After serving as president of University Hospitals through a yearlong transition process, Dr. Cliff Megerian will add CEO to his title on Feb. 1, succeeding Tom Zenty.
Megerian received his medical degree from the University of Michigan Medical School and first came to UH in 1988 as a 25-year-old surgical intern. He went on to complete a fellowship at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and Harvard Medical School. He also holds a management certificate from CWRU's Weatherhead School of Management.
He returned to UH in 2002 and has since risen through the ranks of leadership. He spoke with Crain's about his decision to lead UH and his goals in the role. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. — Lydia Coutré
Why did you want to lead UH?
I think anybody would be honored to lead UH. UH has a legacy of caring for its community that spans over 150 years and is really a time-tested organization that has incredible fortitude in its DNA. I never grew up wanting to be the CEO of a hospital. I grew up wanting to be a respected and caring surgeon. When the board and Tom came to the decision that Tom wanted to move on at the end of 2020, beginning of 2021, I was approached by the board and by human resources to consider applying to be CEO. I was overjoyed and frankly a little intimidated, but the good news is Tom and the board were very thoughtful in putting in place a yearlong transition the whole year of 2020, which turned out to be a real challenging year. When I first started out, I never dreamed of being in this role, but I'm absolutely overjoyed that I am.
When you accepted the role, what were your initial goals for the system?
The goals that I really have put before the organization is to make UH the most trusted health provider in the region. I want to double down as an organization on being consumer-focused by providing our patients the most consistent quality of care, but also the most, if you will, five-star patient experience no matter where they access UH. I had a part with this over the last six years, but we have now emerged as clearly the highest-value provider. If we can now do that throughout all swaths of patients that we touch, we will continue to be successful, we will continue to grow and we'll continue to do what the community needs. And then finally, my goal is to create an organization that is even more agile than it is today. Our agility was tested during the 2020 pandemic. We have to be agile because all health care centers are going to be facing a number of things. There's going to be a continued cost pressure. There's going to be a continued transparency with regard to consumerism. We are going to be moving a lot of our business from the inpatient world to the outpatient world, which changes the complexity of our earnings and our delivery system. And we're now going to be moving — thanks, I think, as a silver lining to COVID — a portion of our day-to-day ambulatory care to the virtual world.
A lot of the challenges of the pandemic are ones health care has been grappling with for a while. Is it fair to say the pandemic really highlighted those challenges and accelerated not just UH but the health care industry as a whole toward some of the solutions?
The pandemic is obviously a tragedy — injured lives, lost lives, lives changed, finances injured and disrupted. We in health care have been trying for years to offer telehealth services. We never got off the ground. At UH, we were less than 1%, even though we tried our darndest. During the height of the pandemic, we were up to 75% of our visits were tele. We learned how to do it, we learned how to be agile and our patients learned how to do it. And that has been a good kick-start for American health care because it's more efficient, it's lower cost, and it's more highly accessible. (The pandemic) taught us how in a modern era to manage during the release of a contagion. I'm hopeful and I pray that here will never be another contagion. But I also know that's naive, and I think that having the entire United States learn how to continue to function with masking, gowning, gloving, hand-washing and even more sophisticated PPE efforts, we will be better prepared for something in the future. We've had to think about our supply chain, and we pivoted by creating relationships and actually investing in domestic companies. The COVID pandemic has caused hospitals in town that historically have not always collaborated, specifically us and the Cleveland Clinic in the past, but also Metro, St. Vincent and others, we are now locked arm in arm. And then finally, for us, it's given launch to a whole bunch of new research projects. We've launched over 150 clinical trials specifically around treatment and prevention of COVID and COVID-related complications.
Looking at whatever our next normal is after the pandemic, what do you see as the next challenges for UH?
I'm very bullish on UH, first. UH is really positioned well, with especially some of great things that have been happening both in terms of partnerships with others — not only hospitals but also some insurance companies. I think many of our long-term challenges are going to be similar to those challenges at any hospital in this region. One is our aging population, and that increases obviously our Medicare patient mix, so we'll be increasingly beholden to government payments. It's going to intensify our focus on cost containment. The other challenge is the consistent movement, especially lately, from inpatient activity to outpatient activity, which really changes your financial picture a little bit and you have to evolve your infrastructure to match that. I think the other challenge that we have to face is that increasingly, health care will be more and more and more — rightly so — consumer focused. It's really incumbent upon us to demonstrate that we have and we bring the highest value for those consumers.
What are the next opportunities for UH?
I think the major opportunities for UH is built on the backbone of an organization — and Tom Zenty deserves incredible accolades for this achievement — but UH's care delivery is built on the backbone of providing the highest compassion, individualized, personalized, kindest care within a framework that is high value. And that has got a halo around it of one of the most legacy academic teaching hospitals that is now the eighth-most funded research hospital in the United States in terms of total federal funding.
