Voices of U of U Health
Forward Together: Achieving Strategic Alignment
By Grant Lasson, MBA, and Dan Lundergan, MHA
This is the sixth blog in a multi-part series exploring how University of Utah Health is taking steps to become an integrated academic health system achieving unsurpassed societal impact. The series highlights six shared goals guiding our collective vision for 2030.
As a trusted leader in health, education, and discovery, University of Utah Health is evolving to meet the demands of a dynamic future. It’s a future shaped by growth, complexity, and limitless potential to improve lives.
This journey requires us to be more unified in vision and purpose. When we share one vision, we move faster and with greater strength. Unity helps us achieve more for the patients, researchers, educators, learners, and communities we serve.
Where Strategy Meets Operations
For the first time, leaders across U of U Health came together to develop systemwide goals to guide us forward. Aligning around these goals helps us evolve from a collection of exceptional parts into one interconnected, high-performing system.
Becoming a more unified system takes focus and persistence. Alignment doesn’t happen by chance. It happens by design—when we choose clarity over complexity, connection over silos, and a shared vision over individual agendas.
Our clinical strategy and operations have long worked well in tandem, each driving progress in their own way. Now, we’re strengthening that partnership through structures and relationships that allow great ideas and solutions to move quickly from vision to execution.
We organized the Strategy Meets Operations Committee comprised of clinical executive leaders and clinical department chairs. This group works together to solve problems, remove barriers, and accelerate progress.
We’re already seeing what’s possible. For example, when teams came together to address access challenges in endoscopy care, years of frustration gave way to collaboration and tangible progress. In this new forum, concerns were shared directly with system leaders who listened and made quick, on-the-spot decisions about resources, space, and next steps for policy discussions.
With the right people in the room, decisions become clearer, timelines shorter, and solutions achievable. That’s what alignment looks like: shared ownership and shared results.
Leading and Listening as One
True alignment flows in multiple directions. It’s not just about setting goals from the top. It’s about listening, learning, and co-creating solutions across U of U Health.
We are a system that values and enables entrepreneurialism. We know great ideas can come from any corner of our organization. Through the Strategy Meets Operations Committee, we now have a process that makes it easier for people to bring those ideas forward for consideration and feasibility.
This bi-directional approach helps us advance system priorities while also empowering innovation at department, division, and unit levels. It turns the energy, creativity, and problem-solving power of our teams into coordinated system progress.
We have already been inspired by the ideas coming forward. They remind us that our greatest strength is in our people. Their unique business ideas have the potential to bring services to our patients that don't exist anywhere else in the Mountain West.
Reaching New Levels of Impact
As we look to the future, alignment is the foundation that will help us reach new levels of impact. It will enable us to improve access, enhance experiences, support our teams, and strengthen our communities.
Building on decades of excellence and previous successes, we’re now taking deliberate steps to function as one integrated system. Alignment is more than structural change. It’s a cultural transformation.
When our goals align across every mission and every level, we create something powerful: a system that amplifies effort and accelerates progress for everyone we serve.
We’re proud of how far we’ve come and, with unified vision and purpose, even more excited about where we’re going.
We Want to Hear from You
Do you have ideas for increasing system alignment or a novel business solution? Send your ideas to Together@hsc.utah.edu.
Other Blogs in This Series
Forward Together: Collective Goal Setting
Forward Together: Building Our Patient Stewardship and Navigation Hub
Forward Together: Putting Patients at the Center of Quality Care
Forward Together: Fostering a Culture of Innovation and Scholarship
Forward Together: Practicing Generative Financial Stewardship
