On Oct. 17, Dr. A. Marc Harrison started his run as president and CEO of Intermountain Healthcare. The Salt Lake City-based integrated delivery network—which generated $6.1 billion in revenue last year, operates 22 hospitals, employs 1,400 physicians and offers health plans through an insurance subsidiary—is widely recognized as an innovator in technology and care delivery. Harrison worked at Intermountain's Primary Children's Hospital while completing his residency and internship. Before returning to Intermountain to succeed longtime leader Dr. Charles Sorenson, Harrison spent more than a decade with the Cleveland Clinic, including as CEO of its hospital in Abu Dhabi. Modern Healthcare Managing Editor Gregg Blesch recently spoke with Harrison about managing population health, running a hospital in Abu Dhabi and building personal connections in a large health system. This following is an edited transcript.
Modern Healthcare: A video Intermountain posted to introduce you shows you biking through some breathtaking landscapes in Utah and offering a testimonial about living well. How do you view your public role now that health systems are increasingly called on to manage population health?
Dr. A. Marc Harrison: That was pretty high up there, and what you couldn't see is I was going up a really steep hill. My heart rate was probably about 180 as I was trying to ride up that mountain. I accept the fact that part of my job is to be a role model for living well and for taking good care of myself as an example of how people should take care of themselves. Now, I'm far from perfect, right? I've been known to have an occasional hamburger and French fries and that's because I'm human, but I do try—particularly as a person who's a cancer survivor—to think carefully about making sure that I make the most of every day, both physically, emotionally and spiritually. And part of that is exercise, diet and integrating my work in my life.
MH: Take us back to 2010. You were working at the Cleveland Clinic. They were about to open this huge gleaming hospital in Abu Dhabi, and you get chosen as its first CEO.
Harrison: I was chief medical operations officer at the Cleveland Clinic, so I was responsible for integrating the health system and some performance management stuff, and I was responsible for starting some new businesses and running a large part of the clinical operations. I was actually very happy in that job and loved it. And Dr. Cosgrove, who was the CEO and still is the CEO there, came and asked me if I might be interested in joining the team in Abu Dhabi. There had actually been a fair amount of turnover at the top of the organization in Abu Dhabi, and it was a project with enormous promise, but it was having a little bit of trouble getting its feet under itself. I took the opportunity to not only grow professionally but to serve an organization that I loved dearly and had been good to my family and to me. It wasn't a gleaming hospital when I went over. In fact, it was a team of 35 people in an unfinished, not even topped-off steel structure on a sandy island that had not really been developed. Over a five-year period, we turned that into a 3,500-person organization with representation from 70 countries at the 3 million-square-foot building, and delivered tertiary, quaternary care in that time frame.
MH: Were most of the patients traveling from all over the Middle East and Africa, or was a local community served?
Harrison: We really had three big missions there. The first was to allow people who lived in the UAE, and Abu Dhabi specifically, to stay close to home for their healthcare. The second was to add new capability to the market, and the third was to train healthcare leaders for the future in the UAE. The vast majority of our patients were from the United Arab Emirates. Within the first year of operations, we were fortunate enough to see patients from 35 countries. Some had traveled a very long way for some of the special services, clinical services that we offered.
MH: What's a lesson learned during that experience that's transferrable to the challenge you're beginning right now?
Harrison: Probably the best lesson is if you have a great team, you can figure out just about any complicated problem. And I learned to surround myself with really good people, to listen to them carefully, and to try not to get in their way, and then, when necessary, to make clear, definitive decisions. One of the things I find very attractive about Intermountain is people are highly empowered to speak up, speak their mind, to try new things, but always to be good to each other and always put our patients first.
MH: The organization you've just joined is a huge, sophisticated integrated system. As a practical matter, how do you go about doing your homework and making the personal connections that are necessary to get started?
Harrison: That really is the key question, isn't it? You know, technical knowledge is one thing, but it's really about relationships and culture that allow people to be successful. And I'll tell you, I was extraordinarily fortunate. I think it was my first day at work, Aug. 10, and Dr. Sorenson, the outgoing CEO, couldn't have been more generous or helpful. On top of that, I'm just on a listening tour and I'm spending as much of my time as possible making my way around this large and complicated but really very well-run system, and learning from the people who have committed their lives here, and I'm really excited to be back in Utah.
MH: As an outsider, is there anything you've identified that you can help Intermountain improve?
Harrison: Yes, but I think it's really sort of degrees of improvement. The overall strategy and direction of Intermountain—making sure that we provide high-value care, that we understand and continue to learn how to manage population health—these are very contemporary and, I think, directionally, absolutely correct. There are some specifics that we can work on. Even though our supply chain is great, there is actually lots more work to do around standardization and making sure that we're very careful about the resources we use. And I think I've been fortunate to have great experience around some of those sort of initiatives at the Clinic and also in Abu Dhabi. But I think these are really degrees of changes as opposed to a right turn or a left turn.
