Building on Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s innovative wellness programs, Samanntha DuBridge encourages employees to be open and honest about their mental health p. 134
< Samanntha DuBridge VP, Global Benefits and Employee Mobility
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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Bleeding-Edge
Glimpse into the future and discover how six healthcare innovators are working daily to usher in the next era of healthcare technology, and get an inside look at what motivates each of these leaders to break new ground in the industry, p. 78
Innovations
80. Andrea Thomaz
85. Ed Rumzis
88. John Meiners
94. Eric Poon
98. Brian Eigel
102. Tom Ahrens
The Path
12. Mark Heringer leverages his financial expertise as Adventist Health moves to the cloud
22. Jill Mongelluzzo’s propensity for team sports has served her well in the world of HR
18. Mount Sinai Health System’s Epic initiative is just one example of how Kristin Myers innovates
26. Lou DeSorbo discusses how his military career influences his perspective on security and risk
The Reason
64. John Brown Jr. spearheads inclusive workplace policies that empower all employees to succeed
30. Tabatha Erck is expertly integrating the hearing industry with other healthcare sectors
43. David Cade on creating a community for healthcare lawyers to collaborate and learn from one another
40. Jaideep Parekh reflects on how his supply chain strategy has evolved throughout his career
52. Bradley Tinnermon discusses how he’s taking Banner Health’s revenue cycle to the next level
The Issues
68. Sallie Arnett is tackling the issue of sepsis with stateof-the-art technological improvements
72. Betsy Van Hecke is inspired every day by Medtronic’s mission to help patients live better lives
60. Andy Long sees firsthand how Insys Therapeutics’s medicines can change lives
Top to bottom: Ackerman + Gruber (Erck), Stephanie Massaro Photography (Mongelluzzo), Jason Cohen Photography (Brown Jr.)
The Business
106. Despite being chief privacy officer, Richard Eskew champions transparency at Accolade, Inc.
127. After completing forty-two acquisitions so far, Arti Dhuper considers herself a subject matter expert
112. Ginger Chappell wants all Sutter Health employees to feel like they’re on the compliance team
130. John Williford appointed legal leaders to different business units to improve his legal team’s functionality
The Feature
80. Andrea Thomaz discusses Moxi, a robotic nursing aide that is giving nurses more time to spend with patients
94. Eric Poon is filling gaps in patient care at Duke University Health System with cutting-edge technology
88. John Meiners leads the American Heart Association’s digital CPR education program
102. Tom Ahrens has some simple suggestions on how to drastically reduce the spread of common germs
132. Samanntha DuBridge wants Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s employees to feel comfortable discussing their mental health
148. Corizon Health’s Carolyn Schneider relates her work with start-ups to the world of healthcare HR
145. Christina Flint is encouraging women to create their own work/life balance by telling employers what they need to succeed
154. Bernie Knobbe and Mary Finch explain how they’re making wellness a part of daily life at AECOM
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From
On to the Next Frontier
I grew up watching Disney movies on VHS tapes. Classics such as The Lion King, Aladdin, and The Little Mermaid were staples of my childhood. Fast forward a decade, however, and the whir of the VHS tape as it rewound and fast-forwarded had been muted by the introduction of a small plastic disc called a DVD. This new technology allowed for greater portability and enhanced durability of my favorite movies, but it relegated VHS tapes to the archives of technology history.
Jump ahead to 2019, and this once-monumental technological advancement seems prehistoric. Now, many people almost exclusively stream content on a variety of platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, and HBO, often completely foregoing physical copies of their favorite movies and TV shows. People born in the twenty-first century might not even know what a VHS tape is anymore.
Similar shifts can be observed in healthcare. For example, many care providers are prioritizing a shift away from paper medical records in favor of EHR systems where they can view hundreds, or even thousands, of patient records electronically. But soon, EHR systems will also seem like old news. In this issue of American Healthcare Leader, we spoke with six leaders who are breaking technological barriers in the industry. From Andrea Thomaz’s work to introduce robotic nursing aides into hospital environments (p. 80) to John Meiners’s work to create a state-of-the-art digital CPR education program (p. 88), the future of healthcare is taking shape right in front of us.
Throughout the section, our guest editor, AMN Healthcare’s Dr. Cole Edmonson, also provides his insight into how each of these leaders’ impact will affect the future of patient care for us all.
As we contemplate what the future of healthcare look like as technologies such as AI become more common, some might feel hopeful while others might be fearful. After all, human beings aren’t always comfortable with change. But if I’ve learned one thing from working on this issue, it’s that the people leading these shifts in healthcare are inventing the future with one group front and center: patients.
Joe Dixon Editor Guerrero
From the Guest Editor
YoungDoo Moon Carey
Evolving Alongside Healthcare
Growing up, I can remember my first computer, the TI-99. I recall just how excited I was to be able to play the game Pong on it, type on the keyboard and see words appear on the screen, and to be able to edit and correct text right there on that magical screen without using Wite-Out on paper or starting over. Today, that probably seems silly and quite foreign to many people and perhaps reminiscent of a digital dinosaur age, but I am from Generation X (somewhere between digital dinosaur and digital native).
I also recall being really happy I took typing as an elective course in high school, especially since my first employer twenty-eight years ago required clinical nurses to complete typing tests for speed and accuracy before getting the job. I kept asking myself why I needed typing skills as a nurse since all the clinical documentation in patient records was on paper. Much to my surprise, we documented our medications on a computer system and used a light pen for checking boxes as we documented patient care. Fast forward two years, and I was working part time in the ICU caring for patients and part-time helping to design and test one of the first EHRs in US.
My journey into healthcare began with my father’s diagnosis of lung cancer when I was 19. I became a caregiver, along with my mother and sisters, accompanying him to clinics, specialists, treatments, and hospitals. As I experienced his journey through the healthcare system, I found myself watching, listening, and engaging with many different professions—physicians, nurses, pharmacists, therapists, and many others, but I was drawn to one group in particular: the nurses. The nurse, who appeared to me to be the “glue” that held the entire experience together, coordinating, caring, communicating, advocating, listening, educating, comforting and leading. These were the people who shepherded my family safely, competently, and compassionately
through the healthcare system by bringing an art and science to bear on our experience.
What was not evident to me at such a young age was the technology that from the background was beginning to shape our families journey and all our healthcare journeys, in a quiet, subtle way. As I look back today, I can see how today’s EHRs, the internet, intraoperability, genetic sequencing, medical implants, 3D printing, nanotechnology, thousands of apps and the Internet of Things developed from the early technology I was awestruck by early in my career.
Digital Health is a burgeoning field that has yet to come of age. Digital health represents a positive disruptive force in healthcare from provider relationships, care delivery, pharmaceuticals, genetics and genomics, personalized medicine, analytics, robotics, and artificial intelligence that will transform the health experience in our nation. Digital health will challenge the current delivery, regulation, licensing and payments systems to be more agile, nimble, responsive, efficient and effective. On-demand, instant access, and block chain and analytics will be hallmarks of this new predictive paradigm. This transformed future state depends on diverse industries coming together to explore new, exciting frontiers.
Trust, ethical decision-making, evidence-based decisions, transparency, connectedness, access, and compassion must be at the core of new technology that is developed with a view of health that is greater and more complex than we have ever understood or imagined. Building an actual culture of health for all through the intersection of digitized health and human caring can be one our greatest aspirations and the most inspired accomplishments of our age.
Dr. Cole Edmonson
The Path
Every step an executive takes on their career journey is pivotal to achieving their current successes. Along the way, individuals accumulate technical skills, foster relationships, and develop the leadership acumen that have turned them into pioneers of the industry.
18.
12. Mark Heringer
15. Lil Delcampo
Kristin Myers
22. Jill Mongelluzzo
26. Lou DeSorbo
By Abhinanda Datta
The Economy of the Cloud
Chief Technology Officer Mark Heringer draws from his financial background to spearhead technological innovations in healthcare
As an agricultural economics major in college, Mark Heringer was interested in studying econometrics, a field which uses computers to build models of the economy. It is then that he realized he preferred learning about computers instead of economics. He started working for a government-sponsored entity called the Farm Credit System, dealing with a series of banks.
He began working in the IT department doing a variety of things such as training and programming. In 1987, he got the opportunity to be in charge of the department. As vice president of the organization’s management information systems department, Heringer
developed and provided the leadership, vision, and determination to successfully implement a five-year plan for upgrading the information processing technology used by the Western Farm Credit District, a group of twenty affiliated companies with ninety offices and one thousand employees in seven western states.
“We replaced its general ledger, we replaced its loan accounting systems, and we replaced its HR systems. We started rolling out PCs. So, from 1987 to 1993, we were essentially overhauling everything that it used to run its business for that series of financial services,” Heringer says.
He worked for the same company for eighteen years, during which it went through various mergers, and grew its presence from five to twelve western states. In the late ’90s, the company merged with a wholesale bank out of Spokane, Washington, and he spent two years working with the joint management team. However, he soon realized it was not the right fit for him. After almost two decades in financial services, Heringer made the shift to healthcare.
He started looking for other opportunities and began networking with a former colleague from IBM who was running a recruiting organization. Then, in the late ’90s, Sutter Health formed from the merger of several hospitals, and the organization was in the process of trying to build an integrated healthcare delivery network. Specifically, it was looking for a business systems product manager to support the Lawson Software ERP implementation.
“Due to my background, I was perfect for the role,” Heringer says. “I made my way performing different roles such as HR, payroll, procurement, and workflow suites for all of Sutter Health’s companies. This is how I made the transition into healthcare, and I am very lucky because I enjoy this much more than I enjoyed financial services.”
He later spent seven years as vice president providing technical services for an integrated health delivery system with 26 hospitals, 250 offices, 5,000 doctors, and 50,000 employees across Northern California. During this time, he was
responsible for wide area and local area networks, data centers, servers, storage, voice communications, and end-user devices.
In early 2014, Heringer was working as a consultant and got involved with the various medical facilities owned by Adventist Health. Eventually, there was an opening at the company, and he left to join it.
In his current role as chief technology officer, he is responsible for the data center, network, and server across Adventist’s twenty-two markets. He is also responsible for its security and manages a team that handles rapid response, working as a liaison between the service desk and the vendors. Recently, Adventist shifted from physical data centers to a more cloud-based system, which has been a focus for Heringer.
“We started the implementation about fifteen months ago,” he says. “So, all of our general financial information is now in the cloud, and we are working on a project to move all of our collaboration space into the cloud in the next few months.”
Earlier this year, Adventist decided to partner with Cerner to take responsibility for about two hundred of the company’s employees who are in charge of running and maintaining Adventist’s EHR. Adventist made a decision to partner with Cerner to be responsible for all of the application work that goes on around the EHR.
“This deal with Cerner looks very much like another successful deal I did
Chief Technology Officer
Mark Heringer
Adventist Health
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“I made my way performing different roles such as HR, payroll, procurement, and workflow suites for all of Sutter Health’s companies. This is how I made the transition into healthcare.”
in the ’90s,” Heringer says. “It is a ten-year deal, so we’re in the early stages of working on it and getting this whole partnership to work.”
Despite his vast technological experience, working at Adventist is a very different environment for Heringer. When he spent his sixteen years at Sutter Health, he was responsible for a 45,000 square foot data center. Everything was on-premises, and he was responsible for thousands of servers. Part of what they are dealing with as an IT team while shifting to the cloud is managing that relationship and service delivery.
“Not a lot of people have experience in managing big cloud services, and we’re still trying to figure out how do we build the right relationship with Microsoft and Oracle so we get the kind of service that we would expect,” Heringer says. “How those relationships are managed and monitored is the intellectual challenge that we’re facing right now.” AHL
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By Roland Archer
Safeguarding Medical Breakthroughs
When you’re part of an academic institution known for forging new ways forward in scientific research, it helps to have someone working behind the scenes to make sure all necessary legal avenues are covered.
Lil Delcampo joined USC’s Health Sciences legal team in 2009 and worked her way up to become associate general counsel for the department in 2013. In her role, she supervises and provides support for the university’s health system, Keck Medicine of USC, which includes Keck Medical Center of USC, USC Verdugo Hills Hospital, and USC Care Medical Group.
Keck Medicine of USC is one of only two university-based medical systems in the Los Angeles area, and the Keck School of Medicine of USC is the region’s first medical school. Keck Medical Center of USC includes two acute care hospitals: Keck Hospital of USC and USC Norris Cancer Hospital. The enterprise also owns the community hospital USC Verdugo Hills Hospital, and in addition to operating the USC Care Medical Group, it includes more than forty outpatient facilities, some at affiliated hospitals, in Los Angeles, Orange, Kern, Tulare, and Ventura counties.
With USC Health Sciences forging new frontiers in healthcare research, Lil Delcampo helps cover the details that keep the institution moving forward
In 2018, US News & World Report ranked Keck Medical Center of USC among the top three hospitals in Los Angeles and top seven in California. The medical center also ranked in the top ten in urology; top twenty in ophthalmology, geriatrics, and cancer care; top twenty-five in orthopedics; and top fifty in neurology and neurosurgery, gynecology, nephrology and cardiology, and heart surgery. Prior to joining USC, Delcampo spent two years developing her own health law practice, and served as general counsel for healthservice companies in Southern California. Before starting her own firm, she served as senior counsel with Hooper, Lundy & Bookman, counseling clients on regulatory matters, HIPAA, privacy and informed-consent issues, as well as litigating various managed-care cases. She is the coauthor of two chapters in healthcare treatises, “Providers v. Payors: Common Legal Disputes in Managed Care;” Managed Care Litigation, BNA (2005), and “The FDA Approval Process for New Drugs;” Pharmaceutical Law, BNA (2007).
“A tremendous lack of ethnic diversity exists in the field of neuroscience. We’re working to change that through our international partnerships, which will be central to our understanding of how diverse populations experience aging.”
All that experience provides USC with a wealth of knowledge as USC Health Sciences continues to push boundaries with cutting-edge research. In November 2018, the university announced the Keck School of Medicine had united hundreds of researchers spread throughout thirty-nine different countries as part of the Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through MetaAnalysis (ENIGMA) consortium. Through ENIGMA, these scientists work together to collect and analyze brain-imaging and genetics data, which can not only be used to study conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, but also to direct a global study of brain aging. USC Health Sciences notes that care and treatment for people with dementia costs more than $604 billion globally every year and as researchers race to find ways to slow or reverse the progression of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, pooling these resources at an international level can be a key tool for discovery.
Beyond casting a wide net for research, Paul Thompson, PhD, associate director of the USC Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute and director of the Imaging Genetics Center at the Keck
School of Medicine of USC, says ENIGMA also knocks down barriers that previously existed (and, to some extent, still do) in the research world.
“A tremendous lack of ethnic diversity exists in the field of neuroscience,” Thompson said in a November press release. “We’re working to change that through our international partnerships, which will be central to our understanding of how diverse populations experience aging.”
On another front, it was announced in December 2018 that researchers at USC’s Keck School of Medicine are using DNA from breast cancer patients to create a blood test that would predict which patients are at risk for having their cancer return and spread to other organs. Although the initial collection focused solely on breast cancer patients in California, more DNA samples from around the United States are expected to be collected into 2019.
The research shows no sign of slowing down or becoming any less adventurous, so it’s to the university’s great advantage that its legal team includes a seasoned professional such as Delcampo keeping a keen eye on the details. AHL
By Anthony Ruth
On a Mission to Innovate
In implementing Mount Sinai Health System’s Epic program, Kristin Myers, the organization’s senior vice president for technology, is creating a platform for healthcare’s next evolution
When Kristin Myers began work on an electronic health system selection for one of Mount Sinai Health System’s ambulatory care clinics back in 2005, she had no idea she was embarking on a system-wide Epic implementation program. Ultimately, the project would transform Mount Sinai Health System and her career. But then, Myers has always been open to opportunity and change.
After completing a dual degree in law and technology, she began working for Cerner Corporation, a healthcare IT vendor. “Being a vendor is very different from the next role I had consulting for Ernst & Young,” says Myers. “That experience is very different from working at a health system. However, all the experiences before
I joined Mount Sinai laid a foundation that has helped me succeed and grow in my career.”
As senior vice president for technology, Myers oversees application strategy, the clinical portfolio, as well the programs to support and transform operations that advance Mount Sinai’s mission as an academic medical center. As her flagship program, the Epic implementation is an effort to have one integrated EHR system across all of Mount Sinai’s hospitals and locations to improve patient care while also supporting the health system’s research and education functions. “Being able to support all three aspects of our mission has been unique as an academic medical center,” says Myers.
Kristin Myers SVP, Technology
Mount Sinai Health System
A Responsibility to Give Back
Kristin Myers was one of only two women in her technology course in college, but that didn’t stop her from making it her chosen path.
“Women should be relentless in their career objectives and feel empowered to speak up and own their career,” she says.
Myers grew more aware of the gender disparity in technology, and of gender dynamics in general, as she matured and advanced in her career. That’s led her to take an active role in developing younger leaders.
“Women in technology or in leadership, we have a responsibility to give back—to coach and mentor, and take opportunities where we can to ensure that there are other women who can participate in the discussion, to get a diversity of opinions,” she says. “That’s how you make the best decisions.”
Following the initial ambulatory care update, Mount Sinai set out to upgrade its clinical workflow in its New York teaching hospital, replacing the paper charts and an aging mainframe system called TDS. In 2010, the majority of the clinical departments had been converted over to the EHR platform. What they didn’t plan for was the growth Mount Sinai would experience in the coming years.
“We started off as a two-hospital system; we are now seven hospitals with more than seven thousand primary and specialty care physicians,” explains Myers. Following Mount Sinai’s merger with Continuum in 2013, the organization is one of the largest employers in New York City, with about thirty thousand staff.
The scale isn’t the only thing that’s evolved. Although the intent behind the program was to enable better clinical practice, improving safety, quality, and efficiency, the Epic system has now become a platform for innovation, Myers says.
She and her team are looking at API development and opportunities to utilize the data they collect to develop applications on top of the platform. Thanks to the Epic implementation and the data scientists that collaborate with the team, clinicians are using predictive analytics to predict whether a patient will become septic, among other health risks.
“Being able to provide that data at the point of care to this physician, where they can identify septic patients early, before their conditions worsen so they can take action on it—has been a huge improvement to patient safety and reducing morbidity,” says Myers.
The system is also helping Mount Sinai improve the patient experience by reducing readmissions and streamlining workflows. “From the time that the patient enters the facility, operations can track the steps of the patient’s workflow,” Myers explains.
This allows operations to understand where there might be bottlenecks and where there are opportunities to improve efficiencies. They also now offer scheduled telehealth visits and other digital innovations that patients have come to expect from healthcare because
“We started off as a two-hospital system; we are now seven hospitals with more than seven thousand primary and specialty care physicians.”
of the prevalence of technology in their day-to-day lives, and Mount Sinai is implementing a Salesforce CRM platform to better personalize patient communication.
A major component of the project has been change management, and Myers’s team has taken care to tailor its implementation approach to the individual sites and stakeholders, which also include more than forty-five major ambulatory care centers throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, and Long Island.
“You really need people to be engaged and to support the transformation because it’s challenging, and everyone’s daily life is changing. That extra degree of attention and focus on what the impact is going to be to individual institutions is very important.”
Myers has also worked hard to keep her team informed and motivated throughout the process by starting a mentoring program within the technology department and encouraging her team to be continuous learners.
That mind-set is in line with how Myers thinks about the project overall. Even though the completion is scheduled for 2020, “we’re not really ever done,” she says. “Even when the implementation is completed, the platform needs to continuously evolve and be optimized to keep up with innovation.” AHL
By Tricia Despres
The Essence of Teamwork
Since childhood, National Grid’s Jill Mongelluzzo’s inclination toward working with others has led her down a path to human resources
As a young kid, Jill Mongelluzzo had many dreams. She spent her days in school, developing her love of the arts and photography. Yet, her main focus was sports.
It was in the pool and on the field in which she learned her life’s greatest lessons.
“I learned how to be a leader, how to work with others as a team, and how to reach toward goals you didn’t at first think were attainable,” says Mongelluzzo, who played softball and soccer growing up and lettered in swimming during her college years. “It was these virtues that helped me throughout my personal and professional life, and, looking back, I can see how these lessons shaped me.”
Her interest in human resources began in college, as Mongelluzzo was naturally drawn to the profession’s focus on teamwork as a key element needed for an organization to thrive.
“I was drawn to the philosophy that everyone could have a role in an organization,” she says. “I also enjoyed presenting and being in front of people, so human resources seemed like the natural career choice for me.”
Eventually, that future would entail spending fourteen years at the New York Public Library, where she handled total rewards and benefits administration and sat on the NYPL/DC37 Health and Welfare Plan Trust as a trustee, both developing her skills and network.
“Working at the NYPL with its three thousand employees at the time, I was exposed to everything benefits and experienced firsthand the impact of benefits decisions on the employee community,” she says. “The time I spent there was so valuable.”
Yet soon, Mongelluzzo found that her destiny was pulling her in another direction, and she found her next growth opportunity at National Grid, one of the
Jill Mongelluzzo Director of Benefits National Grid
“Whether an employee is a new parent, or just graduated from college, or has dedicated their life to the company, we want to make sure we are offering benefits that support each phase of their lives.”
world's largest utility companies focusing on delivering energy safely, efficiently, reliably, and responsibly. National Grid, headquartered in the United Kingdom, is one of the largest investor-owned energy companies in the world that plays a vital role in delivering gas and electricity to millions of people across Great Britain and the northeastern United States, and is swiftly becoming an innovator in the renewable and clean energy space.
