We have the ability to give it a red, yellow or green status indicator, the ability to put qualitative analysis next to it. So I'd be curious to hear as to how that conversation has changed a little bit. And then, well, then I'll hold off and then I'll ask the quote, the audience asked question after that.

I think the big thing would be that before clearpoint, people had just these numbers in spreadsheets or in reports all across different folders. And with clearpoint being able to bring those most important measures together into one place, being able to see those trends which we may not have had before, and I continuously push our performance management champions to utilize that analysis field so that it doesn't just sit there as a graph or as a table, talking about the work that's happening behind the scenes to impact this data. And that's been a huge focus of what we're trying to do with this system is to go beyond just the numerical portion, but talk about the story behind the numbers to get people out of just. Yep, things are increasing, decreasing, or we didn't even look at the previous year. And then with clearpoint, all the different functionalities behind the scenes have been really helpful to be able to help our staff think through some of those trends. But I think the big piece is getting people comfortable with talking about that analysis piece. And why is the data going in any particular direction or what's happening out in the community or at the state level that could be impacting our work?

Right, okay, that's great. So here's the audience question. So did you create a strategic plan first and did that process determine the measures? Or like, were you already measuring things like, how did you organize it in clearpoint? So I'm going to try to distill it into like, where did these measures come from?

Yeah, yeah.

And I'll invite Heidi and Sarah Jean to add to what I have to say. So, like I said before, we did have a strategic plan with measurable goals that got done and completed in December of 2019. You have to remember we are a public health department. What happened in January of 2020 is we were actually in November of 2019, we were already tracking Covid cases in China. So we knew what was coming. We did not know this epidemic or this, sorry, this pandemic was going to last so long. So for three years, we were all hands on deck on Covid response. So we did not have a strategic plan. We did not work on some things in our strategic plan. Our services for the most part, except for some programs, stopped, halted and we were only working on Covid. We had this opportunity February of 2023 to learn about Clearpoint and commit to doing, to having a performance management system. What we decided to do is to go with clearpoint, learn clearpoint and start small because performance management is a very intimidating term to many people who do not work in the analysis of data. We are very good at tracking data, tracking how many cases of, you know, sexually transmitted infections there are, how many establishments we've, we've licensed, how many pools we've tested, et cetera, you know, the day to day data. This is data that is required by the state. In some cases we're collecting data that is required by some of the grants that we're working on. We have grant deliverables. So before we launched a big, you know, let's measure our strategic plan, key performance indicators, we, we first had to revitalize our strategic plan. We haven't had time to do that yet. Matter of fact, 2024 is when we're going to be doing our department wide strategic plan. And we have to remember, strategic plan is, you know, very broad and then it trickles down to more manageable measures. But in order to get people just comfortable with getting there, we wanted to start with measures that they deal with on a day to day basis. So our performance management information and data that right now is in clearpoint are those little everyday data that we're collecting right now. We're just trying to build that culture. When we get to measuring our strategic plan measures, people are going to be more familiar with clearpoint, going to be more comfortable than doing that and tackling that same thing with our community health assessment. You know, we just finished our community health assessment. So by the time we're ready to start putting all of that into clearpoint, people are going to have the skills and the know how. So we kind of did it a little bit inverse basically because Covid, the pandemic just, it required everybody's hands on deck. And our 2019 strategic plan, as, as nice as it was, we can't even tweak it. We have to start new. So we are going to be doing that this year and using clearpoint to track some of those.

That's great. It's like you're creating the, you're, you're tilling the ground, you're getting the culture ready for all of the strategic planning work that no One has seen for several years because you've been in crisis mode.

And we are still working on Covid response. So, you know, a lot of our communities like, oh, Covid's gone. We're not masking anymore. Well, we're still tracking cases, we're still dealing with, you know, congregate settings that have outbreaks. Covid is still a big part of what we do still. So yeah.

Excellent. Are you all willing to share anything in clearpoint and show. Show some folks what it looks like?

