Transforming Health Center Culture: Shared Experiences in Fostering Alignment Between Health Center Departments to Strengthen Health Center Operations

While both are vital to the success of a health center, operations and finance teams and their workstreams are often separated and isolated from each other. The integration of finance and operations teams will lead a health center on a pathway to excellence. This session will provide a practical guide for changing organizational culture to integrate finance and operations teams. Successful interdisciplinary collaboration of finance and operations with health center clinical teams will also be discussed. Health centers leaders, who have engaged in organizational transformations to create collaborative and meaningful relationships across teams and amongst leaders, will outline their journeys during this process. They will discuss best practices for building and sustaining relationships between operational and financial leadership and teams, creating workflows for operations and finance staff to best work together and with other departments, and developing strong communication pathways and systems to support the teams. The goal of this session is to help organizations develop workforce habits that support an interdisciplinary culture change that penetrates beyond leadership to embed in the fabric of the health center so best practices will continue beyond leadership changes.