After joining the company in 2015, Mongelluzzo was promoted into her role of director of benefits in February 2018. In this role, she directs corporate benefits strategy with a focus on the improvement of employee well-being and productivity for a multigenerational, diverse, and inclusive workforce.
Mongelluzzo says she places a lot of importance on creating a benefits package that is not only going to attract and retain employees from all generations, but one that supports the needs of National Grid’s diverse workforce.
“It’s this philosophy that is leading us to offer benefits that make sense for employees, no matter where they are in their lives,” she says. “Whether an employee is a new parent, or just graduated from college, or has dedicated their life to the company, we want to make sure we are offering benefits that support each phase of their lives.”
Mongelluzzo says getting there certainly requires data analytics, but most importantly, there needs to be the
human element of open communication with employees so she knows what needs to change, what employees want, and how best to engage with them to help make the right decisions at the right time.
Take National Grid’s Student Loan Repayment Program, which has done much in terms of attracting young employees as well as retaining a workforce of parents who took out loans on behalf of children.
“Seventeen percent of our management employees have taken advantage of our student loan repayment program, saving an estimated $2 million in the first year on student loan interest,” she says.
Other benefit initiatives include the RedBrick wellbeing platform in which the employees have the ability to focus on making small changes to improve their physical and emotional health, a caregiver benefits platform that provides services for families with small children, adolescents, and adults, and a robust digital communication platform called “Live Brighter” that is the go-to site for benefits information and decision-making resources.
“The way we work is changing, and to keep up it’s important to have productive employees who are healthy from a physical, mental, and financial standpoint,” says Mongelluzzo. “Employees are pulled in so many directions. They may stay up late at night, or are distracted at work grappling with their everyday lives and how to prioritize everything. I constantly ask myself ‘What do I need as an employee?’ because if I’m facing a need and feeling this way, they must be experiencing something similar.”
Indeed, healthy living and work/life balance is something that even she finds herself grappling with as life ebbs and flows, from managing her professional and family life, supporting a child with cystic fibrosis, and volunteering her time with the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans, where she currently serves as the chair of its corporate board.
This is where her philosophy comes in.
“At the end of the day, our employees are our internal customers,” she says. “Providing them with the tools they need to make the best decisions for themselves and their families is what drives me. My goal is to build a suite of benefits that not only is affordable and sustainable, but is a platform to help employees like myself to ‘Live Brighter.’” AHL
Cra ing the right strategy for your employee benefit goals isn’t a paint-by-number approach. At Alliant Employee Benefits, our benefit experts (benefitologists) build meaningful, results-driven solutions on a canvas that begins with you — your organization’s resources, culture, and people. From high-touch employee engagement strategies to trend and volatility analysis, you’ll enjoy an artisan-like approach executed through a multi-year plan. Talk to your Alliant Benefits Advisor about what a masterpiece might look like for you.
Beth.McLeod@alliant.com
By Abhinanda Datta
A Foray Into Risk Management
Lou DeSorbo discusses how his military career inspired his corporate leadership style
At nineteen years old, Lou DeSorbo was elated to have the opportunity to join the Air Force and work in a highly technical and scientific field.
“I was young, but I was just barely selfaware enough to realize that I was not ready to succeed at university as a mechanical engineering major,” DeSorbo says.
Then, one day, DeSorbo received a call from an Air Force recruiter. “I was in a place where I was open to the idea,” DeSorbo says. “That’s how I got into the Air Force and became involved in the field of applied geophysics.”
Apart from being an exciting opportunity, the Air Force prepared DeSorbo for a career in technology. He soon found
his way into an organization called the Joint Task Force-Computer Network Operations (JTF-CNO), now known as the United States Cyber Command, where being a science geek paid off.
His first opportunity with the JTF was as a cyberoperations watch officer. The job required him to sit in an operations center working 24-7 with several highly motivated and dedicated professionals who were in the groundbreaking phases of learning how to build a cyberoperations force.
Within the organization, DeSorbo was afforded another opportunity to work in cyber-research and development for about two years, followed by yet another
Lou DeSorbo
Chief Security and Risk Officer
Centene
opportunity to lead the Cyber Strategic Defensive Operations Division, before being selected as the strategic adviser to the director of operations at the JTF. As the strategic adviser, he had the time to think about cyberspace as a war-fighting domain and about the mission space at varying levels of complexity.
“Getting started as a watch officer, it’s a very tactical mind-set, mostly involving network operations,” DeSorbo says. “As I moved through the organization and took on more senior roles, the levels of complexity and abstraction that I needed to pick up to be successful increased as well.”
He says that there are things about cybersecurity operations that in his opinion can only be learned when one is working weekend and midnight shifts, when people from the other parts of the world are awake and hatching attack plans.
“There are things I learned about the inner workings of information technology that I never would have learned so quickly if I didn’t have time doing research and development work,” he says.
With a plethora of skills under his belt, DeSorbo joined Centene in 2015 and is currently its chief security and risk officer. His wide-ranging skill set has also become a valuable asset to DeSorbo’s business partners.
“Lou is constantly pushing his team as well as his partners to understand organizational priorities as it pertains to their objectives around risk and security posture,” says Justin Kohler, director of customer success for Gigamon Insight. “He puts the focus on trends and underlying capabilities, allowing our partnership to prioritize our common goals: improved overall security maturity and empowered network defenders.”
“There are things that I learned about the inner workings of information technology that I never would have learned so quickly if I didn’t have time doing research and development work.”
One of his biggest goals at the moment is to develop an integrated risk management program that manages enterprise security.
In 2000, a life-altering event not only taught DeSorbo the value of life, but also helped him become a compassionate, understanding leader. As active duty military, he went in for knee surgery and was diagnosed with MRSA, a bacterium that causes infections in several parts of the body. Before he made a full recovery, he had an epiphany.
“I learned I want to be the best possible person I can be,” he says. “I truly care about my people, and I take care of the organization and the mission of the organization. I take ownership and responsibility, and I’m never afraid to take on new challenges,” Lou says.
To him, this leadership style means ensuring the best possible care for his team to enabling them to do what is necessary to take care of Centene’s healthcare mission.
DeSorbo wants to ensure all of his employees are empowered and able to make a difference every day in the security business. With this in mind, he started “Lunch with Lou,” staff lunches that happen every 4–6 weeks.
“At these lunches, our staff members, managers, supervisors, and individual contributors have an opportunity to sit down with me,” he says. “They can ask me questions about my past or even security strategy. One of the key goals that I want to get out of this is to allow our staff to voice any concerns they have.”
Through a path with many twists and turns, DeSorbo has been a mentor, leader, adviser, and strategic thinker. His long career has brought him front and center to one of healthcare’s biggest companies, where his leadership helps his staff be their best, a mark any leader can be proud of. AHL
The Issues
National, and even global, forces have an unmistakable impact on an executive’s work. Whether it’s a legislative change or an industry-disrupting technological breakthrough, executives must constantly adapt their business strategies to keep their company thriving.
40.
46.
56.
30. Tabatha Erck
36. Ragan Cheney
Jaideep Parekh
43. David Cade
Melissa Seymour
52. Bradley Tinnermon
Jeff Podraza
By Clint Worthington | Portraits by Ackerman + Gruber
Aiding the Hearing Industry
Senior vice president Tabatha Erck, Ed.D, leads Amplifon Hearing Health Care (and the rest of the hearing industry) through integration with traditional health sectors
Tabatha Erck SVP
Amplifon Hearing Health Care
Amplifon Hearing Health Care senior vice president
Tabatha Erck, Ed.D, has three decades of experience in healthcare under her belt. This comes not a moment too soon for the nation’s first provider of hearing benefits. The hearing industry is currently experiencing a number of dramatic changes in terms of access and interactivity with traditional healthcare organizations, and Erck has been working hard to establish Amplifon as a vital facilitator for these changes. Not only that, she strives to bring greater awareness to the link between hearing and overall health, with the goal of increasing the number of people who have access to affordable, effective hearing loss treatment.
Erck has been excited to work for Amplifon from the start. “There aren’t many companies within healthcare that cross over payer communities like this,” says Erck. “I thought to myself, ‘Here’s a group of professionals—hearing care specialists and medical practitioners—within a niche industry of healthcare, who have little to no support and are suddenly thrust into clinical protocols and regulatory oversight they’re not prepared for.’” To that end, Erck’s varied experience, which includes working in health insurance, big pharma, and hospital administration, makes her uniquely suited to position Amplifon as a hearing insurance industry expert.
As Erck sees it, there are significant changes in healthcare happening now that present key opportunities for the hearing industry. First, there is substantial growth in the number of individuals who now have benefits that cover hearing aids and exams; the Medicare Advantage market alone has seen a 600 percent increase in enrollees since 1993, and it is predicted to increase its number of plans by 8–10 percent a year for the foreseeable future. This means that more people with hearing loss will have access to affordable care. It also means hearing providers will see more insured patients. As a result, hearing health practitioners are struggling to keep up with this new demand, especially independent
practices who are looking for tools, resources, and the support they need to align and comply with health insurance protocols and regulations.
The healthcare industry is also finding distinct connections between hearing loss and social determinants of health—a study from Johns Hopkins indicates that hearing loss could lead to dementia by making individuals more socially isolated, a known risk factor for dementia and other cognitive disorders. The need to close the gap between untreated and treated hearing loss has far-reaching implications, Erck says.
“By adding hearing to the list of preventive care services covered by insurance, we can substantially narrow the gap, thereby decreasing the risk for costly health conditions, including dementia, depression, and catastrophic falls.”
Erck’s work at Amplifon is heavily impacted by this integration of the hearing industry with more traditional healthcare sectors. “We’re on the cusp of change,” Erck remarks, “and we’re entering a phase of educating, informing, and engaging with primary care organizations about these issues.” Currently, she is working to educate practitioners and health plans on the link between smoking and hearing loss, which would incentivize people with a history of smoking to have their hearing tested for early detection and prevention of hearing loss. As the number of people who have hearing coverage grows, Erck and Amplifon strive to prepare hearing providers, payers, and other healthcare organizations for those changes.
To accomplish this goal, Amplifon is assembling an advisory council of network providers that will work with them to collaboratively build tools for measuring health outcomes, quantifying patient satisfaction, and more. Once that is established, the council can then go out
“By adding hearing to the list of preventive care services covered by insurance, we can substantially narrow the gap, thereby decreasing the risk for costly health conditions, including dementia, depression, and catastrophic falls.”
and teach other providers how to use those tools and make the same improvements. “Culture takes time and a lot of energy to change,” says Erck. “The profession seems gung ho to do it; we’re just at the ‘how’ stage.”
While the industry is still experiencing some anxiety about this new direction, Amplifon’s advisory council will serve as a guide to those providers who need help adapting. “We don’t just publish something and say, ‘Here’s what we’ll do,’” says Erck, who offers YouTube videos, training courses, and more to arm organizations with the knowledge they need to change their protocols. Erck is confident that these initiatives will not only eliminate roadblocks to closing treatment gaps for those with untreated hearing loss, but also ensure the hearing industry’s standards and practices align with those of the insurance industry.
Given the increased focus on hearing loss and its relation to overall health, Erck sees hearing providers as part of a patient’s comprehensive care team in the
coming years. With Amplifon, Erck is working to make high-quality hearing healthcare more affordable and accessible for people with hearing loss. From partnering with health plans to fund hearing benefits, to advocating for better compliance with ethical hearing care standards in the development of earbuds and other consumer products, Erck feels particularly proud of the company’s efforts to bring affordable, beneficial hearing care to all. “Amplifon is not owned by manufacturers; we are uniquely positioned to balance the needs of all stakeholders, bring everybody to the table, and see what quality care looks like.” AHL
Signia is pleased to recognize Tabatha Erck, senior vice president of Amplifon Hearing Health Care. As the hearing industry continues to merge with the traditional healthcare space, Tabatha plays a key role in driving the evolution of the hearing healthcare model and shares Signia’s goal of creating a new vision for the future.
By Joe Bush
Lead, Follow, or Move Aside
Ragan Cheney draws on her military upbringing to fearlessly lead Titan Spine toward continued growth
You could say Ragan Cheney is Titan Spine's three-star general.
The self-described Army brat was born in West Point, New York, and moved twentyseven times growing up, as her father, Col. William T. Zaldo, III, now retired, rose to one of the top military ranks. Cheney watched and learned as her dad led. Over the years, one instance of her father's leadership has stuck with her.
Zaldo noticed that the Army base’s convenience store was raising prices on certain items coincidental with paydays. He took action to stop these increases and was successful, Cheney says. The lesson, he shared with her, was that you must always take care of those who don't have a voice or the power to effectively battle those trying to take advantage of them.
“I was raised on the saying, ‘Lead, follow, or move aside,’” she says.
At Titan since January 2016, Cheney has helped lead the spinal implant technology start-up to growth that has necessitated a tripling of its workforce. Hired to be executive vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary, Cheney has also built the company's human resources infrastructure; helped evaluate and upgrade the health, welfare, and benefit plans to be better than competitors in its geographic region and industry; helped with the HIPAA compliance program; helped build the board infrastructure and advised on all corporate documents.
She worked with her legal team and Titan’s finance team to convert the
Ragan
Cheney EVP, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary
Titan Spine
“I see customers and their families as colleagues. I’m so fortunate to work for a company that truly makes a difference in people’s lives.”
company from an LLC to a C corporation to make the company more nimble to enter other markets, whether through private equity or the public market. Cheney helped recruit and hire the firm's first CFO and COO, as well as other key members of the sales, finance, and leadership teams. She also oversees contracting for Titan’s indirect salesforce, a division that has more than doubled.
This Swiss Army knife approach began when Cheney got to talking with retired surgeon and Titan’s cofounder, CEO, and president, Peter Ullrich, at a community event before she worked there. The two live near each other and knew each other socially. At the time, Cheney had been working for Associated Benefits and Risk Consulting—a wholly owned subsidiary of Associated Bank Corporation—since 2007 as senior vice president and senior human resources consultant. During the chat, Cheney suggested a few things to improve Titan as it grew, and before she knew it, Ullrich, and the other founding member of Titan, Kevin Gemas, had offered her a role. To begin, she was just hired as general counsel and was tasked to build the company’s human resources and compliance programs. However, Cheney says the urge to take on more responsibility was too great, and began to immediately look for additional ways to improve the company.
“It's how I'm wired,” she says. “Dr. Ullrich, when he tells the story, always says, ‘We knew we needed someone like Ragan, but we didn’t know how much we needed her until she got here,’ which I take as a great compliment.”
Cheney's impact has always gone beyond her standard job description. At Associated, she helped design and deliver a program known as “Emerging Leaders, Emerging Managers.” This program identified individuals who may not have the title of manager or supervisor, but who exemplified core leadership strengths.
Similarly, when she joined Titan, Cheney sought to build various internal employee training programs that reinforce fundamental leadership skills such as building trust and setting goals, in addition to a New Year resolution program referred to as “Your Attitude Determines our Altitude.”
“I love to connect individuals who have similar interests, creating a supportive and collaborative environment,” she says. “Some like to call themselves leaders, but they're not. They have the title but don't lead. The responsibility of leaders is to make sure you are instilling confidence and knowledge in people to the point where they can function without you if you leave.”
In addition to improving the company’s internal processes, Cheney also strives to maintain Titan’s
leadership status in the surface technology marketplace. Titan’s proprietary surface technology has already changed the interbody fusion market. As outlined in the Journal of Biomedical Materials Research, its proprietary combination of nanosurface textures works at macro, micro, nano, or cellular levels to quickly encourage the production of bone growth factors needed for rapid bone growth and fusion.
“To remain the leader, my team has to make sure to work with outside professionals in intellectual property to make sure our competitors aren't infringing on our intellectual property or misrepresenting their own FDA clearances,” Cheney says.
Always learning is one of Cheney's tactics to keeping her leadership skills sharp. Podcasts, books on tape, seminars, and interaction with peers ensure she stays on top of today's news and philosophies.
“Keep an eye on your competitors, but obsess over your customers,” she says. “I see customers and their families as colleagues. I'm so fortunate to work for a company that truly makes a difference in people's lives.” AHL Congratulations to Ragan Cheney of Titan Spine for this recognition of her commitment to excellence and contributions to the industry. At MB Financial Bank, we couldn’t be more proud to be her partner.
MB Financial Bank is thrilled to congratulate Ragan Chaney on this recognition. Ragan is an instrumental part of Titan’s success and impressive growth trajectory. Her ability to manage fiduciary responsibilities while executing key business points have allowed for fluid decision-making and a like-minded relationship with her banking partner.
Titan Spine is a fast-growing medical device company that specializes in the design, manufacture, and marketing of implants used in the cervical and lumbar spine. Stradley Ronon’s IP group has worked closely with Titan’s GC Ragan Cheney to develop a robust, comprehensive, and worldwide patent portfolio covering the company’s technology.
By Charlene Oldham
A Blemish-Free Supply Chain Strategy
Jaideep Parekh tailors his management philosophy at Galderma Laboratories LP to optimize the company’s supply chain operations as the function continually evolves
Galderma Laboratories LP’s products range from prescription to aesthetic, and consumer skin care. So, rather than managing a single supply chain, the company delivers to three distinctly different markets that each have unique needs. This makes supply chain management more complex and competitive than ever before, according to Jaideep Parekh, Galderma’s director of supply chain.
“That’s really put a tremendous amount of focus on how valuable consistency and reliability within the supply chain discipline have become, especially
in the retail sector,” Parekh says. “A few years ago, you had around 7–10 days to get the product into the retail channel. Today, it’s roughly 4–7 days.”
Delivering the right product mix is also critical, which means supply chain teams must analyze and act on vast amounts of data very quickly. Manufacturers can collect more information than ever from their customers about sales volumes, on-shelf availability, and dozens of other data points. However, the sheer volume of available information can test supply chain managers, systems, and staff, Parekh says.
“It’s great to have information. Now, it becomes a challenge of what you do with it,” he says. “As a supply chain function, I think we’re still figuring that out. It is also imperative to use information to deliver improved service to customers; supply chains that do this successfully will be differentiated and best in class.”
Parekh says he thinks that’s the case across the supply chain discipline, regardless of a company’s size. However, supply chain management has come a long way in his more than twenty years in the field.
Before coming to Galderma, he served as a key accounts executive for Coca-Cola in India when the brand was just beginning to enter many of the country’s markets. Back then, Parekh was tracking most supply chain data manually. He even rode along with delivery drivers, expanding distribution points, merchandising products, and collecting payments to gain insights. Nevertheless, even then, Parekh says Coca-Cola had a firm grasp of how long trucks would be on the road, current fuel prices, and other details that drove operating costs.
“It was probably one of the best supply-chain educations someone could have asked for,” Parekh says.
He got a more formal education at Texas Christian University, where he earned an MBA with a focus on supply chain management and finance. He then rose through the ranks at the eye care company Alcon, where among other initiatives, he led the Continuous Improvement Program where he focused on optimizing costs and increasing employee engagement.
The program, which encouraged improvement ideas from employees, got the vast majority of suggestions from management before Parekh recommended to his supervisor that they solicit more input from people directly involved in daily operations. His supervisor was quick to sponsor this suggestion and, within eighteen months, one in every three employees in US distribution operations had submitted a viable idea that was implemented.
Jaideep Parekh Director of Supply Chain
Galderma Laboratories LP
“A lot of the value the supply chain brings is how efficiently we can run, and that means taking waste out of the system when we find it.”
Today, he applies that lesson at Galderma, where he has been since March 2017. At Galderma, the Cost Improvement Program already has senior-level sponsorship, and he encourages ideas from team members at every level. In fact, he says he actively encourages feedback—both positive and critical—and is committed to act on it when warranted.
“I want a collaborative team. I don’t want a cooperative team because, willingly or unwillingly, we will start agreeing on things,” he says. “We have consciously built a culture across our organization that encourages passion, accountability, collaboration, and external focus, and that has resulted in the discovery of ways to improve our supply chain, which has ultimately advanced our business results.”
That openness to discover solutions is necessary, Parekh says, because supply chain management is evolving all the time, which is why he hires for attitude
over aptitude. People with the right mind-set can easily master new skills, which will be necessary as the industry continues to change. The one constant is an external focus on the customer.
“A lot of the value the supply chain brings is how efficiently we can run, and that means taking waste out of the system when we find it,” he says. “But we need to be effective as well. I can drive a lot of costs down but, at some point, that graph between efficiency and effectiveness is going to intersect.”
Finding that sweet spot is where Parekh has his team focused, but he’s careful to remind them, and himself, that sales drive deliveries—not the other way around.
“At no point do I forget that I am only here because there are customers and patients with needs and who are willing to choose our products,” he says. “So, if it’s not creating value for the customer, then we need to have a second look at what we’re proposing.” AHL
By Jenny Draper
A Community for Industry Catalyzers
While the association dedicated to the legal world of healthcare emerged in 1967, today The American Health Lawyers Association (AHLA) is designed for the future of the industry, thanks to the leaders who have entrusted the stewardship of AHLA to CEO David Cade. As the head of the largest nonpartisan organization of its kind in the United States, Cade began employment at AHLA in 2015 and has since focused on enhancing the careers of its nearly fourteen thousand members and network of more than twenty-five thousand engaged health law professionals. Now, primed with a new strategic plan, Cade and his team are delivering innovative programming and more learning opportunities than ever before.
“We’re focusing on being a one-stop shop for legal education and holistic professional development,” Cade says. Current AHLA members come from law firms, governments, insurers, providers, and academia, among other public and private sectors in the health industry. Cade joined AHLA as a member in 1997 and served on its board of directors for six years before his appointment to CEO. “The practice of health law fifty years ago was very different than it is today, so we’ve had to change and adapt over the years to remain relevant,” he adds.
