A hospital does not inherit its strategy. A capital program can be approved for the right reasons, designed by a strong team, and built on schedule — and still land in operations as a building the facility team has to learn under pressure. The discipline that closes that gap is operational readiness, and at the IFHE 2026 World Congress it was the subject of a session built for the people who own both ends of the handoff.
The session. “From Strategy to Performance: Executive Strategies for Operational Readiness” ran Sunday, October 18, 2026, on the IFHE Stage at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, part of the 29th IFHE World Congress held alongside the HCD Conference + Expo. Per the official program, it offered a focused look at how healthcare executives translate strategy into operational readiness.
Three chairs, one handoff
The panel’s composition is the first fact worth noticing. As listed in the official program, the session brought together Rick Hood, President and CEO of IMH Healthcare; Sam Werschky, Assistant Vice President of Planning, Design & Construction at Cook Children’s Health Care System; and Marc Budaus, Partner and Health Studio Practice Leader at HKS, Inc. The program lists the moderator as to be determined.
That is the readiness triangle in one row. A health-system chief executive owns the strategy. A planning, design and construction executive owns the capital program that strategy produces. An architecture firm’s health practice leader owns the design work in between. Operational readiness fails in the seams between those three chairs — which is why a session on the subject seats all three.
What the program says the session covered
Readiness, as the program frames it, is a connection problem. The session connected three things that are usually managed apart: the capital decisions an organization makes, the organizational alignment behind them, and the day-to-day performance of the facility that results.
Frameworks were the promised working material. Per the program description, the session presented frameworks for keeping facilities, operations, and clinical priorities moving in the same direction under pressure. The qualifier matters: readiness is tested on the bad week — the surge, the outage, the staffing gap — not on opening day.
Day-to-day performance is the endpoint, not an afterthought. The program’s framing ends at the operating facility, not at substantial completion. For facility managers, that is the recognizable claim: a project is not finished when construction is. It is finished when the building performs the way the strategy assumed it would.
What a facility director takes from it
The readiness questions are answerable before go-live, or they are answered by events. Who owns the building’s performance in its first ninety days? Which clinical workflows were walked in the actual space, by the people who will run them? Where does a capital decision made two years ago show up as a daily workaround for your team?
Alignment is a facility deliverable. The session’s premise — capital decisions, organizational alignment, and day-to-day performance as one connected chain — gives facility leaders a way to argue for a seat earlier in the process. The cost of a misaligned handoff is paid in operations, in work orders and workarounds, long after the project team has dispersed.
Related reading
- Equipment Is Infrastructure: The Handoff Where Capital Projects Fail Operations
- Why Does a Hospital Generator Pass Its Start-Up Check but Still Risk Failure?
Session record
- Session: From Strategy to Performance: Executive Strategies for Operational Readiness
- Event: IFHE 2026 World Congress (29th), co-located with HCD Conference + Expo, October 17–20, 2026, New Orleans
- Slot: Sunday, October 18, 2026, 1:30–2:00 p.m., IFHE Stage
- Speakers, as listed in the official program: Rick Hood (IMH Healthcare) · Sam Werschky (Cook Children’s Health Care System) · Marc Budaus (HKS, Inc.); moderator listed as TBD
- Source: IFHE 2026 World Congress official agenda
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