Yes, I can definitely share my screen and show you a little bit of what we have in here. So we have dashboards created for each of our six divisions, like Julia had mentioned earlier. And then within, within each of those division dashboards, we have several different programs listed related to the work that's happening within that division. And then within each of those programs we have a variety of measures. So we'll go with our ICS training. So that is incident command structure. It's something that all public health staff are required to complete. These different trainings just helps us to be better prepared for responding to incidents out in the community. And the way that we have this set up is really nice just being able to have that high level description of our measure, an analysis related to the data that we've entered. And so this is that field that we're really pushing our staff to fill out to talk about that story behind the data. So for our ICS trainings in particular, we had a lot of staff turnover, a lot of focus on just other competing priorities that we had a lot of staff that were not up to date with their trainings as well as with the 800 course. That wasn't something that had been historically something that was required out of our staff. And so in 2023, our emergency preparedness coordinator focused a lot on getting our staff up to date with their trainings. And so being able to tell that story behind the data has been incredibly helpful. So that years down the line, when we look back in here, we're able to remind ourselves of why that data was able to improve so well from year to year. Also encouraging our staff to utilize the recommendations field, just helping us to think through how we could positively impact some of the measures that we have in the platform. So it's just been really helpful trying to get all of our information in one spot. And then I very much encourage our staff to fill out this data source pod. So this is something that we ended up adding in so that we can remember where data is being pulled because if you're only pulling it once a year or it's, you know, new staff is pulling it, sometimes it can be challenging to remember where stuff is being pulled. So it's helpful just having everything on that one page related to the measure.

No, this is awesome. This is really, really nice. I appreciate you sharing and it sounds like as you go forward into 2024, you have strategic plan to think about. You just finished the community health assessment. Are you worried about the health improvement plan? I don't want to use too many, you know, health department inside baseball strategy terms but, but there are a whole bunch of types of plans that you typically would pull data from all your departments from. What are your, what are your plans for 2024 in Clearpoint?

I can jump in quickly on that one, at least for the community health improvement plan. So we use our community assessment data to determine priorities. And you know, the difference between a community health improvement plan and a strategic plan is that it's, it's broader, you know, and that we'll have community partners involved and trying to address, you know, community wide needs. And so, you know, we are, we haven't used, you know, this will be the first time using clearpoint for, for a community health improvement plan. So we're looking forward to that, looking forward to building our strategic plan incorporating the, you know, the chip, our, that's our language for our community health improvement plan, aligning those plans with our strategic plan and you know, really trying to utilize the, the functionality of, of clearpoint and you know, so we're able to visualize the data, make better decisions based on data, that kind of thing.

Yeah, that'll be great. I'll have to connect you with one of our other clients who's a county that started in public health and then realized as they started doing these improvement plans they were connecting with other county services and then other partners as you talked about. And they ultimately got more and more data into clearpoint across and now they're kind of using it countywide to do various tracking, which is a really interesting process.

I think we realized that we're probably utilizing 25% of the function of Clearpoint right now. We are a new client. You know, we signed up in March, I think where we had, we were new clients as of March. It took a couple of months for myself and Heidi and Sergeant to get trained. So I am loving the questions in the Q and A. We're going to get there slowly but surely. But yeah, I mean we realize that we're just scratching the surface here. So we're excited to be learning from other, maybe local health departments that are using clearpoint, other governmental, nonprofit entities that have more experience with some of the measures. So, yeah, we're all ears.

Great. Well, I know we're out of time for those that have committed to our half hour time slot. Any. Let me give you one last chance for comment. Here is what would you, since you are kind of fresh and new to this, what would you recommend to an organization that was in your shoot. What would you recommend to yourself back in March for, for getting started with this? I mean, clearly you've been successful. You're showing us some, some awesome reports and have great plans. But what would you have hoped that someone told you right around the time that you signed up?

Well, I don't, I don't know if I'm answering your question, but one of the things that really sold us on clearpoint is not necessarily the platform itself, although your platform is very intuitive. It was the consistent and sustained customer service and furthermore the consistent and sustained technical support. None of us are performance management experts. Sarah Jean certainly, you know, is closer to that than any of us are. And we're trying to talk to 50 other employees who think performance management is, you know, this. So that consistent and sustained technical support is something that sold us. So if we would have known that sooner, we probably would have been an earlier adopter because we had, did not have that hand holding that we needed with other platforms.

Excellent.

There's a lot of, you know, public health like we, we kind of start things with, from scratch A lot of times, like if you need a performance management system, you start with, you open up an Excel book, you know, and start with a blank page. And so it's hard, you know. And like Julia said, we don't have, I mean, we learn as we go, we share things, but it's, it's, it's a steep learning curve for some of the, you know, you know, like we're hired for a different set of skills and then we have to do this. And so having the support, the, the staff at clearpoint has been, it has accelerated our learning as well as then like Sarah Jean is great with, she's epidemiologist, she's great with numbers and understanding spreadsheets. And so she's been able to really again, fast track some of this. So I think the support though is really crucial for us.

Excellent. Well, thanks to the three of y' all for, for talking to me today. I mean, this was really great. I always learn a lot when I do these, and I'm sure our audience has as well. So we greatly appreciate your time and look forward to hearing more of your continued success throughout the year.

Yeah, and if there's any local health departments in the audience, you know, connect with us, we'd love to share and learn.

Okay, thanks again. Bye.