Cade has honed his expertise with numerous transition and reform initiatives, which he represented before Congress, state legislatures, federal and state agencies, and other executive organizations. Prior to AHLA, Cade worked at the national law firm Polsinelli, where he advised hospitals, health systems, corporations, and community providers. He also worked on the Clinton Health Care Reform Task Force and served the US Department of Health and Human Services for fourteen years as deputy general counsel and acting general counsel, where he worked to expand Medicaid and Medicare coverage and eligibility and worked on other programs to improve quality and access to affordable care.
CEO David Cade reveals how a more member-centric mind-set is helping The American Health Lawyers Association enhance careers and advance important policy discussions
Now at AHLA, Cade and his team kicked off a multiyear governance review project and reorganization to bring even more value to its members. The strategic plan targets three key areas: building a resilient organization, creating an engaged learning community, and providing exceptional content.
David Cade CEO The American Health Lawyers Association
The Road to Resiliency
Since AHLA members are involved in an industry that is both heavily regulated and dynamic, Cade and his team are focusing on innovative solutions that not only strengthen the organization, but also increase its agility to remain relevant in the healthcare’s legal market.
“The association grew into silos and we weren’t working in harmony internally,” Cade says. “The goal that existed three years ago and exists today is to be more efficient and effective in what we do.” In his first year, Cade interviewed all of the staff and many stakeholders, reviewed all of the systems, and then broke down barriers to create a culture of sharing and cooperation.
To do so, his team has developed an infrastructure that uses data to better inform the development of new initiatives and evaluate existing projects.
“A major step we took this year was to allow the members themselves to raise their hand and identify a preference for the type of content they want to receive,” Cade says. “That’s allowing them to take control of the information that they want and when they want it.”
Upgrading the Network
Cade is driving the organization’s transformation into an engaged learning community by differentiating the AHLA approach: advancing health law education and collaboration through in-person and virtual networking to cater to diverse learning styles. The industry is also not immune to the digital age, in which technology increasingly impacts how lawyers practice and what services are offered.
“Now at our conferences, we have presentations using technology like voting and polling,” Cade says. “We’re in tune to not only the community that we serve, but how they best learn and bringing information to them with a variety of tools such as podcasts—easily digestible and deliverable on-demand.”
Members are also practicing longer than in past generations, according to Cade, so the community mixes many generations with different engagement and educational needs. He adds that consultants and other
professionals have a larger role in providing guidance in the healthcare arena, and in-house practices are growing while firms are consolidating.
“The complexity of the healthcare delivery system is multidisciplinary,” says Cade, citing frontline practitioners, policy developers, and managers of operations. “Standing alone, it’s hard to stay current in everything because it’s so dynamic. We are able to digest, simplify, and deliver the content that is most relevant to our members.”
Content for Connections
As a hub for idea exchanges, AHLA is also prioritizing the publication, presentation, and analysis of industry-leading content. It starts with an enhanced technology platform so that relevant information is available and customized to member preferences. This new, focused content presents laws, as well as their underlying legal policies, and includes the recruitment of industry leaders to be active participants in the discussion.
“What’s unique about us is we are a professional association and we choose not to lobby,” Cade says. “We take a position of neutrality, and that allows us to be a trusted agent. So, government speakers at our conferences and webinars are very comfortable being here, sharing, learning, and growing in their practice alongside private practitioners, academics, and policy officials.”
Ultimately, AHLA aims to create expanded opportunities for discourse between policymakers and influencers—such as government officials, private practitioners, consultants, and academics—to advance health policy progress.
“Part of the richness of the environment here is our commitment to diversity and inclusion,” says Cade, emphasizing his commitment to racial and ethnic diversity in addition to AHLA’s multidisciplinary approach. “Anybody and everybody involved in healthcare or health law has a home here and should feel comfortable.”
“We’re focusing on being a one-stop shop for legal education and holistic professional development.”
The Empowered Community
The strategic plan executed by AHLA’s board of directors, Cade, and his team aims to establish an interconnected community of lawyers and other professionals involved in health law, healthcare, policy, and career development. Looking ahead, Cade is zeroing in on member and revenue growth while also increasing engagement with the broader health law and healthcare community—including law students.
“In my youth and early career, I didn’t have an appreciation for the value an association like this could bring,” says Cade, who earned his juris doctor at the University of Maryland. “And I didn’t have a focus on health law until I went to law school, when I was representing individuals being de-institutionalized from state institutions—and it felt like my calling.”
Now guided by this new calling, Cade and his AHLA team are improving the learning experience for all generations of health law professionals and fostering an organization that is as diverse and dynamic as the community it serves. AHL
By Anthony Ruth
When Biogen saw its first clinical trial results from Aducanumab, a potential treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, the company knew it might be on to something big. The drug, now in Phase 3 clinical studies, could be one of the first viable treatments for Alzheimer’s, which affects more than five million Americans and forty-four million people worldwide.
Until this point, Biogen’s focus had been on multiple sclerosis, which has a much smaller patient population, an estimated 2.3 million worldwide.
Melissa Seymour, vice president, global quality control at Biogen, knew that if Aducanumab were approved, the organization would need to adapt. “This could truly be life-changing for millions of patients,” she says. “But it brings Biogen the daunting challenge of ensuring rapid and consistent supply of product to a very large population.”
To meet that challenge, and to maintain a process of continuous improvement, Biogen has embarked on a vision to realize the “lab of the future,” a project known within the organization as iQC. The “i” stands for three qualities that Biogen leaders deemed integral to the lab: that it be innovative, integrated, and intelligent; QC is for quality control.
Seymour, who has spent more than twenty years in the quality space and serves as the iQC’s executive cosponsor, says Biogen’s labs were scientific, compliant, and solid, but there were things that could be improved. Electronic systems and instruments relied on manual interactions and translation of data. Over time, systems had grown highly customized to specific sites, assays, and even individual’s preferences. There was no clear end-to-end visibility of sample traceability. And they were not taking advantage of the latest advances in technology.
“All of this can lead to massive inefficiency, lost time, and increased risk of errors,” Seymour explains.
Biogen started iQC in 2015 and has a target completion date of 2020. With a $13 million investment, the project is being implemented in Biogen’s new state-of-the-art facility in Solothurn, Switzerland, as well as in its existing labs in Hillerod, Denmark, and Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
“It is imperative that we have laboratory operations that can support the testing and release of quality products, says Seymour. “Our goal with iQC is to provide increased testing capacity and the ability to reduce cycle times as well as lower system, equipment, and infrastructure maintenance costs.”
“Our first lab of the future consortium helped bring companies together that shared the same urgency to improve overall lab operations in terms of cost and efficiency, reduce cycle time, and improve on-time delivery, due to the increased pressure on overall cost and service level,” says Rafi Maslaton, founder of cResults and maker of Smart-QC.
Seymour thinks of iQC as having three main aspects: science, systems and staff.
“The science is driven by new and innovative technologies that will reduce our testing time and increase our knowledge,” she explains. For example, the lab incorporates Growth Direct rapid bioburden testing that utilizes blue LED and fluorescence to detect bioburden in three days down from seven, and Next Generation Sequencing for adventitious virus testing that could reduce testing time from more than twenty-eight days to six days or fewer.
Melissa Seymour VP, Global Quality Control Biogen
“It is imperative that we have laboratory operations that can support the testing and release of quality products.”
“Implementation of these types of technologies can reduce errors and increase turnaround times while also ensuring compliance,” Seymour explains.
Among the new systems, Biogen has already implemented its first phase of Labware 7.0, with more than fifty electronic lab notebooks (ELNs), as well as instrument integrations and sample management. Additional integrations to manufacturing and planning systems will come in 2019. With the ELNs, Biogen can standardize and guide method execution to reduce errors and increase efficiency. “This also puts data at our fingertips and provides a single source of truth,” Seymour explains. “Integration of systems and transfer of data leads to more robust and reliable data.”
“Working closely with customers like Biogen is essential to our business,” says Vance Kershner, president at laboratory information management systems supplier LabWare. “Our enterprise platform is a key element in the iQC initiative, and we’re delighted to be involved in such a strategic program.
But the most important aspect of iQC, in Seymour’s opinion, is staff.
“Operating in a new way requires a cultural shift, and we have spent lot of
time in change management,” Seymour says. She wanted to prevent a situation where the system launched but the teams needed six months or a year to adapt, so Biogen brought in a change-management consultant and held open sessions throughout the process, which allowed analysts to test the system and provide feedback as it was being developed.
Seymour is convinced that giving the analysts this opportunity for input and visibility—and truly listening to them—has been the most important factor in moving the project forward. “It is the end users that ultimately have to adopt a new way of working, and it is critical to bring them along on the journey,” she says.
Seymour says she has a new appreciation for how difficult standardization can be. For instance, she uncovered thirteen different methods within Biogen for measuring pH. “It took a lot of discussion and debate to align on one way of working,” she says. “People are very attached to the way that they work, and it is a process to align.”
While the changes for analysts have been significant, Seymour says the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and that they see the bigger picture.
LabWare is recognized as the global leader in providing enterprise scale laboratory automation solutions. Our Enterprise Laboratory Platform combines the award-winning LabWare 7 LIMS™ solution with LabWare ELN™, a comprehensive and fully integrated Electronic Laboratory Notebook application, enabling companies to optimize compliance, improve quality, increase productivity and reduce costs. By bringing together the industry’s broadest range of integrated lab automation capabilities, LabWare’s Enterprise Laboratory Platform enables you to optimize your processes while at the same time rationalizing your systems portfolio. This makes the Enterprise Laboratory Platform unique in the industry, and the most powerful single source solution of its kind for laboratory automation. For more information, visit the LabWare website at: www.labware.com.
Making validation easier, faster & smarter
“Implementation of these types of technologies can reduce errors and increase turnaround times while also ensuring compliance.”
The end-to-end sample management that was on Seymour’s wish list of improvements is now one of iQC’s success stories. Today, the system prompts manufacturers to pull the sample, a label is generated, and everyone knows where the sample is and whether it’s been tested.
“That was a big success and a process that touched warehouse manufacturing, sample control people, laboratory people, and QA on the backend-release process,” Seymour explains. “You must realize that no organization can live in a silo.”
Seymour is excited for the potential that iQC can have on patients, and says her biggest takeaway is the importance of harnessing the talent of the team around her to bring the vision to fruition. “I get to work with great people who have great ideas and great passion for what they do. Working through problems, debating issues, developing employees is all super rewarding,” she says. AHL
Rapid Micro Biosystems is the leading provider of automated, nondestructive, rapid microbial detection. We are proud to partner with Melissa Seymour’s team at Biogen as they automate their Bioburden and EM testing. To learn more about our Growth Direct system and accelerate your time to results, please visit www.rapidmicrobio.com
The #1 Resource Planning and Scheduling Solution for QC Laboratories
What is Smart-QC?
Smart-QC is a web based Resource Planning and Scheduling software designed specifically for QC laboratories. Smart-QC provides the platform to assist us in improving our short/long-term planning and scheduling. It was designed to effectively manage the dynamic and complex QC environment. Smart-QC captures the entire list of activities in the lab such as test and review, lab support (in-direct) and other events such as training, holidays and more.
Smart-QC today is deployed in over 80 labs worldwide and our solutions are used by 9 of the top 15 largest companies in the industry.
Smart-QC is implemented in a variety of labs such as Small Molecular, Biologic, API, Contract Labs, Generic, Consumer, Medical Devices, Injectable, Research, and Development labs.
Smart-QC is deployed in labs with various sizes from 10-15 analysts for the entire QC department to labs with 100-250 analysts and ALL TEST & REVIEW assignments are fully automated by our proprietary scheduling algorithm.
To our knowledge, Smart-QC is the only commercially configurable solution that is successfully deployed as a corporate solution at QC Laboratories.
Smart-QC Architecture is scalable and reliable and is already being used by 25 sites simultaneously while providing aggregated KPIs by its Executive Dashboard for corporate usage.
Smart-QC is already integrated with almost ALL LIMS vendors as well as SAP, LMS, QMS, HR, and Equipment Management systems.
By Lior Phillips
The Final Touchpoint
Bradley Tinnermon ensures Banner Health’s revenue cycle team is as compassionate and efficient as the organization’s clinicians
From the doctors working with patients to the staff meeting individuals at the front desk, the healthcare industry has been seeing the benefits of new technology firsthand. No longer solely the purview of Silicon Valley, advances such as AI and data analytics tools are helping provide better care and make hospitals and practices more efficient. It’s important to note, though, that it isn’t only the IT department bringing these crucial changes to their organizations. As vice president of revenue cycle and revenue integrity, Bradley Tinnermon has ensured Phoenix-based health system Banner Health can incorporate these tools without having to outsource or lose control of their processes.
Coming out of college, Tinnermon knew he could make an important
impact in the healthcare industry. He had family members in administrative positions in healthcare but ultimately opted to cut his teeth in the consulting world. “I had some great conversations with my uncle about the best way to get experience with health systems on the financial side, and I felt I would be able to gain more experience in a short time frame if I started with a strong consulting firm,” he says. “Rather than learning from a single health system, I could learn from systems across the country seeing different strategies and situations.”
Throughout that time, Tinnermon continued to learn and grow, adding on to the strong base set at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He eventually focused on outsourcing operations for hospitals and physician groups, working
closely with health systems and vendors. But though he felt good about the work he was doing to help these organizations, Tinnermon knew he’d eventually want to move into an executive position within a health system instead of consulting on the outside.
After holding vice president-level roles at revenue cycle organizations like Conifer Health Solutions and Optum360, Tinnermon joined Banner Health as vice president of revenue cycle and revenue integrity in 2017. Among the many changes that came with the move, Tinnermon loved the connection it gave him to the community and how his work impacted the patients and families served.
In addition, the new role meant that Tinnermon would have the opportunity to work closely with a new team, fully exercising the leadership skills he’d amassed across his consulting work. While the bottom line of the organization is important, he’s just as focused on developing a positive experience for the employees of Banner Health. “I’m a metric-driven person, but I also enjoy mentoring team members and ensuring they have a genuine career path,” Tinnermon says.
Most important, though, is focusing the team’s work on the connection to the patient and the healthcare mission. “Our teams interact with patients and families that are scared, confused, vulnerable, appreciative, and, at times, upset,” he says. “Our job is to make the financial component of their care as transparent and as easy to understand as possible.”
“Bradley Tinnermon is tireless in supporting Banner’s patients,” Jeff Podraza, Esq., the lead attorney at Specialized Healthcare Partners said in a statement. “Every overturned insurance denial is a win for both the patients and Banner.”
One chief element of ensuring that the patient has the best experience with Banner Health comes through ensuring that every team’s processes are up to date with the best technologies. For Tinnermon, that means utilizing automating workflow robotics and AI-enabled tools to help his team members work more efficiently. In addition, Banner has started to add technology that will help patients interact with the system in more fluid, seamless ways immediately.
Bradley Tinnermon VP, Revenue Cycle and Revenue Integrity
Health
Banner
Courtesy of Bradley Tinnermon
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Deloitte is proud to celebrate the work and accomplishments of Brad Tinnermon, Vice President, Revenue Cycle and Revenue Integrity at Banner Health. Congratulations on your
These tools, he stresses, aren’t being utilized to replace team members, but rather to take over the mundane tasks those team members had to perform and to free them up to do more advanced analysis, evaluation, and human interaction.
Tinnermon and his team come to these developments through a process that they call the “idea factory.” The team brings ideas for evaluation, and then they determine how exactly those ideas would benefit the organization. The team starts by documenting the process or program that would be impacted, what the financial benefit would be, implementation time frames, and cost, he says. Then, they determine implementation and operating expenses, including implementation resources, software expenses, project management, and other specialists.” Once they gather that data for the idea factory, they can make an informed decision. Anyone within the organization has the opportunity to present a proposal through the idea factory, and projects are prioritized based on value and resource assessments.
enable Banner to reduce complexity and better serve its important mission.”
These processes also allow Banner to provide an increased level of transparency to patients. “Patients deserve to have a clear and proactive understanding of their financial responsibility and options related to the services we provide,” Tinnermon says. “You want to make sure you do it in a way that will make your brand more attractive to those that are receiving care, which also makes it more attractive for healthcare providers affiliated with our health systems.”
Tinnermon is proud of the ways in which the organization’s leadership team has invested in Banner Health’s technology that supports the transparent and improved patient financial experience.
Though he had previously specialized in outsourcing processes for health systems, Tinnermon and Banner have chosen to keep their revenue cycle and financial operations processes in-house. “I know what it takes to deliver those services at scale with a level of efficiency and performance,” Tinnermon says. “So, we focused on methods that would allow us to utilize some of those approaches while retaining complete control of our revenue cycle.” While they do occasionally partner with organizations for outside help, the flexibility that Tinnermon and his team have instilled in the revenue cycle allow Banner to maintain control and adapt quickly.
“Brad and his team are focused on delivering the most innovative, effective revenue cycle possible,” says Sloan Clardy, president, technology solutions at nThrive. “nThrive’s suite of revenue cycle management technology, powered by predictive analytics and machine learning,
“Banner has come up with many significant ways to differentiate ourselves as a health system and to continue to provide an outstanding patient experience with excellent customer service,” he says. “Status quo is never OK. Change is going to happen one way or another, and we plan to control and shape that change in a way that is positive for our patients and employees.” AHL
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Specialized Healthcare Partners (SHP) provides best-in-class claim resolution services to hospitals nationwide with more than seventy healthcare attorneys and clinicians on staff. Founded by partners with three decades of denial management and complex claim experience, SHP combines regulatory understanding, contractual knowledge, and clinical expertise to produce industry-leading denial overturn rates. SHP’s commitment to our clients extends to data security as SHP maintains a HITRUST certification for HIPAA compliance and the protection of confidential and sensitive personal health information.
Get your financial goals on mark across all areas of the revenue cycle, from Patient-to-Payment.
nThrive integrates knowledge and expertise of the entire revenue cycle in a way that provides unmatched benefits for our clients. nThrive empowers health care for every one in every community by transforming financial and operational performance, enabling health care organizations to thrive. www.nthrive.com/AHL
nThrive can help health care organizations generate more cash across all areas of the revenue cycle, from Patient-to-Payment.
By Joseph Kay
Training for Success
Jeff Podraza and Specialized Healthcare Partners virtualize their approach to revenue cycle training, team member support, and organizational engagement, saving thousands in training costs and improving efficiency
Jeff Podraza recalls how difficult and disorienting his early days in healthcare were.
“When I started in this industry, I was amazed by what I didn’t know,” Podraza says. “I had just gotten out of law school, and when you get out of law school you think you’re pretty smart,” he says. “You have to be open to having your brain filled with all kinds of new terminology and concepts.”
Now an executive partner at Specialized Healthcare Partners (SHP), he’s helping to create a tech-driven training, support, and engagement solution for revenue cycle organizations. Based in Delray Beach, Florida, the company supports healthcare organizations undergoing revenue cycle transformations. It supports health
systems and large hospitals by resolving their most problematic and complex insurance claims. In addition, SHP also provides assessments and training on maximizing reimbursements on behalf of healthcare providers.
Podraza spent years training professionals and delivering seminars on the legal aspects of healthcare revenue. Over that time, he developed an intimate, nuanced knowledge of how these teams operate and what it takes to improve them. Podraza transitioned to SHP when his former colleagues, Pat and Tracy Lutz, founded SHP, invited him to join the company to help expand its service and to tap into a major asset: the knowledge and ability to train people on complex billing and reimbursement procedures.
“Most Americans don’t appreciate how complex it is, what it takes to send a bill out for what some people think are routine clinical services. It’s anything but routine,” he says.
Today, SHP focuses on its core niche: resolving denied and complex insurance claims on behalf of hospitals. Its specialization is key to its ongoing success, explains Podraza; by keeping its menu extremely short, SHP developed and advanced its practice to a world-class level. At this single project, he says, SHP is unrivaled.
Although its niche is specific, SHP thrives because it helps these institutions while they’re training new staff members who might not know the ins and outs of reimbursement yet. Additionally, it’s expensive and time consuming to fully onboard a new associate, and for the first sixty days, there’s no productive revenue contribution, Podraza says. Indeed, it’s likely negative, as the new team members tie up veterans and supervisors with questions and needs. Since the training process is so resource intensive, any improvements to efficiency or duration pay dividends across the enterprise.
To that end, SHP developed a cloudbased training and team-member support platform that teaches team members how to make decisions while providing the context and resources they need. It’s a flowchart, a living library, and a support tool that orients new associates efficiently and effectively. It started as a tool to bring SHP’s own associates up to speed. The company’s core competency training typically takes 6-8 weeks; the
interactive training platform reduces this time by 2–3 weeks.
There’s a typical training experience in any healthcare organization, explains Podraza, but it’s only partially institutionalized. After general training and specific systems training, an associate joins a team and gets to work—but their knowledge is far from complete, and they have to continue training themselves with the resources at hand. Maybe that involves searching through a fat binder of outdated documents; however, often it means asking a neighbor questions.
“What they usually do is start talking to the person who sits next to them. ‘What do I do here? How do we do this?’ he says. “That’s a fairly typical way to train someone, and there’s a much better way to do it: we could take all that material that we’ve developed ourselves and virtualize it. We could do it in such a way that it becomes a complete brain.”
Now, SHP can customize and license the work, as well as provide tools for partnering organizations to add their own procedures and resources. Then those organizations can distribute the material virtually. With more associates working globally or remotely, this helps management control processes for cost and error. It’s an organization’s growing information hub, accessible globally.
