At Leadership Symposium, healthcare’s C-suite leaders say they’re fed up with status quo

SCOTTSDALE, Arizona—The weariness was palpable at Modern Healthcare’s first in-person conference since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic almost 20 months ago.

Patience is clearly wearing thin among the C-suite executives who attended the magazine’s recent Leadership Symposium. They’re tired of having the same conversations about healthcare’s entrenched problems year after year yet seeing no meaningful changes to a system that still incentivizes inflated prices and more services for underwhelming outcomes.

“For 10 years I’ve been listening to the same conversation,” Dr. Stephen Klasko, CEO of Jefferson Health, a not-for-profit system based in Philadelphia, said during one of the conference sessions. “Every single panel, it’s ‘equity, prevention, payer-provider alignment.’ It’s so beautiful. But we have an unsustainable, failed system.” Klasko is retiring at the end of the year.

Maybe it was the collective exhaustion of managing their organizations through an unprecedented catastrophe. Whatever it was, leaders signaled they’re more ready than ever to embrace sweeping changes. They were eager to hear from their colleagues what worked during the pandemic. 

Here are some highlights from the invitation-only conference, which was held Sept. 27-29 in Scottsdale.

‘Customer obsession’

The e-commerce behemoth Amazon has a strategy of “customer obsession” that one of its leaders argues should permeate healthcare as well. 

An organization ought to wrap itself around the way a customer thinks and what a customer needs or wants—even if it’s with things not articulated, Phoebe Yang, general manager of healthcare at Amazon Web Services, said during a panel on healthcare’s disruptors. Yang said her job at Amazon is to help healthcare organizations self-disrupt and innovate for future growth.

Ninety percent of Amazon’s inventions are aimed at solving customer pain points, Yang said. Her advice to healthcare providers: Be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time while you reorient yourself around how to meet the needs of your customer, patient, member, or consumer—how to make their lives less friction-filled and better. But it won’t be easy. 

“You will take hits, and it will feel painful,” Yang told the audience. “But over the long term, you’re going to get toward the end result of meeting your customer’s needs and being lasting, valued, and trusted partners in their lives.”

Dr. Susan Turney, CEO of Marshfield Clinic Health System in Wisconsin, said she hears lots of talk in healthcare about patient access and choice. But she’s not convinced the industry is truly patient-centric. 

“I think there’s a lot of focus on whether or not the industry and individual systems and providers are patient-centric,” she said during the session. “I would rather focus on how we design a model that is truly patient-centric. We should talk about fundamentally what needs to be done rather than just circle around it.”

Dr. Alan Kaplan, CEO of UW Health also in Wisconsin, was similarly skeptical. The way he sees it, so-called disruptors are merely biting at the crust of the $3.9 trillion healthcare pie, but they’re not inherently changing the way health systems like his operate. 

“What makes you believe that the next 10 years will be different than what we’ve experienced in the last 25 as far as truly changing the healthcare system?” Kaplan said during the session. 

Yang responded that patient demographics are indeed changing. With that, they’re demanding services at different locations, including—for seniors—aging in place. 

Klasko, of Jefferson Health, said he thinks a contingent of patients is simply fed up with the current system. One way Jefferson is responding is by creating a Match.com-like program that pairs obstetricians with patients. Patients enter preferences like locations and visit times and providers compete for their business. 

“We have Star Wars technology for how I deal with an individual OB-GYN patient that has been amazing over the last 30 years,” Klasko said. “And a Fred Flintstone delivery system that hasn’t changed.”

Hiring and keeping a diverse workforce

Rush University Medical Center in Chicago is dealing with the same difficult employment environment as its peers across the country. Keeping employees motivated is a key challenge. 

Morale was relatively high during the pandemic’s first wave because staff were riding on adrenaline and being praised as heroes, said Dr. Omar Lateef, CEO of the medical center. By the time the second surge hit, everyone felt beat up, he said. And when the delta variant entered the picture, they were done. The lack of morgue space was a back-page story.

At the same time, employers have to compete for workers. At one point during the pandemic, Lateef said there were about 12,000 ancillary healthcare job openings in Chicago and just 3,000 applicants.

“So the only thing we can do to keep our front-line (workers) going is to really get them to believe in the mission, to be part of the team” he said.

Lateef also urged audience members to engage in “overwhelming transparency” with their workforces. Ensure employees understand the organization’s debt ceiling and cash on hand, for example. 

Another symposium session centered on health systems’ diversity, equity and inclusion work, with leaders talking about how they’re making DEI front and center in their hiring and promotion practices. 

At University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, leaders are just beginning to put the infrastructure in place to invest in the right executives, whether it’s front-line nurses or aspiring leaders, said CEO Suresh Gunasekaran. Developing impressive recruitment packages for pediatric neurosurgeons has been second nature, but the same hasn’t been true for DEI, he said. 

To that end, the system plans to create a leadership program that involves both its recruitment and retention teams.

“It kind of starts with this being a senior leadership level mandate that it’s OK to go out there—and not just OK, it’s critical to our future. It’s a strategic priority to go get this kind of leadership and this kind of staff that can help us execute,” Gunasekaran said. “I think that’s been the real change.”

Panelists agreed it’s not just about making diverse hires, it’s about ensuring equity in opportunities, education and promotions among established employees. 

University Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, for example, already has a very diverse workforce. But it also abides by metrics that ensure it’s offering training apprenticeships to employees at every level and reaching out especially to people of color in the organization who want to develop their careers further, said Dr. Shereef Elnahal, president and CEO of the public academic health center. 

“It’s not just hiring people of color or talent from the outside—the real banner of success, in my view, is internally promoting and building career paths for folks who we hire out of school, and for folks who we hire from the community,” he said. “That’s really important to us, because I heard constantly when I first got here a little over two years ago that we were not equitably affording folks those opportunities."

‘Government ought to get out of the way’

Conference attendees weren’t just fed up with their own industry; their disillusionment extended to the federal government too. 

Speakers during a session on politics said healthcare leaders must organize to enact the sweeping changes their industry needs. Their resounding message was to quit looking to Congress or the Biden administration for fixes. 

“My belief is looking to the government to actually fix something as complex as this won’t work,” Dan Liljenquist, chief strategy officer at Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare, told the audience during the session. “We know healthcare. How do we organize for a different future?” 

Ceci Connolly, president and CEO of the Alliance of Community Health Plans, a trade group for not-for-profit health plans, said the pandemic contributed to what’s become an “increasingly toxic” environment in Washington, D.C., in which policymakers are skeptical of new interventions.

Health systems can respond by doing more to highlight their value to their communities, Connolly said. 

At one point, Liljenquist, a former Utah state senator, asked panelists whether they really thought Congress could substantively change the direction of healthcare. 

Connolly responded swiftly: “My answer would be government ought to get out of the way.”