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Using the Road to Recovery to Build the Health Care System We Need

By The SHSMD Team posted 08-25-2020 12:09 PM

  


This blog post previews an upcoming panel session with Alan Kaplan, M.D. CEO of UW Health in Madison, Wisconsin, at Navigating a New Reality, the virtual conference from the AHA and SHSMD, from September 14-16. The session, “Using the Road to Recovery to Build the Health Care System We Need,” will feature Kaplan, Julie Peterson, CEO of Kittitas Valley Healthcare in Ellensburg, Washington, and Tina Freese Decker, president and CEO of Spectrum Health in Grand Rapids, Michigan. These diverse organizations are effectively planning to facilitate financial recovery with a strategic focus, including capital strategy, expense management and growth and investment towards a new future.

Finding Opportunities in the Crisis

As well as challenges, crises can create opportunities by:
  • Changing priorities.
  • Requiring experimentation.
  • Fully exposing weak spots that must be addressed but were previously ignored or “too hard to solve.”
  • Encouraging new levels of agility.
  • Fostering a spirit of collaboration and “in this together.”
  • Building determination to emerge stronger.
  • Surfacing overlooked capabilities in the workforce.
  • Emphasizing the necessity of learning from rather than covering over mistakes. 

Kaplan notes that hospitals and health systems have already seized these opportunities, demonstrating a new capacity for speed and agility that previously went untapped. “We built testing capabilities, developed new policies and procedures and secured access to community data in record time. We are beginning to recover services safely for patients and staff. Hospitals have dealt effectively with contagious diseases and disasters through the decades, and we will continue to do so now.” Although these are reasons to be optimistic, other circumstances have tempered that optimism. “Pent up patient care needs coupled with our financial situation creates an urgency to set a different course for the future, as federal stimulus funding, executive pay cuts and staff furloughs are providing only fractional and temporary relief.”

At the same time, he points out, “Our recovery process acknowledges that rare opportunities are emerging from the damage. Many of these opportunities merit becoming permanent features of our organization rather than temporary changes and transitory capabilities.”

As difficult as the COVID-19 crisis has been for the health care workforce, Kaplan identifies potential silver linings. “Sustained telemedicine adoption could diminish the impact of staffing shortages, increase the satisfaction levels of patients and care providers and reduce the geographic footprint needed to care for our patients. Work-from-home has gained greater acceptance, and has the potential to lower facility costs and serve as a recruitment tool.”

Road to Recovery

Kaplan specifies, “Recovery planning at UW Health is focusing on four steps. We know that with ongoing real-time assessment of our situation, these actions will not just help us get through the COVID-19 crisis, they’ll help us emerge as a better organization.”


He also identified three leadership imperatives, saying, “What we need to do is be the leaders we aspired to be early on in our careers, and the leaders we have admired from our peer group and other industries.”

These imperatives are:
  • Acknowledge with candor.
  • More leadership, less management.
  • Breakthrough behavior changes.

Kaplan notes that the overarching challenges of leadership have intensified but not fundamentally changed. “We need to navigate through the fog of this pandemic and craft a compelling future, different but just as exciting as we previously conceived. Our job has always been to create clarity in the face of headwinds and ambiguity. Now is no different, except the challenges are more acute and there is more at stake.”

To hear more from Kaplan and the other leaders on the panel, learn more about health care transformation and stay on the leading edge of tomorrow’s health care disruption today, be sure to attend Navigating a New Reality, the virtual conference from the AHA and SHSMD, September 14-16, 2020. This panel is generously sponsored by Kaufman Hall.
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