In creating the training and teammember support technology, developers needed to make sure it wouldn’t wind up causing team members to spend more time looking for answers, resulting in an overwhelming user experience. The tool itself had to be immediately intuitive, or
Jeff Podraza Executive Partner Specialized Healthcare Partners
else it would go unused or waste associates’ time. This balance, recalls Podraza, was surprisingly complex, and it led to unforeseen development costs.
“The biggest challenge was synthesizing something that was user-friendly and deep,” he says. “People shouldn’t spend any time figuring out how to use it. We have our technicians sit down with users for 2–4 minutes to show them how to navigate, and they’re off.”
It’s an exciting development that foreshadows an exciting future of fully automated medical delivery and finance. But that’s still decades away, says Podraza, and building the training platform was complicated enough.
“Great things are happening in terms of applying robotic process automation and machine learning to drive efficiencies in revenue cycle, but there’s still a lot of work to be done that requires skilled team members. The job loss isn’t
there yet,” he says. At this point, these tools support and develop—rather than replace—human workers.
Most of all, Podraza is excited about what the tool does for people. The potential for the organizations it helps is great—reduced attrition, shorter training times, and wider margins, among other factors—but really he sees himself helping young professionals, daunted and eager as he once was.
“In this industry, it takes about 4–6 months and costs an RCM company, depending on the makeup of its team, between $25,000 and $50,000 to replace an existing employee and get a new team member up to competency. I knew if we could cut that, it’s a real opportunity,” he says. “But there’s also a huge benefit to that employee: by engaging people through this platform, we show team members how to win and also to feel better about what they’re doing.” AHL
Jeff Podraza and his team at Specialized Healthcare Partners are helping new revenue cycle hires get up to speed efficiently and effectively.
James Greene/Delray Camera Shop
The Reason
Some executives feel the importance of their work because they have experienced its impact firsthand. Shaped by their mission to help others or by their personal experiences with healthcare, many executives are drawn to the industry from a sense of empathy and a desire to make a difference for others.
60. Andy Long
64. John Brown Jr.
68. Sallie Arnett
72. Betsy Van Hecke
By Clint Worthington
Although the world of pharmaceuticals and medical technology can seem clinical and difficult to conceptualize, Andy Long has a deeply personal understanding of how prescription medicines can impact someone’s life. As chief financial officer for Insys Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical company based out of Phoenix, Long sees the work that Insys does reflected in the medical hardships faced by his own family—loved ones who could have been helped by Insys’s innovations, and some who could still be.
“Almost every product Insys produces has the potential to touch someone in my life,” says Long, who joined the company in 2017 after having already spent more than twenty years in the healthcare industry. Prior to Insys, Long spent much of his career in operational roles where he led large teams of individuals on a global scale, a huge contrast to his current leadership position. He still acts as a business partner like he did in previous jobs, he says, but at Insys he has taken on additional responsibilities in a more corporate role, managing functions such as tax, treasury, and investor relations for the first time.
Long has more than a business interest in seeing the company succeed, however. Take, for instance, Insys’s first commercialized product, SUBSYS, a medication for addressing breakthrough cancer pain in adults, and recently launched SYNDROS, which is intended to alleviate certain symptoms associated with chemotherapy such as nausea. Long’s father, who died of cancer, suffered from both symptoms. When Long’s father went through his cancer treatment, his doctors didn’t speak to him about his pain and postchemotherapy nausea, Long says. Because of this, he had to watch his father go through a tremendous amount of pain during his treatment, including significant weight loss due to his nausea. Although antiemetics to address his nausea were available in tablet form at the time, Long wishes there had been an oral solution like SYNDROS available for his father. “I keep wondering how his quality of life could have been improved had he had access to our products,” Long says.
Although his father has passed away, Long has other members of his family that could benefit from Insys’s research and advancements in the future. Currently, the company is conducting extensive research into the synthetic cannabinoid molecule cannabidiol (CBD), which is being studied as a possible therapy to treat various neurological diseases. Although the research is in its infancy, Long says it holds promise for patients with everything from epilepsy to post-traumatic stress disorder to autism. Long’s cousin’s teenage son, who suffers from a form of epilepsy, as well as his own son who is on the autism spectrum, could potentially find relief with CBD-related products that come out of this research.
Insys is also working on another product that could potentially help his son, who in addition to autism, also suffers from significant life-threatening allergies. Not only could Insys’s research into CBD lead to products that could potentially treat autism, but the company is also working on an easy-to-use nasal spray that could serve as an alternative to epinephrine intramuscular injections. “The thought of injecting anyone with a needle, let alone your son, is unsettling,” Long says. “How much less stressful would a nasal inhaler be for both of us?”
Connections like these are particularly motivating for Long, and they significantly impact Long’s perspective on Insys’s work. “Anyone in the healthcare industry understands the work they do touches lives,” says Long, “but it’s that much more personal when you can take the product you are actually working on and apply it to your immediate family.”
Andy Long CFO Insys Therapeutics
A Cause that Hits Close to
Home
When he’s not helping Insys Therapeutics in its goal to develop medical products that will help individuals with autism, like his son, Andy Long makes sure he and his son are able to share some quality time together.
“He’s a big fan of sports,” Long says, who regularly enjoyed attending Pittsburgh Pirates baseball games with him and, after they moved to Phoenix, the Arizona Diamondbacks. The two also exercise regularly, going to the local health club every Saturday to walk and run on the track.
While Long’s work is on the financial side of the company, he is fully engaged in all areas of the business in an effort to make Insys Therapeutics successful in developing its pharmaceutical pipeline. While new to the CFO role, Long has leveraged his previous operational experience to improve many of Insys’s existing processes. “Over the course of my career, I’ve developed an approach to drive improvements to business performance,” he says. His major principles include measuring the outcomes of what you are trying to affect and identifying the root causes of what you wish to accomplish. From there, it’s important to develop action plans, execute them, and measure the impact, course-correcting where necessary. Applying these principles to his work at Insys has led to some solid wins, he says, including a significant initiative to save millions on the company’s sales-return performance. In addition, Long has worked to position the finance function as a more effective business partner within the company. Long says that the finance team is in a unique position because it touches every other function within Insys. To that end, Long endeavors to identify connections across the organization that others may not see. By reaching out to improve communication between departments, Long encourages his team to interface with all functions across the company to identify opportunities to improve processes. “The best finance people are true business partners to the organization,” Long says.
As he continues to play a part in Insys’s ongoing transformation, his work remains firmly grounded in the personal connections he makes between the company’s work and the people that could be helped by their efforts. “It’s pretty amazing to be involved in a company that could work on a drug that could help children around the world one day,” Long says. AHL
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INSYS Therapeutics is a specialty pharmaceutical company that develops and commercializes innovative drugs and novel drug delivery systems of therapeutic molecules intended to improve patients’ quality of life. Using proprietary spray technology and capabilities to develop pharmaceutical cannabinoids, INSYS is developing a pipeline of products intended to address unmet medical needs and the clinical shortcomings of existing commercial products. INSYS is committed to developing medications for potentially treating anaphylaxis, epilepsy, Prader-Willi syndrome, opioid addiction and overdose, and other disease areas with a significant unmet need.
By Tricia Despres
Empower Leaders, Inspire Excellence
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana’s John Brown Jr. has focused his entire career on empowering others
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana’s John Brown Jr. has long dealt with his share of adversity. The youngest of five, Brown grew up on the outskirts of Kansas City, Missouri. His family did not have much money, but when he walked in the door after a long school day, he would always be welcomed by a house brimming with activity and kids, which meant he seldom had time to dwell on what he didn’t have. Instead, he focused on all that he did have.
“Every other kid wanted to be a president or an astronaut, but I thought I could do it all at the same time,” Brown says. “I grew up poor, but honestly, I was always more focused on things money couldn’t buy.”
Indeed, it was things like integrity, honesty, and living with a set of principles that Brown would focus on not only in his personal life but throughout his professional career.
In his current role as senior vice president and chief human resources officer at Blue Cross, Brown continues to look for ways to empower individuals to do their best despite the adversity they might face. Since joining Blue Cross in January 2017, Brown has quickly established a number of programs such as a diversity council and a variety of new employee resource groups. He has also implemented a plan to ensure that all Blue Cross employees go through a rigorous course on both diversity and inclusion training.
“By the end of 2020, every employee will have gone through this four-hour required training,” says Brown, who is certified by the Society for Human Resource Management as a senior certified professional. “I don’t think diversity and inclusion is a destination. It’s a journey.”
“We are proud to partner with John Brown to deliver Diversity and Inclusion Training,” says Dr. Odette Christie, CEO of OEC 2 Solutions, LLC. “John’s laser focus on leadership, empowerment, and diversity creates substantive actions that promote an inclusive culture and drive business success and innovation.”
Math and science were his favorite subjects in school, so Brown always assumed he would pursue a career in the tech industry. After receiving his bachelor of science degree from DeVry Institute of Technology in Kansas City, Brown took a job at Southwestern Bell.
“It was there where I began to realize that the same skills that would drive outcomes in the tech space were the same ones that would drive outcomes in the healthcare space,” he says.
From there, he would take positions at Aetna and Marsh USA, and eventually accept a role as a segment vice president of retail service operations for Humana in Louisville, Kentucky. In that role, Brown was responsible for enrollment, claims, and customer service support of individual business lines, including Medicare Advantage and Medicaid.
Also while at Humana, he began work on a diversity council in which senior leaders across the organization would join together to learn about inclusion and diversity.
John Brown Jr. SVP & CHRO
“I don’t think diversity and inclusion is a destination. It’s a journey.”
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana
Jason Cohen Photography
A Charitable Spirit
Throughout the years, Brown has devoted countless hours to a number of local organizations. From serving as a mentor to serving as a board member, he has carried his virtues with him into organizations such as YMCA Safe Places.
“It’s a place where teens in peril can come, no questions asked,” he says. “I firmly believe that every child deserves a fair start. They should never be burdened by the challenges surrounding them.”
Brown is currently playing active roles in Prevent Child Abuse Louisiana and 100 Black Men of Metropolitan Baton Rouge.
“We all can learn from each other,” he says. “When we take the time to learn from each other, there is nothing we can’t achieve.”
“As far as I was concerned, there were not nearly enough women and people of color in senior leadership,” Brown recalls.
To collect metrics to prove that his assumptions were correct, he would do one survey after another.
“I would always ask for the data to be cut by demographic,” he recalls. “You would see things such as the fact that African-American males were experiencing the company in a totally different way than other demographics.”
While there, he also established an employee resource group, which Brown says gave employees a voice that some of them had never had before.
“From women to people of color to members of the LGBTQ community, no matter who they were, it gave those employees a seat at the table,” Brown says. “It helped to remind them that they had a voice and that they could use that voice for good.”
As he moves ahead with his career at Blue Cross, Brown says that he feels many eyes following him, especially men and women of color. But there are other people paying attention to his career, too. Both of his daughters are looking to their father as a role model.
“Whether I’m at work or volunteering in my free time, I know they are watching me,” Brown says.
In fact, as Baton Rouge, Louisiana, continues to heal from a ferocious few years of floods, as well as shootings and events that have ripped the community apart, Brown has been right there, doing what he can as a community advocate to get things moving in the right direction again.
And yes, he’s proud of what he has accomplished in his professional and personal career. But there is so much more to be done, he says. AHL
By Manisha Rita
The Fight Against Sepsis
How Sallie Arnett is tackling patient deaths caused by sepsis at Licking Memorial Hospital
Sallie Arnett, MS, RHIA, CHCIO VP, Information Systems
Memorial Hospital
Licking
Kim Wanamaker
Sallie Arnett experienced the devastating effects of sepsis up close. Her father received a late diagnosis of the life-threatening condition, which resulted in his death. In response, the vice president of information systems at Licking Memorial Hospital (LMH) set in motion a strategy to reduce the sepsis mortality rate at LMH to help other families avoid a similar situation.
Sepsis is a potentially life-threatening complication of an infection that occurs when chemicals released into the blood stream to fight off infection cause inflammation throughout the body. This can lead to clots and other blood vessel issues. The condition tends to progress rapidly, which often leads to organ damage and, in many cases, death. According to the National Institute of General Medical Health, “severe sepsis strikes more than a million Americans every year and 15–30 percent of those people die. The number of sepsis cases per year has been on the rise in the United States.”
“I’ve approached this from both a personal and a professional perspective,” Arnett says. “By teaming up with our clinical leadership, I was able to learn about the staff challenges of identifying and treating sepsis, and I was able to seize the opportunity to apply technology to address their needs.” With nearly thirty years of experience in the healthcare industry, her goal has been to leverage information technology to improve the quality of patient care.
In 1997, Arnett was one of five students to have graduated from the master’s of science in health information systems at the University of Pittsburgh. At that time, the world of technology was still grappling with the cordless phone, the widespread use of pagers, and the internet was still in its nascent stages. “People thought we were a little bit crazy in staking our careers on the concept of information technology in healthcare,” Arnett says.
Improved Patient Outcomes
American Journal of Medicine Study (2014) with over 7,600 patients reports
LOS in ICU coming from the med/surg unit1 45% REDUCTION
86% REDUCTION
Code Blue Events1
Overall Length of Stay1 9% REDUCTION
Additional Clinical Outcomes
Pressure ulcer development2
Reduction in patient falls3
Following extensive provider and staff education on how to recognize and treat sepsis, LMH turned to technology to help reduce its sepsis mortality rates. Two years ago, under Arnett’s leadership and working in close collaboration with nursing leadership, LMH installed EarlySense Continuous Monitoring technology throughout the hospital. Each room outfitted with EarlySense includes a small, tablet-sized device to monitor heart rate, respiratory rate, and movement of their inpatients. The device is contact free and is placed under a patient’s mattress or chair pad. Using data obtained from monitoring trends over time in heart rate and respiratory rates, the system provides early warning of patient deterioration.
“Clinical studies have provided evidence that heart and respiration rates are two of the most important predictors of adverse patient events,” Arnett explains.
Prior to installing EarlySense, LMH physicians and staff were already collecting and storing essential patient data necessary for sepsis identification at various locations within the hospital’s EHR system. The challenge was finding the necessary data needed for clinical decision-making at the onset of this dangerous condition.
Using data from multiple locations within the EHR, Arnett’s team set up Iatric Systems Visual SmartBoard, which automatically presents doctors with a complete view of each patient and their sepsis status on a single screen. When the Visual SmartBoard identifies a patient with severe sepsis or septic shock, it immediately takes action to electronically alert the physician as well as the nurse caring for the patient. This was then integrated with the hospital’s secure texting platform to alert physicians on their smartphones in real time when a patient’s condition is consistent with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services criteria for severe sepsis or septic shock. This automatic detection and monitoring of sepsis allows LMH staff to be proactive rather than reactive.
Sallie Arnett and her team implemented a system of digital alerts to help physicians and nurses address critical patient needs immediately.
The team also is responsive to feedback and has streamlined the process since it was first implemented. “Alert fatigue is a serious challenge within our industry, and our team worked closely with our
“Alert fatigue is a serious challenge within our industry, and our team worked closely with our physicians to ensure that they are only receiving the minimum number of alerts necessary to care for our patients.”
physicians to ensure that they are only receiving the minimum number of alerts necessary to care for our patients,” Arnett says. “The physicians know that when they receive an alert that it is definitely time to react.”
With support from the Ohio Hospital Association’s Sepsis Collaborative, along with her team, Arnett has reduced the number of sepsis-related deaths from about 27 percent to 9 percent at LMH.
Collaboration and teamwork are really important to Arnett’s leadership strategy and her beliefs often translate to future hospital projects. For example, two current projects concern improving physician and staff communication: one is to evaluate options for a unified EHR for the entire organization to streamline communication across the entire continuum of care, and the second is to replace LMH’s current nurse call system. “There has to be really strong synergy between the clinical and IT staff. They work best with a shared vision and shared goals,” she says.
She admits there is no single solution to every problem presented by working in a dynamic and complex crossover environment such as healthcare IT. “The process has to be collaborative. You need to put the right people into the decision-making process to determine solutions that include all perspectives,” she says.
In a few months, Arnett will be celebrating her eighteenth work anniversary with LMH as vice president—an outlier in her field given that the average tenure for a chief information officer is about five years, she says. She confesses that, “building those relationships takes time, as does understanding the perspective of others. One of the keys to success with any project is getting to know your people when you are building your team.” AHL
By Clint Worthington
Alleviate, Restore, Extend
Betsy Van Hecke stands by medical device company Medtronic’s strong founding mission statement to provide the best care for its clients
Over the course of her fifteen-year career at Minneapolisbased healthcare company Medtronic, Betsy Van Hecke has taken on a wide variety of responsibilities. From working as a senior legal director who worked with individual clients and sales contracting, to her role as a vice president of ethics and compliance, to her current position as vice president, legal for Medtronic’s Cardiac and Vascular Group, Van Hecke credits her success to a deep knowledge of Medtronic’s inner workings. Now, as she runs the legal department of Medtronic’s largest division, Van Hecke uses that experience to spearhead initiatives meant to grow the company’s ability to help patients. Before joining Medtronic, Van Hecke had a long career in both public and private practice. After graduating from law school, she clerked for a federal judge before joining Minneapolis-based private practice Dorsey & Whitney as an associate attorney. After spending a couple of years as an expat working for the firm in its Hong Kong office, Van Hecke returned to the States to take an offer from Medtronic.
The biggest transition for Van Hecke upon joining Medtronic was getting used to the challenges of in-house practice. “There was a lot of newness when I started,” Van Hecke says. “But it was great fun—lots of variety in the issues I would handle.” Over time, she graduated to larger responsibilities, eventually becoming the lead lawyer for a very significant product recall ten years ago. This kind of recall has its own obstacles, especially in the case of implantable medical technology. “If there’s something wrong, it might be riskier for a patient to take out a device than leave it in,” Van Hecke says. Nonetheless, she saw Medtronic through a successful recall, which led to greater management responsibilities and, eventually, to her current position.
“Betsy joins her deep industry knowledge with her impressive legal and business skills to provide insight and guidance to Medtronic as it continues to forge new pathways in global healthcare,” says Marty Lueck, chairman of the executive board at Robins Kaplan LLP.
Betsy Van Hecke VP, Legal, Cardiac and Vascular Group
Medtronic
David Kern
Leaders Helping Leaders
In addition to Medtronic’s other initiatives, Betsy Van Hecke is particularly proud of her participation in an executive training program that trains executives to become executive coaches. Van Hecke herself has completed three hundred hours of training to become a certified coach, which she sees as a valuable opportunity for professional development at the company. “When executives learn how to coach other executives, we become better leaders as a result,” she says.
Her vast experience at Medtronic allows Van Hecke to see the company from numerous angles, which is a useful asset in her legal work. A particular motivator throughout her tenure has been Medtronic’s mission statement, which the company’s founder, Earl Bakken (the inventor of the wearable pacemaker), crafted in 1960. Among its priorities include the need to “alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life,” as well as recognizing the personal worth of employees and striving for reliability and quality in their products.
“It really guides people’s thinking and inspires their work,” Van Hecke says. “The company’s mission helps employees remember that there is a patient at the other end of everything they’re doing.” A personal connection also reinforces Medtronic’s mission to Van Hecke as well as the importance of the company’s work. Van Hecke’s husband, John, is a Medtronic patient. “That makes it easy for me to see the connection between the work and the people whose lives are saved as a result.”
These lessons inform her current work in several ways. While her business expertise allows her to contribute to corporate strategy, these positions have also armed her with a broader sense of analytical thinking and a unique perspective on Medtronic’s operations. She also values her legal team’s willingness to have conversations about risk, as opposed to being overly cautious, she says.
Over the past few years, Van Hecke has leveraged that sense of partnership and collaboration into several fruitful initiatives at Medtronic. For instance, the company has placed a greater focus on strategic planning. Van Hecke led the legal function in looking across departments to make sure Medtronic was meeting its strategic goals.
Van Hecke has also been aiding the company in a significant organizational design project for her legal department, putting together groups of people who used to do similar work in different pockets of the organization. With this restructuring, these groups now work as one team on a consistent basis.
is honored to serve the legal and business needs of
Betsy Van Hecke Vice President, Legal CVG Group and Value-Based Healthcare Innovations and her team at Medtronic
ropesgray.com
When it comes to our clients and their business issues, we’re in the trenches with them. When they need practical solutions to complicated problems that extend around the world, we are there. We are a law firm that works alongside our clients wherever and whenever they need us.
“The company’s mission helps employees remember that there is a patient on the other end of everything they’re doing.”
One of the most exciting initiatives Van Hecke has spearheaded, however, is a global center of excellence for value-based healthcare across all of Medtronic’s legal business units. While the project is still in its early days, Van Hecke hopes to help Medtronic adapt to a changing healthcare system that is increasing pressure on healthcare providers to increase value of service rather than the number of patients it serves.
“Ropes & Gray values the partnership we have established with Betsy and her team at Medtronic,” says Tim McCrystal, partner and cochair of the healthcare practice at Ropes & Gray. “We look forward to continuing to serve as a resource for value-based healthcare matters and other key legal issues.”
With these initiatives and more, Van Hecke is confident that Medtronic will continue to play a role in the turbulent, ever-changing world of healthcare. “We’re the largest medtech company in the world; the approaches we take can have a significant impact,” she says. By focusing more on value-based initiatives and a strong organizational structure, Medtronic’s legal team looks to continue the mission its founder set nearly sixty years ago. AHL
“DLA Piper congratulates Betsy Van Hecke on this welldeserved recognition of her incisive and thoughtful approach to healthcare innovation. We value our relationship with Medtronic and share its commitment to facilitating the delivery of integrated, sustainable care.” -Karen Nelson, Partner
Inventing Healthcare’s
Healthcare has come a long way from the days of paper-and-pen recordkeeping, but that progress didn’t happen overnight. Every day, innovators in the industry research, test, and create new technologies that are reshaping hospitals and clinics around the country.
In this section, meet leaders—and read commentary from our guest editor, AMN Healthcare’s Dr. Cole Edmonson—on the forefront of these industry breakthroughs, which are helping transform technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning, and more from science-fiction concepts into integral aspects of patient care.
80.
85.
Andrea Thomaz Robotic Nursing Aides
Ed Rumzis Benefits Administration Technology
88. John Meiners _Digital CPR Education
94. Eric Poon Learning Health Units
98. Brian Eigel CPR E-Certification
102. Tom Ahrens Simulative Sepsis Education
When Nurses and Robots Unite
Diligent Robotics’ AI helper, Moxi, is learning how to help nurses so they can spend more time helping patients
/ By Russ Klettke
There is a robot prototype that is being tested in hospitals in Texas. Its name is Moxi, it is mostly clad in white, has digital expressions to take the place of a fleshand-bone face, and most importantly, does mundane tasks that otherwise preoccupy human nurses. Now, those nurses increasingly have more time to spend with patients.
Moxi is not trying to fully replicate human nurses. That’s not the idea. Moxi exists at the intersection of machines, artificial intelligence, and making healthcare work better. The company that designed and is testing Moxi, Diligent Robotics of Austin, Texas, is led by CEO Andrea Thomaz, a social robotics expert
who recognized early that AI could go a long way toward building robots able to address human needs.
“Socially guided machine learning was the root of my thesis at MIT,” says Thomaz, who earned her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who enjoyed stints as a robotics professor at Georgia Tech and the University of Texas Austin. She says the challenge was that machine learning and the programming of computers are very different from the ways that humans learn from one another. But by dipping into developmental psychology and how children learn, Thomaz crafted a robot that can learn through experience.
Daniel Cavazos
<
(from left) Moxi poses with Andrea Thomaz, Vivian Chu, and Agata Rozga, the team responsible for its creation.
< Andrea Thomaz / CEO / Diligent Robotics
This learning is not just in how it’s programmed. The people who work with Moxi can teach it new skills. “It’s like how a tennis coach would show a player how to swing a racquet,” says Thomaz.
We’re accustomed to seeing robots in manufacturing environments, but applying that idea to healthcare might seem a very different scenario. And it is. But surgeons are already using machines for head and neck and urologic surgery. Exoskeletons are helping paralyzed people walk. In development are pharmaceutical dispensers that work like ATM machines.
Moxi is in league with these innovations, but with a major difference. Thomaz and her colleagues—Vivian Chu, an expert
in applying machine learning algorithms with multimodal data, and Agata Rozga, a psychologist who combines computation and observational methods in healthcare settings—have designed this robot to deal with the many variables and dynamics found on hospital patient floors. This includes the presence and movements of people, varying schedules, such as when bed linens are changed, or when a new patient is admitted. The primary tasks of the current Moxi model are to take those linens to the laundry area, to deliver supplies to newly admitted patient rooms, and to deliver lab samples.
Each is a task that consumes healthcare professionals’ time, underutilizing
<
Moxi completes menial tasks such as restocking shelves so nurses don’t have to.
them relative to their education and licensing. Give those repetitive jobs to a robot, and the nursing staff can then do what they do best: human caregiving.
Moxi is imbued with more than just a moving arm, a hand that grabs, and a rolling, mobile base. The digital face has eyes that blink and wink, a voice that says hello, and sensors that enable safe navigation. The head and eyes move and blink to proactively communicate intentions.
“Moxi can coexist with people and be a part of their team.”
“Moxi can coexist with people and be part of their team,” says Thomaz.
Thomaz’s considerable résumé—for which she has been featured in cover stories in both Popular Science and MIT Technology Review magazines—has attracted funding for Moxi’s development. The National Science Foundation contributed $725,000 in two grants in 2016 and 2017, while four separate venture capital funds added $2.1 million in seed funding in 2018.
There are other applications for robots like Moxi, and other robotic enterprises are working on similar products. It’s likely we’ll soon see and interact with robots in coffee shops, offices, warehouses, and in retail settings, where robots retrieving items from storage might dramatically reduce actual floor space dedicated to shopping. Already, virtual digital assistants in the home are used to conduct internet searches, play music, and order goods, making human-machine interaction commonplace. But healthcare has pressing challenges, which is what drew Diligent Robotics to the industry. Moxi’s goal is to make hospitals work more efficiently.
According to the Texas Organization of Nurse Executives, the state will face a shortage of 70,000 full-time registered nurses by the year 2020. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation says that the nursing workforce nationwide needs to increase, due to growth and replacements, by more
Moxi can blink, wink, and say hello to people it interacts with in care settings.
_
“Healthcare has one of the biggest needs for robotics. We knew that we could build this for the greatest societal impact.”
than 1 million by 2024, particularly in the South and West, as the baby boomer generation continues to age.
“Healthcare has one of the biggest needs for robotics,” says Thomaz. “We knew that we could build this for the greatest societal impact.”
Thomaz and her team shadowed nurses in hospitals for more than 150 hours to study their workplace challenges. She learned which tasks were right for robots—and something more. “We were so inspired by the passion of healthcare professionals,” she says. “Their jobs are hard. I want to help them.”
As for other companies’ robots also entering the healthcare workforce, Thomaz is unfazed. “Competition is great,” she says. “The main difference is we have arms with grippers. And we’re not trying to reinvent the hospital. It’s just about changing the workflow, letting Moxi do the routine tasks while nurses work with patients.” //endmark
AI and Healthcare’s Not-so-distant Future
“Workforce solutions for the growing shortages of healthcare providers must include technology solutions. Moving from a reactive state to a predictive and proactive one is an opportunity that exists in all areas of the healthcare system. The time is rapidly approaching when robots with social and artificial intelligence will be a critical and standard part of the care team. These technological innovations offer opportunities for the entire care team to transform patient care through deep machine learning that can be connected, responsive, and predictive. These advances in technology can supplement a team’s abilities while giving them more time for human interaction and a more authentic bedside presence. Technology also can ease the cognitive burden of caregivers working in today’s complex care environments.”
–Dr. Cole Edmonson
Harnessing the Future
Ed Rumzis discusses some of the most intriguing advances in benefits administration at bswift and beyond
/ By Tricia Despres
Ed Rumzis can have a hard time unplugging, both in his professional life and his personal life.
“I think it’s hard for me to unplug because I have such a thirst for the next thing,” admits Rumzis, a native of Chicago who received his BS in computer science from DeVry University. “But I have six kids. They help me keep things in perspective.”
With more than thirty years of experience in benefits administration technology, Rumzis continues to ensure that technology enables a more consumerfocused healthcare experience. That is one of his main priorities at bswift, where he serves as its chief technology officer.
“I was always interested in customer interaction and the role of technology in that,” says Rumzis, who has served as a technology leader at many large
benefits-outsourcing companies including TIAA, Hewitt Associates, and Xerox. “So coming to bswift a year and a half ago felt like coming back home.”
In the complex world of healthcare, technology brings opportunities to personalize each experience. Specifically, bswift offers cloud-based benefits administration technology and services for online enrollment, interactive decision support, ACA compliance reporting, and employee engagement.
And for Rumzis, finding effective ways to leverage the newest technology to benefit bswift’s 11 million members is his main goal.
“We have employees and retirees making their healthcare choices with us,” says Rumzis. “A benefits technology must be flexible, scalable, and easily integrated
with all the platforms the company is using. The amount of processing power that is available today is mind-blowing.”
Under the umbrella of Aetna, bswift is leading the way in some of the most groundbreaking technologies out there, including conversational interfaces, artificial intelligence, and chatbots.
“It’s amazing being a part of the ecosystem of CVS/Aetna,” Rumzis says. “Their role in healthcare transformation and their investments in technology allow bswift access to groundbreaking solutions in a secure way. We tap into that every day.”
But still, Rumzis encounters his share of challenges.
“By 2025, 75 percent of the workforce will be millennials,” Rumzis states. “It’s a workforce that has grown up with mobile
devices, so expectations of anytime, anywhere smartphone experiences are becoming the norm. The challenge is making the small screen space contain a worthwhile and engaging experience.”
There is also the fact that a fair amount of users are hesitant to welcome new technologies.
“Some of the workforce is terrified of it,” says Rumzis. “They are constantly thinking about what is going to happen to their data.”
Giving a personalized experience and choice is key to meet all customer needs, and for that, bswift has an intuitive decision-support engine named Ask Emma.
“The premise of Ask Emma was about having a decision-support assistant that was helpful but not pushy,” says Rumzis. “She is the ringleader that all bswift
< Ed Rumzis / Chief Technology Officer / bswift Chad Meyer/bswift
customers can take advantage of. It’s all about helping you during those key decision-making moments that matter to you.”
One of the most intriguing technological advances in benefits administration is 3-D printing, Rumzis says.
“It’s here, but it’s about to go to the next level by going local,” Rumzis says. “3-D printed sensors have applications in health and safety, productivity, and knowledge delivery, and it will dramatically change the workplace.”
He adds, “There will be a day in the not-so-distant future where this type of 3-D printing, with computer chip-infused labels, can also be used as a secondary form of authentication.”
Of course, that means security and confidentiality must be watched intently.
“Cybersecurity is critical, and artificial intelligence is going to play a key role in that, given the amount of data that is produced in this hyperconnected world,” says Rumzis. “It’s about trying to stay ahead of the bad guys, and I think that includes thinking outside of the box with unconventional prevention programs, including consumers owning their data.”
Staying ahead of the latest trends in innovation and security keeps Rumzis on his toes, but it’s a challenge he enjoys continually trying to solve.
“Everything seems to be changing in cycles of eighteen months,” he says. “In a world of endless possibilities and big decisions with big benefits, my team and I are constantly working on game-changing enhancements to help guide consumers to become more knowledgeable and confident in their health and benefit decisions.” //endmark
_“Ask Emma is a decision-support assistant that is helpful but not pushy. She is the ringleader that all bswift customers can take advantage of.”
Ensuring Information Security through Rapid Change
“In a digital economy, where information is the new currency, cybersecurity is an increasing concern for everyone from individuals to organizations. Biometrics have added a new level of security with multiple authentication requirements. However, understanding the generational differences in technology adoption is critical to the success of any organization, app, or platform. The speed of technological change, and the ability of the client, customer, or patient to adapt, will significantly impact who will lead in the digital health space. Technologies can produce unintended consequences, even with the best of intent, so a healthy dose of skepticism can be a great advantage in the security space.”
–Dr. Cole Edmonson
Pumping Fresh Blood into CPR Education
John Meiners and the American Heart Association bolster CPR competency through technology-driven educational initiatives
/ By Lior Phillips
While the other kids were out having fun on Friday nights, John Meiners spent his nights and weekends in his college years as part of a maritime search-andrescue unit. “I had a pager on my side, and we were dispatched for operations all across the Tampa Bay area,” Meiners says. Although he didn’t find a career in naval rescue missions, he did find a passion for service and helping others in need that he’d carry into the workplace. Today, he’s undertaking a very different yet equally essential mission—improving CPR knowledge through new technology and other innovative methodologies as chief of mission-aligned businesses and
healthcare solutions for the American Heart Association.
Even before his search-and-rescue days, Meiners knew he would spend his life helping people. He studied chemistry in college, assuming he’d end up in medical school. But after graduating, he found himself to be particularly adept at fusing science and medicine with business. He started on that journey in earnest in 1990 when he took his first role at the American Heart Association. Twenty-eight years later, Meiners has grown and changed along with the organization, finding new ways to improve the health of others every step of the way.
The organization recruited Meiners for his fundraising background and sales and marketing experience, and the role afforded the Floridian the opportunity to explore his passion after other jobs in sales. “I was immediately drawn by the American Heart Association’s goals to help people live longer, healthier lives,” he says. “For that reason, most days it doesn’t even feel like work. It’s not hard to get up every morning when you know that what you’re doing is saving people’s lives.”
That’s true, he adds, for most of his teammates, not to mention the more than 30 million volunteers and supporters. While he’s risen in the ranks across his nearly three decades with the American Heart Association, Meiners is quick to credit the efforts as team-driven. “As a leader, you can only be as successful as the people that you surround yourself with. We’re fortunate to have the best thought leaders in the world willing to share their insight and their expertise with us,” he says.
The organization’s CEO, Nancy Brown, asked Meiners to leave his position as an affiliate executive vice president managing one of the American Heart Association’s regions to come to Dallas to manage the program for emergency cardiovascular care, or ECC, he says. “Between courses I’d taken earlier in my career and my time on the search-and-rescue team as an emergency medical technician, I found myself back in medicine.” Meiners took on his most recent title, chief of mission-aligned businesses and healthcare solutions, in 2016. In this new role, he has taken the lead on development and expansion of the Association’s businesses, aiming specifically to help reduce mortality from cardiovascular diseases and stroke by 25 percent by 2025. A big part
John Meiners / Chief of Mission-Aligned Businesses and Healthcare Solutions / American Heart Association
_“We quickly partnered with some companies to create digital learning platforms for all of our CPR courses.”
of achieving that incredible number comes from educational and training efforts in ECC, which encompasses CPR and firstaid training.
Meiners quickly learned that while science had changed massively in the intervening thirty years, the way the methods were taught hadn’t changed much at all. Courses were instructor-led, with textbooks and DVDs sold as backup. Some training centers still had stores of VHS tapes, even in 2010. Some other nonprofits and venture capital companies had looked into ways of disrupting the field, but Meiners knew he needed to move quickly to find efficient and safe ways to create that competency.
“We quickly partnered with some companies to create digital learning platforms for all of our CPR courses,” Meiners says. While working on the cutting edge in some regards, healthcare providers can be slower to adopt new technologies for education purposes. The data showed
that CPR courses and the traditional every-two-years recertification processes weren’t properly training individuals. Instead, Meiners and his team’s analysis showed that retraining or practice on compressions and ventilations every three to six months would be much more prudent.
Simply put, traditional methods were no longer the most efficient, and changes to the education process needed to be made. “Doctors went to lecture sessions to get their medical degrees, but many organizations have shuttered their traditional training centers,” he explains. Digital learning platforms have seen a major increase in the past five years, though not all have been calibrated to the needs of the industry, nor have the healthcare professionals necessarily been trained properly in their use.
The American Heart Association joined forces with Laerdal Medical on its learning tools; the Norwegian company has been a leader in the resuscitation simulation
space, having created the Resusci Anne mannequin for CPR courses. Together, the companies determined a need to build a platform for short, recurrent lessons.
“We needed low-dose, high-frequency training; we needed to look at psychomotor skills, where continual practice was necessary to maintain a level of proficiency,” Meiners says. The final product, Resuscitation Quality Improvement (RQI), uses high-fidelity simulation equipment and gives measurable data on clinical performance.
“John was instrumental in developing RQI and forming RQI Partners,” says Brian Eigel, RQI Partners’ chief operating officer. “His ability to identify new possibilities to accelerate the American Heart Association’s lifesaving mission makes John a truly exceptional leader driving breakthroughs to help others.”
Another important difference is the portability of the simulation tool. A hospital sending doctors and nurses to a simulation
The Leadership of Continual Innovation
“Many of us grew up in a time when the educational experience meant brick-and-mortar facilities with classrooms filled with desks and chairs. Current and future generations have more options for online learning through adaptive platforms that can customize the user experience and create synchronous and asynchronous learning. This significantly improves dissemination, delivery, influence, and impact. Academic practices beyond traditional ways of learning have achieved critical mass in many higher education and continuing education settings. Options that fit our mobile life style and fit the education models of today are transforming not only the experience, but also the way we learn.”
–Dr. Cole Edmonson
lab miles away every ninety days wasn’t feasible, but the RQI portable solution could be stationed at places throughout the hospital for maximum ease. “If you’re a busy professional and only have fifteen minutes once a quarter, you can practice and complete the skills,” Meiners says.
The Association and Laerdal took additional steps to ensure that the online elements of the training programs would be more engaging, through gamification and microsimulation.
Meiners and his team wanted to create an experience in which professionals felt like they were in a real experience and would put their actual practice to the test rather than merely clicking through slides and watching a video. Additionally,
collaborative tools have been an important addition. “Resuscitation is not an individual sport, it’s a team effort,” Meiners says. To engage healthcare professionals realistically, his team is developing processes and procedures for medical emergencies such as first aid, in addition to CPR.
Always eager to discover new ways to make a positive impact, Meiners is proud of his team’s ability to also meet the needs of markets outside the United States. In the past eight years, the CPR and resuscitation programs have connected more than one thousand training centers across ninety-three countries. In 2017 alone, the Association helped train more than 2.5 million people outside of the United States.
“Everyone you know has been affected by cardiovascular disease,” Meiners says. “Three out of four of my own grandparents were taken by the disease. We’ve got a long way to go to help people understand how they can live longer, healthier lives.” But by continuously thinking creatively and developing new tools to resolve unmet needs, Meiners and his team are taking major steps to fill that gap. //endmark
Impelsys is a leading provider of technology solutions and services for education providers, publishers, and enterprises, managing content and learning delivery on its flagship platform, iPublishCentral Suite, the World’s Most Comprehensive Read-to-Learn Solution. Impelsys also provides courseware development and content engineering services across digital product development life cycle, helping clients build new digital products ranging from ebooks to simulations to online courseware.
To learn more, please write to corpmarketing@impelsys.com or visit www.impelsys.com.
RQI Partners LLC is a joint-venture partnership between the American Heart Association and Laerdal Medical, positioning the organizations to deliver innovative solutions that accelerate the impact of their lifesaving mission and support the partnership’s vision to eliminate preventable cardiac arrest deaths. The company blends the Association’s leadership in evidencebased science and education with Laerdal’s expertise in technology and implementation to deliver impactful and innovative resuscitation quality improvement programs and products.
Committed to continuous learning and a passion for excellence, RQI Partners is creating a new standard of care that shifts resuscitation practice from course completion to everyday competence, dramatically enhancing patient outcomes across healthcare systems.
VERIFIED CPR COMPETENCE IS THE NEW STANDARD OF CARE
Ensuring every healthcare provider is competent to deliver high-quality patient care is a lifesaving mission and a huge responsibility. It’s part of our lifesaving mission too.
That’s why the American Heart Association® and Laerdal Medical ® have changed the paradigm for resuscitation practices to a model of low-dose, high-frequency simulation-based mastery learning, with quarterly verification of knowledge and skills, through the Resuscitation Quality Improvement ® (RQI ® ) program. With RQI, hospital sta are verified as competent to deliver high-quality CPR to every patient, every time it’s needed.
The RQI program is transforming resuscitation quality at leading healthcare organizations and helping save lives.
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‘A Constellation of Collaboration’
Eric Poon on how teamwork was essential to Duke University Health System’s boundary-pushing, patient-centered tech adoption
/ By Will Grant
Eric Poon readily dismisses any notion that technological innovation and adoption at Duke University Health System is specifically under his purview. The chief health information officer refers to the forward-thinking ideals at his organization as a “constellation of collaboration.”
“I think there are a lot of people in our organization who really have that mind-set,” Poon says. “All of us share the common experience of being clinicians. We know that things fall through the cracks. We know the way we’ve done things may not be the way we should continue to do them.” It’s a mind-set that led Duke Health to achieve a Stage 7 Maturity Score from HIMSS Analytics Adoption Model for
Analytics Maturity in 2018, becoming the first health system in the United States to do so. The Stage 7 status signifies an organization’s ability to leverage predictive, personalized, and prescriptive analytics in its care environments, and while it may be a mark of distinction, Poon insists it’s merely a byproduct of organizational rigor at Duke.
“In my role, part of my job is to make sure that we cultivate great ideas from all corners of the organization,” Poon says. “I find it really helpful to bring the discussion back to the patients.” That philosophy underpins almost every decision his team makes, Poon says. Progress isn’t worthwhile if it doesn’t better serve the patient in some capacity.
> Eric Poon / Chief Health Information Officer / Duke University Health System
A Moral Approach to Healthcare Innovation
“Clinicians working to develop technologies that improve patient care and outcomes, while putting patients, families, and communities first, is a powerful and meaningful approach. Achieving the quadruple aim requires getting back to the “why” and using generative discussions, along with avoiding naïve eclecticism, in healthcare decision-making. When we bring all stakeholders together with a shared vision and purpose, all things are possible. The moral responsibility of the developers is to ultimately consider the local world in which deployment is planned, so as to avoid structural violence against populations these technologies are meant to help.”
–Dr. Cole Edmonson
That line of thinking also often helps settle divergent approaches to the same problem. “People can have differing opinions about what’s the best approach, vendor, or way to take care of patients,” Poon says. “But once you ask, ‘What if the patient is one of your loved ones?’ it really helps people step back and think about how they would design a system that best meets the needs of patients.”
In November 2018, Duke introduced Sepsis Watch, an AI algorithm that helps identify patients in the early stages of sepsis based on predictive indicators including vital signs, lab test results, and medical histories. “All of us as clinicians have had experiences where we know the patient isn’t quite looking right, but with so many things happening, it’s hard to pick
out those faint signals from the noise,” Poon says. “In retrospect, we always wondered if we could have intervened during the earlier stages of sepsis and improved the outcome.”
Poon says he and his team were proud to be part of the design process and are now awaiting results from the system’s first evaluation. “We’re not afraid to put something in, but we want to evaluate rigorously whether it makes an impact in patient care,” Poon says. “If it doesn’t, then we turn it off. We want to innovate but make sure we are doing it smartly.” All indicators are pointing to success, however.
Another area where Poon says Duke Health is looking to push medicine forward comes in the design of learning health units: an evolving concept that is focused on redesigning the fundamentals of patient care. “We want to create reallife, living, breathing learning places within the clinical care unit, both in the hospital setting and the ambulatory setting where we can test out new ways of taking care of patients,” Poon says. “It would be a great way for us to apply ourselves to define new care paradigms and to help advance the state of science.”
Poon says developing the learning health units involves bringing together clinicians, data science professionals, tech leaders, and implementation experts to think creatively about what they can test out and share results of with the rest of the world.
Although some of the approaches may be new, the problems they’re trying to remedy often remain the same. “We can’t continue to spend more time and more resources that we don’t have as a society on healthcare,” Poon says. “At the same time, there are so many different options right now. What combination of drugs, machines, social support, and outpatient education would best help patients achieve their best health outcomes?” Duke Health believes the health learning units may be instrumental in helping find new answers.
Poon says his current focus involves working to loop in more of the health system’s clinicians into understanding the potential for technology to better their patients. After spearheading a consultation service for the clinical faculty and trainees at the Duke University School of Medicine to leverage EHR and analytics technologies to advance its research, Poon says the demand has further highlighted the need for this service. “We got the sense that while the technology is mature and we have a lot of adoption, not everybody is taking advantage of those opportunities,” Poon says.
And while organization-wide adoption may be a work in progress, Poon says that Duke Health’s fundamental ideals are helping fill in those cracks that are so common to clinicians, Poon says. “This is an environment where we want folks to innovate and break some boundaries.” //endmark
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A New Standard in Cardiovascular Care
Brian Eigel of RQI Partners LLC works to make hospitals better by challenging commonly held beliefs about CPR performance and quality
/ By Clint Worthington
Brian Eigel is singularly focused on improving cardiac arrest survival rates. In the United States, he says, patients in a hospital only have a one-in-four chance of surviving an incident of cardiac arrest. Nurses, doctors, EMTs, and other healthcare professionals receive substantial training and are “ready to save lives every day,” says Eigel, chief operating officer for healthcare organization RQI Partners LLC, a joint venture between the American Heart Association and Laerdal
Medical. Despite this, he notes that there are still some commonly held beliefs about cardiac arrest and CPR training that prevent medical professionals from saving as many lives as possible.
With the Resuscitation Quality Improvement (RQI) Program, Eigel and RQI Partners are working with hospitals around the country to dispel these myths that will create opportunities to save more lives by improving cardiac arrest competency across the entire healthcare industry.
Brian Eigel / COO / RQI Partners LLC
Myth 1: “Because I have a CPR card, I’m good at CPR.”
One of the most pernicious beliefs Eigel’s work seeks to dispel is the idea that having a CPR card and being skilled at CPR is the same thing. “We all have a driver’s license, but that only tells people you know how to drive, not how well you drive,” Eigel says. CPR cardholders only have to take the certification test every two years. “That’s not much practice,” Eigel says. “You can’t be proficient at things you only practice every two years.” In fact, studies show that CPR skills demonstrably decay after six months of not using them. It is the actual CPR performance on a patient that will significantly determine if the patient lives or dies, making it critically important that every healthcare provider is truly competent in providing high-quality CPR every time on every patient.
RQI provides healthcare professionals a low-dose, high-frequency quality-improvement platform for quarterly CPR skill refreshers. Ten to fifteen minutes of hands-on CPR practice is provided, with the help of an advanced CPR mannequin equipped with sensors that offer quantitative feedback along five crucial components: rate and depth of compressions, recoil, hand position, and volume of air given. Users then get real-time feedback on their strengths and weaknesses, and they immediately know whether or not they are doing a good job. This translates into making cardholders more confident and competent in working with patients, says Eigel. This paradigm shift results in the healthcare provider receiving an American Heart Association e-credential that verifies they are competent in CPR, rather than a traditional card that showed a CPR course was completed
within the past two years. Eigel hopes this helps establish a new standard of care: being competent and verified in your competence.
Myth 2: “I know I provide high-quality CPR.”
Overconfidence is another problem frequently experienced by healthcare providers, who believe their CPR performance is better than it really is. This is not a value judgment on healthcare providers, though, Eigel explains: “It is very difficult to consistently perform high-quality CPR without routine feedback and practice to create the right muscle memory.” There is an increasing amount of evidence that healthcare providers, all of whom have a valid CPR card, fail to perform high-quality CPR on their cardiac arrest patients. Eigel notes that even the most motivated and trained medical professionals can suffer from these kinds of blind spots.
High-quality CPR is the single biggest determinant of survival and RQI has taken strides to address these gaps in understanding CPR performance through seminars, publishing journal articles, and partnering with early adopters to pioneer this new lifesaving platform. Now in hundreds of hospitals across the United States, RQI users report feeling more confident and competent in their CPR skills, leading to multiple reports of lives being saved inside and outside hospitals, Eigel says.
Myth 3: “CPR quality is not a problem at our hospital.”
Healthcare professionals might not just be unaware of their own CPR competencies, but might extend those overestimations to their entire organization. “For the past thirty to forty years, the
“You can’t be proficient at things you only practice every two years.”
basic paradigm has been that if everyone in a hospital has a CPR card, they follow the algorithm, they get the training, then there’s no problem,” Eigel says. “Whatever happens in terms of patient outcomes was acceptable as long as everyone followed their training and protocols.”
With RQI’s quality-improvement sessions and e-credential verifying competence, Eigel says for the first time hospital staff will know the actual level of CPR skill across their institution. RQI’s platform collects every possible CPR measure and tracks performance of healthcare providers, using an analytics suite to show administrators and staff how they do organization-wide. This is useful from a quality assurance perspective as well, allowing administrators to know that “every person in their hospital is competent at CPR,” says Eigel. This cuts down on the institutional entrenchment that occasionally occurs at hospitals and allows them to experience improved outcomes.
Myth 4: “Our survival rates are at the national average, so we’re doing well.”
Some hospitals may believe it is impossible to improve their cardiac arrest survival rates above the national average. Eigel, however, feels differently. One of RQI’s goals is to achieve greater consistency among all hospitals for cardiac arrest survival rates; currently, Eigel cites a 42 percent variation in survival outcomes depending on where someone goes into cardiac arrest.
With RQI’s e-credential programs, Eigel asserts that hospital staff will gain higherquality training and a better understanding of their competencies, resulting in better, more consistent performance and outcomes regardless of a hospital’s location.
The Vision of Invention
“Adopting new standards begins with wisdom gained in research and experience, providing a compelling reason to change. Truly understanding the advantages of an innovation over the current way of doing something is a key in adopting or adapting new systems, processes, roles, and technology in the diffusion process. Understanding the “why” can fuel the rate of adoption. Disruptive innovation is about making innovations available to the masses while rendering the old ways obsolete. Visionary leaders understand the need to paint a compelling, bold shared vision, define a path, and answer the “why” in order to inspire change that resonates with those being asked to transform.”
–Dr. Cole Edmonson
Myth 5: “We don’t have the time or money to change our CPR strategy.”
While hospitals are constantly beset with budget constraints, the costeffectiveness of the RQI platform can be incorporated into training without making a big impact on the bottom line, Eigel says. By having short, ten- to fifteen-minute quarterly quality-improvement sessions, workers no longer have to leave patient care for a three-hour course, forcing hospitals to find ways to cover these shifts.
Eigel considers it a “win-win-win” for employees and employers alike: patients receive higher-quality care, resulting in lives saved; employees more efficiently learn while becoming CPR competent;
and employers save time and money using the RQI platform compared to traditional classroom training. One customer was so impressed by the program and the quality improvement it afforded patients that RQI was added to the list of quality-improvement processes in which faculty could participate and realize a premium reduction for malpractice insurance.
The overall result of RQI’s new competency standards, and the technology used to facilitate them, is the creation of a comprehensive platform to establish a new standard of care and competency that is affordable for hospitals to implement, and a new frontier in helping save more lives from cardiac arrest. //endmark
Habits for a Healthier World
Viven Health’s Tom Ahrens is educating people on how small changes to their everyday routine can drastically reduce the spread of germs
/ By Joe Dixon
Anyone who meets Tom Ahrens in person shouldn’t expect a handshake.
Instead, the cofounder of Viven Health prefers to greet people with a fist bump. This isn’t a sign of disrespect to those Ahrens is meeting for the first time; it’s just one small way out of many that he is helping to halt the spread of common germs in the United States.
“Studies show that fist-bumping is at least four times less likely than shaking hands to spread bacteria from person to person,” Ahrens says. “If our program is successful in the next couple of years, we’ll eliminate most handshaking in the United States.”
That is the essence of the program Ahrens helped kickstart at Viven Health: to educate people on how to make simple behavioral changes that can drastically reduce the spread of germs and communicable illnesses such as the cold, flu, and pneumonia.
Viven Health achieves that goal through its interactive, digital education programs that focus on giving participants an engaging way to learn how to protect themselves from germs in common gathering places such as airplanes, schools, offices, and more.
In each of Viven’s programs, participants go through an online simulation in
one of these gathering spaces, where they are confronted with choices about how to make the area around them cleaner.
For example, in one simulation, users find their avatars sitting in a seat of an airplane, and they are asked to clean areas where germs are hiding. From there, participants use hand sanitizer wipes that uncover colorful germs they need to clean to complete the simulation.
In addition to improving individuals’ awareness of their surroundings, Viven’s simulations can also help people identify appropriate preventive healthcare measures based on the time of year, their age, and more. As a veteran public speaker on a multitude of healthcare topics, Ahrens understands that interactivity is key to engaging people and creating behavior change in the general population.
After traveling around the world giving lectures on subjects such as the dangers of sepsis to audiences in Australia, New Zealand, and other countries, Ahrens has learned the limitations of the standard lecture format.
“I always ask people, ‘How many of you paid attention the whole time I’ve been talking?’ You can only hold someone’s attention for so long,” Ahrens says.
To ensure people do pay attention for the duration of Viven’s simulations, however, Ahrens has developed a series of short programs that take fewer than ten minutes to complete. This also makes them more accessible to people with busy schedules, and it gives them the ability to complete the programs on the go, he says.
But the crux of these programs is their interactivity. Ahrens’s speaking engagements reinforced to him the need for Viven’s education programs to be interactive if they were going to be successful.
Tom
Ahrens / Cofounder / Viven Health <
_“If our program is successful in the next couple of years, we’ll eliminate most handshaking in the united states.”
Changing Habits, Saving Lives
“Meeting people where they are—where they live, work, play, and pray—is a basic concept in public health. We know that behavior is at the root of many chronic health problems in our country. We can get upstream from these problems if we create partnerships, coalitions, leadership, policies, and innovations that are focused on improving personal health behavior and environmental conditions, especially through the role of nurses, the nation’s largest group of providers and most effective health influencers. Nurses leading technology companies, serving on boards, working in C-suites, and seeking elected positions can have a great impact on deploying technologies, resources, and care that create well-being. Zip code has a greater influence on health and longevity than genetic code, so delivering education and other determinants of improved health in the zip code where people live is a game changer.”
–Dr. Cole Edmonson
“You learn by doing,” Ahrens says. “If I tell you how to change a tire that’s one thing, but if you have to change a tire, you’re going to learn. The idea is the more you have to do, rather than listen, the more likely you are to change your behavior.”
As a relatively young company— Ahrens cofounded Viven Health about five years ago—one of the biggest challenges is getting the word out about the company’s offerings. To increase awareness, Ahrens and his team of healthcare industry veterans are leveraging partnerships they have nurtured throughout their decades of experience in the field to launch their programs in hospitals nationwide this year, as well, and Viven is beginning to provide its services to private businesses.
An idea that has flourished at Viven, and one that it hopes to spread, is that
a person’s immune system is their best friend. But unfortunately, Ahrens says, individuals don’t treat their immune systems that way.
“You can pick stuff off the floor and eat it and your immune system will protect you from that, but it can’t protect you from everything,” he says. If followed properly, the programs could prevent sepsis, an infection where the immune system goes into overdrive to protect the body from viruses and bacteria, which can be fatal.
“We talk about cancer being the greatest public health interest to treat, but you could also say the same thing about sepsis because that’s what people usually die of,” Ahrens says. “We believe ours will be the biggest sepsis education program that’s ever been done, and hopefully, the largest infection prevention program.” //endmark
The Business
Healthcare is a constantly evolving industry that demands executives to plan ahead. Often, this means business leaders need to address departmental- or company-wide issues to remain focused on driving innovation and devising strategies to maintain a high level of care.
106. Richard Eskew
112. Ginger Chappell
118. Danny Claycomb
124. Michael Bezney
127. Arti Dhuper
130. John Williford
The Privacy Officer Next Door
Privacy is important. Richard Eskew, Accolade, Inc.’s executive vice president, general counsel, and chief privacy officer, is also making it approachable.
By Anthony Ruth | Photos by Gene Smirnov
Richard Eskew EVP, General Counsel & Chief Privacy Officer Accolade, Inc.
Richard Eskew may be Accolade, Inc.’s chief privacy officer, but he works hard to make sure his colleagues have no trouble finding him. Being available to talk and answer their questions is one of the ways that Eskew, who also serves as general counsel for the personalized advocacy solution company, helps keep privacy and security top of mind for Accolade’s more than nine hundred employees.
Accolade, a single point-of-entry to personalized health and benefits, reduces the costs and complexity of healthcare by empowering its nearly 1.5 million members to make smart healthcare decisions. Accolade customers are typically self-insured employers, and Accolade supports employees and their families enrolled in those health plans. “Accolade combines highly intelligent technology, clinical expertise, and compassion to help individuals make the right healthcare decisions at the right time,” says Eskew, which means going beyond standard transactional questions such as “Is this doctor in my network?” and diving deeper into the behavioral, social, community, and lifestyle factors that impact an individual’s health.
“We want to get past the typical barriers and personalize the experience for members,” he explains, “so that we can really help them access the healthcare system in a more efficient way that will get them better health outcomes.” By helping members make smart decisions, Accolade can reduce healthcare costs for members as well as employer customers, while also improving health outcomes for members.
To do that, Eskew says, requires that Accolade build trusted relationships with its members, and that’s where he comes in. “Making sure we’re handling people’s very sensitive personal information and protected health information in a private and secured way is part and parcel of building that trusted relationship,” he says. “Everything we do here at Accolade is built with privacy and security of data top of mind from the outset.”
Getting the Message Out, and Listening for the Response
Eskew oversees training modules that lay the foundation for protecting privacy and building trust, including new-hire, quarterly, and annual trainings. But Eskew says the “set it and forget” model isn’t enough. “It’s that feedback loop we have that makes our program really special,” he explains. “We’re listening to what’s going on in the day-to-day operations and we’re providing timely guidance and feedback back into the system.”
Eskew recognizes that health events happen in real time, so he set up his team to be able to respond quickly to questions from member-facing representatives, called Accolade Health Assistants and Nurses, who support members. “We can’t predict every scenario, so we need to have that ability to react on the fly,” he says. For
example, a situation where a child is hurt while being cared for by a relative who’s not their guardian may lead a Health Assistant to connect with Eskew’s team to confirm the best way to handle the situation. “We’re able to provide quick guidance in the most compliant and private way possible, while also making sure that we’re giving support to help that individual,” he says. Another way Eskew makes himself—and the topic of privacy—accessible is by making sure that he’s approachable. He hosts brown bag lunches with teams across the organization to get ongoing feedback and answer questions. And in one of his training videos, he goes in front of the camera and uses humor to act out different scenarios that employees might encounter to illustrate how privacy is embedded in all areas of the organization.
“I try to make it really fun for people, really interactive,” says Eskew, noting that if he hadn’t become a lawyer, he might have gone into acting. “I think it helps people know that I’m there for them just as much as we need them there for us and our members.” The approach seems to be working—employees come up to Eskew to say how much they liked the video, which should also make it easier for them to approach him when they have an issue they need help with.
Building Trust by Building Relationships
Eskew can tell he’s reaching Accolade’s employees by how busy his team stays. “I know we’re getting the message out when people are getting back to us with questions,” he says. A lot of the questions arise not from unanticipated scenarios so much as employees wanting to confirm that they are handling the situation correctly—which, Eskew says, they always are. “That level of engagement tells me that we’re having success.”
Another measure of success is in Accolade’s market reach. “We have some really sophisticated customers of all sizes that understand our program and have entrusted us with their employees’ sensitive information,” Eskew says. That also means entrusting Accolade to build relationships with its employees and families, which couldn’t happen without protecting their privacy.
Eskew finds that the same approach he takes to privacy and feedback has also enhanced the other aspects of his role, including risk management. “One of the key ways I’m able to identify and work through any risks to the company is by building a relationship with everybody in the organization so they feel comfortable coming to me,” he says. “When you’re an in-house lawyer, you think of all employees as your client. I have more than nine hundred clients here at Accolade.”
“A company does not grow this rapidly if customers don’t trust both the service and the people running and overseeing that service.”
Eskew also works to build trusted relationships with Accolade’s corporate customers, whether it be their compliance teams, their privacy teams, or other leaders.
“A company does not grow this rapidly if customers don’t trust both the service and the people running and overseeing that service,” he explains. “A big part of what I think about every day is making sure that as a team, we’re building those relationships.”
All Rowing in the Same Direction
Eskew calls his team of four “small but mighty,” but he recognizes that they are not alone in driving the importance of privacy and trust through the organization. Day-to-day support is provided by Accolade’s experienced information security team, who work hand-in-hand with the privacy team, and continues up to the top of the organization. “Our entire executive leadership and management team is focused on this stuff, because it’s so important,” Eskew says. “I’ve been
around the block enough where I can confidently say that not every organization has everyone rowing in the same direction.”
Every major meeting at Accolade starts with a realworld example of how the company has supported a member. “Our team understands that we don’t get to the outcomes—these wonderful stories of how we’ve helped individuals—if we don’t start with that trusted relationship.”
While he may not know what questions or challenges each day will bring, Eskew feels motivated knowing that he and his colleagues are aligned in upholding Accolade’s values and moving the organization forward.
“I have a real passion for this stuff. As much as I could come at it from a highly technical perspective, at Accolade, I really come at it from the mission perspective and supporting the people who are improving people’s lives every single day,” says Eskew. AHL
By Tricia Despres
One Compliance Team
Sutter Health’s Ginger Chappell is changing the way employees think about compliance
Every morning before heading to her office at California-based Sutter Health, vice president of ethics and compliance services and chief compliance officer
Ginger Chappell brushes her teeth.
It’s not a conscious decision for her to pick up her toothbrush and squeeze out her toothpaste. She does it without thinking. She does it because she knows she should. She does it because in the long run, she will benefit from it.
She wants others to think about compliance the way they think about brushing their teeth. It’s that simple.
“You know the value of what you are doing, and you reap the benefits of doing the right thing,” explains Chappell.
But as anyone in healthcare knows, compliance is anything but simple. Because while “doing the right thing” does come naturally to most, in the ever changing, complex healthcare landscape, it can be a slippery slope filled with gray areas.
“My philosophy in terms of ethics and compliance is that it’s everyone’s responsibility,” says Chappell. “It’s our mind-set here at Sutter Health. Ethics and compliance is layered into everything within our organization, and most importantly, it is a core component of our values.”
Sutter Health is one of the nation’s leading nonprofit healthcare networks, which includes award-winning physician organizations, acute care hospitals, surgery centers, medical research facilities, and specialty services. Every day, Chappell and her team work to integrate compliance into every function and activity at the company, rather than having it appear as something that is an add-on to everything else.
Gone are the days when a new employee comes in for a dry and boring training day to go through all of the laws and regulations when it comes to compliance.
“My philosophy in terms of ethics and compliance is that it’s everyone’s responsibility.”
“We started looking at everything differently,” says Chappell. “Especially with our new hires, we wanted it to be something that got people energized rather than overwhelmed.”
Compliance plays a part in every aspect of Sutter Health’s day-to-day business, from billing and coding to conflicts of interest to governmental compliance programs.
“My desire always was to work in the fraud, detection, and deterrence field,” Chappell says, who joined Sutter Health back in 2004 before settling into her current chief compliance role in 2014. “I always wanted to help others do the right thing and do that in the right way.”
Yet, teaching others about doing the right thing can be complicated. In fact, sometimes it can mean a complete shift in an individual’s mind-set. But Chappell feels that they are making headway.
Scott Clark Photography
“So much of compliance comes down to teamwork. We need to demonstrate that we should help each other do the right thing.”
“A good day is when people are reaching out and asking questions first,” she says. “There is nothing better than the days when we are being proactive, but the bad days are the days when we are more reactive.”
Of course, Chappell can’t do it on her own.
“So much of compliance comes down to teamwork,” says Chappell. “We need to demonstrate that we should help each other do the right thing.”
Chappell has seen the impact her team’s message has made to Sutter Health’s sixty-eight thousand doctors, employees, and volunteers that care for Northern California, often through little actions.
“Many questions come through our confidential message line, and we will hear phrases that we have taught them like, ‘see something, say something,’”
Chappell says. “Visibility is also important, and when I say visibility, I mean meaningful and engaging visibility of the ethics and compliance team.”
Chappell and her team also use gamification and scenario-based learning to get their point across.
“We put them into specific situations,” Chappell says. “Let’s say that an employee is pushing a patient in a wheelchair and you overhear them telling the patient that they have their own private practice physical therapy business that they should go to. If you overhear this, what do you do? Is this a conflict of interest? It’s all about breaking people out of the bystander role.”
Chappell has also increasingly been including Sutter Health’s leadership team in various videos, roundtables, and group discussions about compliance.
“It really resonates with our employees,” she says. “We refresh our training every year, especially when the laws are changing so much. When there are changes in the law or in regulations, we try our best to make the change as quickly as we can.”
This year, Chappell says she has a long to-do list.
This list includes creating more efficient processes, including tightening up manual processes and conducting more meaningful reviews, she says. The company is also in the beginning stages of exploring artificial intelligence for compliance purposes.
And while her job is a complicated one, it’s also filled with rewarding moments.
“We have a compliance campaign every October, and this year the theme was to be a Sutter Health superhero, complete with superhero capes,” she recalls. “I was walking by and I saw one of our employees wearing the cape, and he was so proud to be wearing it. At that moment, I knew we had made an impact. We were and are making a difference.” AHL
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SUCCESS RISES IN THE WEST
When you go above and beyond, the sun rises on boundless potential. We believe in applauding your achievements— and the possibilities they inspire.
Congratulations Ginger Chappell, Sutter Health’s Vice President of Ethics and Compliance Services, Chief Compliance Officer.
RISE WITH THE WEST.
By Roland Archer
A Stronger Future
As BioScrip Infusion Services moves toward a more streamlined future with new personnel, the company’s commitment to its patients and to innovation remains fully intact
The healthcare market can be a difficult web to navigate between regulation, constantly evolving technology, and ever-present consolidation throughout the industry. But those who can sustain the rough road can be better conditioned for future growth.
Denver-based BioScrip Infusion Services is the largest independent national provider of infusion and home-care management solutions, with roughly 2,200 employees and nearly 80 service locations across the United States. The company operates with a commitment to bring customer-focused pharmacy and related healthcare infusion-therapy services into the home or alternate-site setting. By collaborating with both healthcare professionals and the patient, BioScrip provides cost-effective care driven by clinical expertise, customer service, and values that promote positive outcomes and an enhanced quality of life for those it serves.
Danny Claycomb was appointed as senior vice president of revenue cycle management in 2017. In his role, he is responsible for helping the company maintain the financial health of its patients, which includes everything from back-office operations to working patient-support centers and managing supplies and invoices.
BioScrip is undergoing a transformation of its revenue cycle and modernizing operations to improve quality for patients. Claycomb notes the company is at a point where he needs to manage more patient needs with the same number of staff, so in addition to new systems, it also means new policies, training, and standardized operations. Thankfully, he notes, his team and the IT department rose to the challenge.
The company is working its way back after a few lean years after accumulating some multimillion-dollar financial losses in 2016. At the time, BioScrip CEO Dan
Danny Claycomb SVP of Revenue Cycle Management
BioScrip Infusion Services
Greenleaf acknowledged the company had significant work ahead to right the ship. Although the turnaround wasn’t necessarily quick, Greenleaf acknowledged in a 2018 conference call with investors that the company was on the right track—putting the right people in the right seats, increasing accountability, and creating a highperforming culture at the company.
“BioScrip is a fundamentally stronger business, and I look forward to moving from the turnaround phase to a new chapter of profitable organic revenue growth,” he said on the March 2018 call. “The home infusion industry is growing 5–7 percent per year, driven by the accelerating shift in healthcare away from higher cost, institutional settings such as hospitals to lower-cost home settings, which is preferred by patients and delivers effective outcomes combined with lower risk of infection.”
Greenleaf noted that hiring Claycomb was a move to by BioScrip to bring in one of “the best in the business.” “Danny has improved debt situations wherever he has gone,” he said.
“BioScrip is a fundamentally stronger business, and I look forward to moving from the turnaround phase to a new chapter of profitable organic growth.”
Danny Claycomb and his team worked diligently to turn BioScrip’s bottom line around.
Wade Hiner
Innovation and performance drive our business; but it’s the vision and trust clients invest in us that truly empower Credence’s success as a global enterprise and dynamic solutions partner.
-Rick Hunter, Founding Partner and Chairman
Credence’s ability to deploy a large number of Right-Shore resources to penetrate our inventory, combined with their deployment of technology driven business intelligence platforms to identify and target liquidating accounts within our portfolios comprise unique competencies that have helped us reduce our outstanding AR to never before seen levels.
– CEO, Large Healthcare Client
“Danny is an innovative leader who inspires and empowers his team to solve the toughest receivables management challenges.”
– Karan Negi, CEO of Credence Resource Management
“Danny is an innovative leader who inspires and empowers his team to solve the toughest receivables management challenges,” says Karan Negi, CEO of Credence Resource Management. “He creates highly effective solutions that deliver outstanding results.”
In his short time with BioScrip, Claycomb has not only managed to assemble a highly functioning team to transform the company’s revenue cycle, but also fostered strong relationships with the company’s vendors, whom he prefers to call “partners.” Claycomb has to tread a fine line between meeting customer needs and staying acutely aware of the loaded regulatory environment in which BioScrip operates.
The moves made by BioScrip in the time since show that Claycomb and the team are pushing in the right direction. In April 2018, GeBBS Healthcare Solutions announced a partnership with the company to provide end-to-end revenue cycle management solutions to help BioScrip enhance business operations.
“We decided to partner with GeBBS due to its overall experience in revenue cycle management and optimization, along with its ability to provide additional valuable workflow software and consulting services to our organization,” Claycomb said in a statement.
Nitin Thakor, president and COO of GeBBS said he was proud of the partnership and ensured the company’s tools will make BioScrip’s processes and operations more efficient and enhance its overall financial performance.
“Danny’s many accomplishments speak for themselves,” says Nitin Thakor, president and CEO of GeBBS Healthcare Solutions. “He is a thought leader in revenue
cycle management and has a proven track record of driving profitable growth.”
In another promising move, in January 2019, BioScrip opened a new ambulatory infusion suite in Jefferson Parish in New Orleans, which will hold forty-four full-time employees. The company moved into a 15,000-square-foot suite, and adds to the company’s Louisiana presence, which also includes a workforce in Covington, Hammond, Lafayette, Houma, Lake Charles, and Baton Rouge.
In Claycomb’s estimation, the company’s continued success remains rooted in its commitment to its customers and further innovation.
“We are about the patient experience, delivering the best care in the industry for the patient and being a leader in innovation,” he says. AHL
Editor’s note: At time of publication, Danny Claycomb was no longer with BioScrip Infusion Services.
Avantha has been proudly associated with Bioscrip Inc. since 2009 and has been facilitating Bioscrip in revenue cycle management services, data management, analytics and information technology-related assignments.
Danny has been working very closely with Team Avantha and has been instrumental in guiding Avantha’s team to establish the best industry practices in the processes/projects that Avantha’s team has undertaken under his leadership.
Our services and solutions cover the entire life cycle from data management to revenue realization. This blend of technology and services has helped Bioscrip in creating operational efficiencies, quality output, and revenue optimization.
GeBBS Healthcare Solutions, Inc., provides technology-enabled solutions for Hospitals, Medical Groups and Government Payers. GeBBS leverages proprietary technology and flexible engagement models to offer cost containment and compliance solutions for revenue cycle, coding, and member engagement.
By Tricia Despres
Merging
Ideals
Michael Bezney played an essential role in bringing two Catholic health systems together under one name
In September of 2018, Bon Secours Health System and Mercy Health combined to become the United States’s fifth-largest Catholic healthcare ministry and one of the nation’s twenty largest healthcare systems.
And unlike so many of the mergers that occur throughout the United States, this one was relatively painless according to Michael Bezney, senior vice president and general counsel of Bon Secours Mercy Health.
“How quickly we completed this deal was really amazing,” says Bezney, who grew up in rural Texas before beginning his law career in Dallas. “It only took a few meetings to cement the deal. It was amazing how culturally we were aligned
from the very beginning. We both wanted to grow and position our ministry for our future growth.”
From the beginning, it seemed like the two organizations were meant to join together.
“Throughout the whole process of the merger, there was a synergy that is hard to explain,” he says. “The world of Catholic healthcare is very small. Our CEO and their CEO each knew about the other’s organization, and their personalities were compatible. When people have a common goal and vision, amazing things can happen.”
Of course, all growth starts with a vision, and these two companies have a long tradition of caring for others.
Michael Bezney SVP & General Counsel
Bon Secours Mercy Health
“The great thing about these two organizations is that they’re focused on being a ministry of the Catholic Church. They are committed to improving the health of the communities and patients they serve, making sure that each person is treated with respect and dignity,” says Bezney.
Indeed, both organizations were founded by religious women who, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, began ministries dedicated to serving people who were poor, underserved, and dying. For Bezney, it was important to retain the character of each organization while continuing to fulfill that larger mission they shared.
“It is in furthering their legacies that we embrace our calling to extend Jesus’s healing ministry through compassion and service,” Bezney says. “This is the foundation of our ministry.”
Together, the two organizations worked to identify synergies that would increase efficiency and effectiveness of care delivery. One example of this shared services model was developing a core in-house legal team that provides legal counsel across the ministry.
As a result, Bezney’s role has changed, as he’s overseeing double the number of hospitals, and went from overseeing twenty attorneys to thirty.
Yet, for Bezney and his counterparts, the most important part of this deal was the more than fifty-seven thousand employees that now unite to work for Bon Secours Mercy Health.
“It’s been all about transparency since day one,” he explains. “We wanted to achieve synergies immediately within this new ministry, and we knew that to do so, we needed to act quickly to establish a common foundation and key
“This is truly a merger of equals, and we are focused on serving our patients as one team.”
Congratulations
Deloitte is proud to celebrate the work and accomplishments of Michael Bezney, Chief Legal Officer at Bon Secours Mercy Health.
leadership. Within the first several months, we had a combined mission and set of core values, as well as a vision that paves the way for our future.”
The changes were so subtle that Bezney says most employees probably didn’t even notice them.
“This is truly a merger of equals, and we are focused on serving our patients as one team,” he says. “A year from now, you won’t be able to tell what was legacy Mercy Health and what was legacy Bon Secours. It won’t matter because our ministry will be united.”
The merging of these two strong, tradition-rich Catholic cultures into one, unified organization is nearly complete. Now serving communities along the East Coast and in Ohio and Kentucky at more than one thousand care sites, Bon Secours Mercy Health extends almost $2 million each day in benefits to poor and underserved patients. This includes traditional charity care and a variety of community health services.
Moving forward, the priority continues, and always will be, the patient.
“We will always strive to care for the whole person, in mind, body, and spirit,” Bezney says. “We have the privilege of being part of something that’s bigger—it’s about being part of a system that doesn’t have limitations. You don’t have to be Catholic to commit to working for a higher purpose and improving the lives and health outcomes of patients.” AHL
Deloitte ’s US Health Care practice helps clients transform uncertainty into possibility and rapid change into lasting progress. Comprehensive audit, advisory, consulting, and tax capabilities deliver value at every step, from insight to strategy to action. Our people know how to anticipate, collaborate, innovate, and create opportunity from even the most unforeseen obstacle. Learn more at www.deloitte.com/us/providers
By Manisha Rita
The Secret to Successful Acquisitions
Speaking to Arti Dhuper of Prime Healthcare, one begins to realize that running a human resources team of more than two hundred staff members is like being in charge of the central nervous system. Her role as vice president of human resources is like integrating the mind and body; but in this case, it’s employees and management. With a strong belief that it’s the people who make companies, she moves into her thirteenth year at Prime Healthcare. Overseeing benefits, sitting on the 401k committee, negotiating with unions, staying updated with current labor laws, and ensuring compliance across the board are some of the key aspects of her job.
When she isn’t taking calls, meeting senior leadership, consulting with legal counsel, or coaching leaders, Dhuper makes sure she is on the ground with her team at the beginning of a new acquisition process. Before Prime, she worked with the Community Mental Health Authority of Clinton, Eaton and Ingham in Lansing, Michigan, as an employment specialist. In 2007, she moved from Michigan to California to join Prime Healthcare as a regional director. During her time with Prime, she also pursued her MBA in management and leadership from the University of La Verne. Four years and a few months in to working at the company, she was promoted to her current role of vice president of human resources.
Since joining Prime, she has overseen forty-two of the company’s forty-five acquisitions. One of the earliest acquisitions she was part of, one of the big ones, she calls it, was in 2006, when Prime acquired Centinela Hospital Medical Center located in Inglewood, California, an underserved community near Los Angeles. “When I walked in, there was no HR, 1,800 employees, and it had three unions.” Additionally, the hospital was about to lose its Medicare accreditation. She was part of the Joint Commission survey that would restore the hospital’s accreditation, allowing for reimbursement from Medicare.
With forty-two acquisitions under her belt, Prime Healthcare’s Arti Dhuper discusses how to make healthcare acquisitions smoother
Dhuper’s team today is much larger than it was in 2006, and she has more people to attend to, but she says she still grows with every experience. For example, she went from overseeing ten thousand employees to forty-five thousand employees over the past thirteen years that she has spent at Prime. And when she joined, the human resources department wasn’t looped in on acquisitions until much later in the process. However, she changed that with her belief that HR plays a very critical role in those processes. “It’s the people who are the fundamental pillar of these transactions,” she emphasizes.
Dhuper VP of Human Resources
“Saving Hospitals, Saving Jobs, Saving Lives,” is Prime’s mission statement, which Dhuper says can’t be done without effective coordination between every stakeholder. From upper level management to staffers and union members, her role involves ensuring transparency and accountability throughout the acquisition process. The challenge with this is sitting in a management meeting and looking at the problem from the top-down, and then having to deliver that to the rest of the organization, or conveying the impact from a bottom-up point of view.
“I am able to take information from 30,000 feet and break it down for the different audiences involved,” she says. To successfully do that, she strongly recommends open communication with employees and keeping them updated on new changes.
“Every time I take on an acquisition, there is a lot of strategic expansion because we are entering a new market. It’s very important to have our core principles intact when we get into these facilities.”
Arti
Prime Healthcare
One of the biggest learning outcomes of her extensive experience with acquisitions has been to stay focused on the goal. “Every time I take on an acquisition, there is a lot of strategic expansion because we are entering a new market,” she says. “It’s very important to have our core principles intact when we get into these facilities.”
In some situations, the hospital management team can be robust with a clearly defined company culture, while in other smaller institutions, not everything is clear. Most hospitals have deeply rooted connections to a community and it’s important to factor that into the process, as well, she says.
Dhuper’s empathetic approach to leading acquisitions has led to recognition from her peers. Last year, she was one of three finalists recognized for her outstanding leadership by the National Human Resources Association, Los Angeles. In a video for the nomination, members of her team described her as a good communicator who is transparent, honest, and promotes work/life balance.
Moving forward, Dhuper’s undertakings include planning for more acquisitions scheduled for this year. “It’s hard, requires more energy, and takes longer to get feedback,” she says. But, “when you’re trying to complete an acquisition efficiently, working backward is worth the effort.” AHL
RECOGNITION
The Best Prescription For Excellence
Energize your frontline engagement efforts with recognition programs tailored to the unique on-your-feet, on-call hospitality culture of healthcare. HALO Recognition’s innovative programs and mobile platforms will enable you to take the culture of employee engagement and patient satisfaction to the next level.
By Joe Bush
Savvy Segmentation
John Williford led the restructuring of PRA Health Sciences’s legal department to drive efficiency and scale for business growth
John Williford says law school doesn’t teach you to be a leader, only how to think like a lawyer. He’s figured out how to lead along the way.
Williford is senior legal counsel for PRA Health Sciences (PRAHS), one of the world’s leading contract research organizations in size and distinction. And as of last summer, Williford is also the head of a team.
In July 2018, PRAHS reorganized its legal department, responding to wild growth since 2014, when Williford as hired. In 2014, PRA was a private company employing ten thousand people worldwide, and shortly after Williford’s hiring the company went public. It now has more than fifteen thousand employees in eighty-five countries. Since 2012, the company has won twenty industry awards in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. It was also on the 2018 Forbes Best Large Employers List.
The transition has gone smoothly, Williford says. Before the restructuring, the department had one senior vice president and one corporate attorney, as well as a vice president to whom every other attorney reported. It is now a department comprising several teams with their own leaders.
Five contracts groups handle projects for specific PRAHS business units. Williford’s team is the largest, overseeing product registration in the Americas, and it consists of four attorneys and eight contract professionals who provide services to the attorneys.
The change to the department’s structure was not brought on to manage an increase in the department’s staff as much as to better serve clients, Williford says. The department itself has grown from a contractual role to a full-service legal wing, and that change necessitated specialization to more closely align with internal stakeholders. This in turn has increased ownership and accountability of the legal work done for each business unit.
Williford explains that different risk profiles for PRAHS’s business units, like product registration, early development services, and strategic solutions, needed the flexibility of customized groups to help clients meet their needs.
“If you have our strategic solutions division crossing multiple jurisdictions across the world and ensuring that proper licenses are in place, you create a scope that grows exponentially,” Williford says. “It made more sense to align people more with what they’re doing on a daily basis,” Williford says.
The department had decided it had reached a limit on how it could keep up with the growth of the company, and this solution allowed the department to better manage its workload while eliminating the cost of hiring new people, Williford says.
“This is a way to utilize the skills of capable people who have been here a while and to connect them more with the teams that they are serving so we can create stronger solutions and become better partners,” he says.
“That drives a lot of efficiencies, because we know what we’re doing, how to do it, and how to deliver it.”
Williford believes he was chosen to lead a group in large part because of the way he had led negotiations when a large legacy pharmaceutical company wanted PRAHS to take over a portfolio of its work and become a preferred partner for outsourcing.
“We had to get up and running extraordinarily fast, from approach and award to full-scale partnership in under two months,” says Williford. “We were able to get it all signed. It’s one of the models we use when we are looking at opportunities and how fast we can get up and running.”
Rather than run the negotiations by email, Williford and others flew out for in-person, full-day sessions to try to create solutions that worked for both parties. It
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“If you have our strategic solutions division crossing multiple jurisdictions across the world and ensuring that proper licenses are in place, you create a scope that grows exponentially.”
was crucial for Williford to make the client comfortable with handing over more responsibility than it had in the past. It meant that PRAHS would take more ownership of decision-making, and Williford had to explain what that meant from a legal perspective.
Williford is right where he says he’s always wanted to be, managing and mentoring for personal and company growth, and he thinks it’s happened earlier in his career than it might have elsewhere.
PRAHS reached out to Williford during his four-year stint at a firm that provided legal and regulatory advice to organizations conducting clinical trials. His familiarity with the industry compensated for a lack of scientific knowledge, and having worked with PRAHS previously, he had marked the company as one able to fulfill his desire to do work that helps people.
“It’s really nice to be a part of an industry that gets to touch so many different parts of what we do as a healthcare system,” he says.
The restructuring transition has been a natural one for him, says Williford. He’d already been leading several large strategic engagements, and he had been informally mentoring attorneys who he had interviewed and trained.
It’s too soon to tell how the restructuring has affected PRAHS, Williford says. In the two quarters since the change, the department has concentrated on better internal communication, clarifying who the rest of the company should call on for different issues. Anecdotally, the rest of the company has appreciated the new regimentation and transparency, he says.
“I think there was always a plan that we would align with the business units,” says Williford. “We don’t know what that future will entail, but we’re all prepared to do what we need to do.” AHL
The Impact
Executives know there is an increasing need to help individuals manage their own health anywhere and anytime. To do that, healthcare leaders are developing products and services and offering resources that cater to different communities’ needs to motivate people to stay engaged with their own health.
134. Samanntha DuBridge
145. Christina Flint
148. Carolyn Schneider
154. Mary Finch and Bernie Knobbe
Mobilizing
for Mental Health
Samanntha DuBridge spearheads behavioral health programs that challenge the stigma around mental health care, allowing Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s employees to access resources they need to remain healthy
By Joe Dixon | Portraits by Cass Davis
Samanntha DuBridge VP, Global Benefits and Employee Mobility Hewlett Packard Enterprise
In 2018, Michael Phelps helped jumpstart the conversation around mental health at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). It wasn’t an in-person visit, but HPE employees heard Phelps discuss his struggles living with anxiety and depression, even after winning a recordbreaking number of Olympic gold medals in swimming, at a screening of the documentary, Angst. The film features teenagers, parents, mental health professionals, and the gold medal-winning swimmer talking about their mental health struggles, as well as some of the psychology behind anxiety and depression. It screened for employees as part of HPE’s For Real Life campaign.
The initiative, led by Samanntha DuBridge, is aimed at beginning a dialogue about mental health and getting employees more comfortable discussing their struggles, as well as asking for help if they or a loved one need professional mental health care.
“Employees and their families used the film as a way to talk about these issues in more general terms and didn’t have to make it as much about themselves,” says DuBridge, HPE’s vice president of global benefits and employee mobility. “I think it really helped get some new, healthy conversations started.”
In 2019, DuBridge and her team are placing a heavy emphasis on refining and expanding HPE’s behavioral health programs as part of a broader effort to round out the company’s wellness offerings. However, although the renewed emphasis on mental health is somewhat fresh, DuBridge and HPE have been offering extensive benefits and well-being packages to employees for years.
“Samanntha DuBridge and the HPE team are industry leaders in benefits strategy,” says Jay Gunning, bswift’s vice president of client services. “Their holistic approach, paired with bswift’s human-centered benefits enrollment solution, is the gold standard for companies who are seeking to improve their employees’ health and benefits experience.”
About nine years ago, DuBridge helped launch HPE’s Winning with Wellness program, an initiative that supports employee well-being across physical health, financial well-being, and behavioral health through various programs.
“We strategized our offerings into pillars that people could relate to and could easily find resources for,” DuBridge says. “Over time, what we offer in those pillars has changed, but our general approach has stayed the same.”
As part of Winning with Wellness, HPE employees have access to a range of resources such as help with retirement planning, a student loan repayment program, opportunities to participate in physical activities such as HPE’s Global Wellness Challenge, a special physical activity challenge designed for families, and more.
The Global Wellness Challenge has been particularly popular with employees, DuBridge says. In this activity, employees wear a fitness tracker to measure the number of steps they take over the course of the challenge. As they progress, the number of steps taken by an employee and their family translates into a virtual journey that can take participants all across the globe.
Participants in these challenges have the option to go on several different virtual journeys, such as visiting the Seven Wonders of the World, or traveling between iconic landmarks within a single country. At each stop, people unlock fun facts and other information about each site until they complete their journey. DuBridge says she has appreciated hearing how much employees enjoy this program.
“One employee said, ‘I’m here in the US and the rest of my family is in India, and we had an opportunity to do something together virtually.’ So, people were getting their kids involved in exercise and were able to spend more time with their families.”
Her forward-thinking leadership and expertise has laid the foundation for a future of growth and success at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. She continues the tradition of innovation that this organization is known for. We applaud Samanntha DuBridge
harvardpilgrim.org
“We really wanted to focus on addressing the fact that talking about mental health issues can be uncomfortable or embarrassing.”
Praise of DuBridge and her professional achievements is no surprise to some of her long-time business partners.
“I’ve been privileged to work with Samanntha DuBridge for more than a decade,” says Richard Migliori, UnitedHealth Group’s executive vice president and chief medical officer. “Samanntha is an amazing partner and has made us a better organization through her relentless focus on the well-being of the HPE population.”
Although the physical wellness challenges remain a cornerstone of HPE’s benefits programs, in 2018 and into this year, DuBridge and her team turned their focus to enhancing the organization’s mental and behavioral health programs through the company’s For Real Life campaign.
“We really wanted to focus on addressing the fact that talking about mental health issues can be uncomfortable or embarrassing,” DuBridge says. “Where we’re headquartered in Silicon Valley there is a strong entrepreneurial culture, and it can be difficult for some people to come forward if they’re concerned that they might be denied an opportunity if they aren’t perceived as strong anymore.”
To address those concerns, she and her team are working diligently to normalize conversations about mental health. Whereas HPE’s behavioral health programs have mainly focused on stress management in the past, DuBridge’s recent efforts emphasize developing a comprehensive approach to mental health needs that go beyond stress management.
“I look forward to the day when . . . people can share openly and support one another without stigma.”
To achieve that goal, DuBridge and her team spoke with mental health experts and put together a clinical group to develop a holistic approach to mental health care, including the For Real Life campaign, to raise awareness and make it easier to talk about behavioral health issues. Once they had developed a framework, DuBridge and her team communicated with HPE’s managers to let them know what resources would be available to them and their teams.
She and her team also gave middle managers tips on how to discuss mental health with their direct reports in an effective way. From there, the programs were rolled out to all employees, and the For Real Life campaign was born.
“I’d like to thank my team for their unwavering commitment to our employees and their families,” DuBridge says. “They truly care about offering the programs and resources to help our people reach their wellness goals.”
In addition to events like screening the film, Angst, educating employees on HPE’s employee assistance program, and promoting open and honest communication about mental health, the For Real Life campaign has focused on providing accessible and confidential mental health services to employees’ family members, as well.
This includes a mailing initiative called Adulting 101 that is targeted at employees’ adult-age dependent children. The mailing promotes HPE’s employee assistance program and other benefits such as the fact that they can get employee discounts on movie tickets, going out to eat, as well as their healthcare at school, including telemedicine services. In the mailing materials, DuBridge and her team made it clear that dependents can also access mental health services free and confidentially if they need them.
Here’s to the
We honor Samanntha DuBridge of Hewlett Packard Enterprise for setting new standards in workplace wellness.
Willis Towers Watson is proud to congratulate Samanntha DuBridge on her outstanding work to innovate and evolve programs to help Hewlett Packard Enterprise and its employees succeed in a changing business environment.
Willis Towers Watson’s unique perspective allows us to see the critical intersections between talent, assets and ideas — the dynamic formula that drives business performance, innovation and success in technology organizations.
Right now, the For Real Life campaign has only been launched in HPE’s US offices, but DuBridge has plans to expand it globally over the next year or so. But because attitudes toward mental health care vary across cultures, DuBridge is assembling a global team of HPE employees to craft and tailor behavioral health programs that reflect different cultures. The hope is that eventually, mental health issues will be treated like any other illness, she says.
“Years ago, we actually talked about cancer in hushed tones, like it was something to be embarrassed about,” DuBridge says. “But that has changed radically, and many people don’t even know that used to be an issue. I look forward to the day when the same change will happen for behavioral health, and people can share openly and support one another without stigma.” AHL
Harvard Pilgrim Health Care focuses on the future of service and healthcare delivery. For fifty years, we’ve learned and evolved. Our health benefit plans, programs, and services help solve the most pressing health issues of today, while our partnerships with likeminded innovators help us approach the challenges of tomorrow.
Cigna is a global health service company who, like Samanntha DuBridge, is focused on customer experience and pushing boundaries in a positive way to promote health and well-being. Cigna values our partnership with Hewlett Packard and we applaud Samanntha for her innovative approach and dedication to the industry.
UnitedHealthcare is committed to improving lives and the healthcare system, through continuous innovation, trusted provider relationships, and a focus on empowering members. Our health benefits and services businesses touch more than thirty-eight million lives nationwide, as they work to better the healthcare experience for everyone, at every touchpoint. That’s why we’re celebrating Samanntha DuBridge and her leadership of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s award-winning wellness initiative; we share her dedication to helping people live healthier lives.
By Joe Bush
Be Your Own Advocate
Christina Flint shares how she helped create an environment at Diplomat Pharmacy that allows her to thrive professionally and personally
Christina Flint refuses to compromise.
The thirty-five-year-old senior vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary for Flint, Michiganbased Diplomat Pharmacy wants to be an accomplished executive and a loving mother, and she believes neither goal should suffer in pursuit of the other.
Flint joined Diplomat in 2012 as a corporate counsel, before she had her first child. Six years later, the Flints have three kids, from ages five months to five years old, and she’s been promoted three times.
In her more than six years at the company, Flint has been instrumental in helping the company navigate complex legal matters. For instance, she helped lead the company through its IPO in 2014. Then, in 2016, Diplomat had to defend its first securities class-action law suit and a derivative action, as well as support an investigation by a special independent committee of the board of directors, all within a few months of becoming Diplomat’s general counsel. She was also vital to Diplomat’s eight acquisitions, which were valued at $725 million in 2017. Lastly, she assisted the organization through a shift in its strategic direction (as a result of the past two acquisitions, Diplomat is now in the pharmacy benefit management business.)
Flint was also an important calming voice at the company as its growth, in part, led to three different CEOs, two different presidents, two different CFOs, and two CIOs in the past two years. She’s also been a key resource to move corporate governance initiatives and processes through the board. Through of all this, Flint’s busy work schedule paralleled happy changes at home.
“Before we had the third child, we really had to think hard,” says Flint. “I had just stepped into the general counsel role and we asked ourselves, ‘Would this be doable?’ I didn’t want to decide whether to have a third child based on what was happening in my career at the moment or where I wanted it to go.”
Flint has had to learn to integrate work and family on the fly. She says she did not see women executives raising young children early in her career, and the ones that had older children seemed frustrated with the amount of time they could spend with their families.
Flint says she’s managed to not only survive but thrive on both fronts because of a few key factors: parents and in-laws who live nearby, her husband’s flexible schedule, her supportive team, strong outside counsel, her status within Diplomat, and technology.
“There’s no way I could get through the day without telling Siri to take down a reminder,” Flint says. “Sometimes my mother-in-law picks up the kids at the office, and as I’m buckling car seats she’ll ask me to
Christina Flint
SVP, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary Diplomat
Pharmacy
bring some more diapers the next day. I’ll think, ‘I’m running into the office right now, I don’t have space in my brain to remember that,’ so I’ll immediately tell Siri, ‘Remind me to bring diapers tomorrow at 8 am.’”
This is the type of advice she shares with other women in a regular women’s discussion group at Diplomat named Women Inspiring Women. Although Flint did not see executives as mothers of smaller children early in her career, she finds herself in exactly that position for her team of attorneys. She says much of what she tells them is to simply communicate your needs.
Flint is quick to point out an example of communication’s importance in the workplace. Soon after returning from her most recent maternity leave, she had to attend a board meeting at one of Diplomat’s satellite offices. She has committed to nursing her babies for a year, so she called ahead to the location and asked for a separate room to feed the baby. When she arrived not only was
“For your own situation, suggest what would work for you, be vocal about it, and don’t be ashamed or embarrassed.”
there a conference room reserved for her, there was a bonus playpen she had not asked for.
Flint’s point is that aside from the fundamentals such as health insurance and maternity leave, companies can only help their working moms if the moms communicate their needs.
“I created what works for me,” she says. “I think it’s on employees to bring it up and to propose solutions. The company’s responsibility is to be open to the suggestions and to hopefully put them into practice. For your own situation, suggest what would work for you, be vocal about it, and don’t be ashamed or embarrassed.”
Although she didn’t have people modeling that type of behavior to look up to early in her career, she appreciates the opportunity to do that for her team.
“I hope I’m providing that guidance now,” she says. “The mentor piece is really about having an open dialogue, and I think people feel more comfortable when they know, ‘My boss gets it.’”
“One of the things other women say to me is, ‘How are you doing this, being general counsel and having three young kids?’” Flint says. “It strikes me sometimes as, ‘Oh, is that a lot?’ It doesn’t hit me until someone asks me that question that I am handling a lot and managing it well.” AHL
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Corizon Health’s Carolyn Schneider discusses how her early work with start-up companies informs her approach to healthcare HR
By Charlene Oldham | Portraits by Jason Myers
In her role as senior vice president for Capella Healthcare, Carolyn Schneider helped shepherd the start-up through nearly a decade of growth, culminating in a deal with Apollo Global Management that created a combined company worth $2 billion.
“Early in the company’s history, we had a fairly significant acquisition and ended up quadrupling in size overnight with a very lean staff,” she says. “But we created the programs and practices so our employees could focus on patients rather than having to worry about their own physical and financial well-being. We wanted as little disruption as possible for them as we transferred ownership.”
After the purchase by Apollo, Schneider then took the title of vice president for human resources at the newly formed company, RCCH Health Partners, where she worked to protect employees—and their patients— from any corporate growing pains.
She and her staff also renegotiated contracts and introduced proven practices from Capella’s playbook, helping RCCH realize an annual savings of more than $2 million from human resources operations alone. Schneider says her time at Capella and two other startups taught her how to cut costs without cutting corners.
“Working at start-ups helps refine your thinking,” she
says. “You have to be creative because, so many times, the organization doesn’t have established processes or resources to help you do your job.”
Today, Schneider is applying that corporate creativity at Corizon Health Inc., where she joined the company as chief human resources officer in February 2018. Although the correctional healthcare provider isn’t a start-up in the technical sense, it is experiencing a reboot after the loss of some key contracts and turnover of some of its top leadership members.
Much of Corizon’s staff also works in remote, often rural, correctional facilities that can feel far from the company’s corporate office in Brentwood, Tennessee. As a result, the leadership team has implemented a start-up-style strategy that focuses on opening lines of communication across the organization and creating programs and policies that encourage expansion.
“When a company isn’t growing, its team members know that corporate energy declines,” Schneider says. “It becomes a vicious cycle.”
“We’ve got to win the trust of our people first and create a good reputation for ourselves, which makes all the other functions easier—when we think about recruitment, when we think about retention, and when we think about winning contracts.”
Company leaders are working to reset that cycle by holding offsite meetings with managers in the field to ensure everyone feels like they are part of the larger team. Corizon is also making strategic investments in technology, learning and development courses, benefit offerings, and other workplace perks to enrich employees’ experiences and increase trust, Schneider says.
“We’ve got to win the trust of our people first and create a good reputation for ourselves, which makes all the other functions easier—when we think about recruitment, when we think about retention, and when we think about winning contracts.”
Early on, Schneider moved some aspects of human resources to the field so employees would have “feet on the street” for local support to help them feel more connected to the corporate office. She also realized
Corizon’s wellness programs hadn’t evolved to fit employees’ needs, especially given some of the challenges they face working in correctional facilities.
“We are now looking at a two- to three-year plan around how to drive this wellness message—and not just wellness as you think of physical self, but wellness in terms of the whole self,” she says, “so that when people come to work their minds are on their patients, not on whether they have healthcare or whether they are in financial or emotional duress.”
Giving employees a healthy “holistic sense of self” will help them pass on that mind-set to patients. That’s critical considering the company’s ultimate aim is to help patients improve their health inside and outside a facility’s walls, reduce recidivism, and live better lives, says Schneider.
“Those are big goals that we have in front of us,” she says. “But they are very doable with a high-quality healthcare team, which we are building today.”
Indeed, Schneider says Corizon’s team already has a strong foundation of employees who understand the importance of their work.
“People go into healthcare because they want to help people. And, to me, what greater cause than to provide healthcare services to some of the most marginalized people in our society,” she says. “We’ve got the privilege of providing care for people who might not have ever had access to good healthcare in their lives. We get to make a difference in a very positive way.”
But many employees have felt disconnected to the corporate office, which is no surprise considering the limitations presented by working in remote correctional facilities where it can sometimes be difficult, or even impossible, to communicate via video, much less in person. So creating connections can be difficult. But Schneider’s goal is to learn what Corizon employees need to make their patients and their own lives better, whether it be through staff-wide surveying or face-to-face meetings where she and other leaders listen and respond to employees’ concerns.
“I don’t just want people to love their jobs; I want leadership to love our people. That’s a big difference,” she says. “If our leadership loves our people, people will begin to love their jobs. And, if we don’t love our people, another employer will.” AHL
Helping people on their path to better health
By Charlene Oldham
When a company serves clients in more than 150 countries and has 87,000 employees, educating them and their dependents about all the benefits available to them can present some unique logistical challenges.
That’s one reason AECOM, which designs, builds, operates, and finances infrastructure projects worldwide, and was named one of Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies for the past five years, orchestrated a full week of events last June to launch its global well-being program. And, even with five full days, the Los Angeles-based firm had to extend the initiative over three different weeks to accommodate a major Middle Eastern holiday and other events occurring at offices in other parts of the world. All of this was in pursuit of ensuring that wellness is 100 percent integrated into the culture and DNA of the company.
“We have a robust US wellness program, now in its eighth year,” says Bernie Knobbe, AECOM’s vice president of global benefits. “And we had some local activities in a few countries. But we didn’t have a true focus consistently on a global basis.”
To introduce a truly international program, AECOM hosted its first global well-being celebration event, scheduled to follow Global Wellness Day on June 9, 2018, with each day of the week focusing on a different theme, or “pillar,” of well-being. Activities throughout the first four days of the event encouraged employees to reflect on physical, financial, social and emotional well-being for themselves and their families while a fifth day focused on the health of the planet.
Internal resources and external vendors came into offices to conduct over 134 classes, health screenings, and additional events that fit with the week’s themes. Some of the company’s leaders created videos discussing what well-being means to them, adding them to a video library that employees could access at any time. AECOM human resources staffers and other wellness ambassadors were also encouraged to organize on-site events that catered to their office’s interests and needs.
Companywide in-office events included a “stress block challenge” in which each employee was given a squishy foam building block and encouraged to collaborate with coworkers to construct something creative and fun. They could then submit photos of their creations for a chance to win prizes. The contest garnered 235 global submissions and created countless contacts among colleagues, Knobbe says.
“Part of social well-being is connecting with people in the office,” he says. “So sending everyone a building block and telling them to work together to build something really brought a lot of engagement, and it also raised awareness around well-being and the benefits available to support both them and their families.”
Bernie Knobbe VP, Global Benefits AECOM
The company also created a well-being wheel that was available at some AECOM offices and online. Employees were encouraged to spin the wheel and take time out to complete the suggested task resulting in more than 2,700 well-being moments for the week. Options included activities such as grabbing coffee with a colleague you haven’t talked to in a while or logging one thousand steps on a short stroll or walking meeting.
“The whole idea was just taking a minute to focus on well-being,” says Knobbe. “We tried to make it a little bit more fun and include game-oriented approaches including contests and other activities.”
But this type of programming isn’t just for fun. AECOM has seen some quantifiable results of its Wellness at AECOM initiative in the US. On an annual basis, people who participate in the program see an 18
percent reduction in healthcare claim costs compared with people who don’t, Knobbe says. Employees—and their spouses or domestic partners enrolled in company medical plans—can also cut costs for themselves by participating in the program. Adult enrollees who complete activities such as creating meal plans or going in for annual health screenings earn points they can parlay into incentives including reductions to their health insurance contributions for the following year. Employees and their partners appreciate the opportunity to earn discounts or chances to win generous gift cards in company drawings as a reward, he adds. The incentives also advance the notion that wellness should be a shared commitment that benefits everyone.
(from left) The team responsible for AECOM’s well-being wheel, Sheilesha Willis, Bernie Knobbe, Brittni Wallace, and Dave Gerstenblith show off their creation.
“Part of it is around raising awareness, which is the first thing you need to have engagement,” Knobbe says. “So you have to make them knowledgeable. But then, you have to encourage employees to take action and include accountability and responsibility to actually do something.”
AECOM has also increased its focus on electronic communication and other online resources to help educate spouses, domestic partners, and AECOM employees who may work remotely or only visit an office occasionally between stints on project sites. Digital tools help spread the word about available resources and incentives, says AECOM Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer Mary Finch.
“The evolution of our benefits and well-being programs has expanded our digital HR tools, which are focused on engaging and enabling our global workforce through mobile applications that provide relevant resources and information on our many programs,” she says. “The opportunity to connect with each of our employees is made real by the digital accessibility via varied media of the well-being and benefits programs we have implemented to support our business health and safety.”
While it’s too early to measure the overall impact of the wellness initiative’s global launch, figures from the company show strong engagement with AECOM’s online well-being resources, the digital well-being wheel, videos from company leaders, and other parts of the program, according to Knobbe.
“And part of this was not just about an immediate impact,” he says. “It was about raising awareness now so we can start to see the impact over time of this investment. We really wanted to sort of wake people up and say, ‘We have all of this for you.’” It also supports the company’s significant focus on project safety, safeguarding employees, and clients and good health.
AECOM is planning to extend its Well-Being Week to an entire month this June, and company leaders are supporting the program year-around, Knobbe says, because employees who take care of themselves physically, emotionally, socially, and financially are healthier, happier, and more productive. Also, a holistic view of health demonstrates how the company can contribute to workers’ well-being, even if they live in a country that provides national healthcare.
Aetna is proud to support Mary Finch, Bernie Knobbe, and the entire AECOM team in their relentless efforts to drive innovation in employee benefits.
Thank you, Mary Finch and Bernie Knobbe, for your vision and partnership over many years. Together, we accomplish great things. www.mercer.com
“The opportunity to connect with each of our employees is made real by the digital accessibility via varied media of the well-being and benefits programs we have implemented to support our business health and safety.”
“I think the basic issues exist everywhere. But they’re dealt with in very different ways. Still, the needs of employees overall are basically the same,” Knobbe says. “They want to manage their stress. They want to achieve mindfulness. They want financial stability. They want good health for themselves and their families. They want to be well.”
And employers can help them achieve those big goals, even without big budgets, Knobbe says.
“If you really want to do this around the world, it is possible. It doesn’t have to be overly complex so that it takes a lot of money, a lot of time, and other resources. It just takes some focus, creativity, energy, awesome teams supporting you, and a passion for making a difference. If you have that, you can do it too, so game on.” AHL
Cigna is a global health service company dedicated to improving the health, well-being, and peace of mind for those we serve. We applaud Mary Finch and Bernie Knobbe, our valued partners at AECOM, for their continued dedication to the industry and our partnership.
MERCER congratulates Mary Finch and Bernie Knobbe on this well-deserved recognition.
At MERCER, we make a difference in the lives of more than 110 million people worldwide by advancing their health, wealth, and careers. We team with our clients every day to improve productivity, safety, business performance, and benefit costs.
www.mercer.com
In Conversation With The Evolution of Digital Healthcare
Guest editor Dr. Cole Edmonson discusses
how electronic care mechanisms impact the modern healthcare environment and what he sees for the future of digital healthcare
By Joe Dixon
What does the term “digital healthcare” mean to you?
Digital health is a burgeoning field that has yet to fully come of age. It represents a positive disruptive force in healthcare in all areas from provider relationships, delivery, scheduling, source data, pharmaceuticals, genetics and genomics, personalized medicine, analytics, robotics, and artificial intelligence that will transform the health experience in our nation. It represents a seamless experience for consumers to engage in a relationship that is curated by both the patient and the provider to improve overall health and well-being while improving accessibility, efficiency, and quality.
What is the importance of digital healthcare in today’s industry landscape?
Digital health will challenge the current delivery, regulation, licensing, and payments systems to be more agile, nimble, responsive, efficient, and effective at a federal and state level. Much of the current regulation doesn’t promote interstate commerce or portability of health-enabling technologies. The practice of on-demand block chain and predictive analytics will be hallmarks of this new predictive paradigm.
How have you seen the role of digital healthcare change over the past 5–10 years?
Digital health will shrink physical space and make virtual presence even more possible for necessary services, from primary care to specialty services. It will extend into the education space for providers and the
public. The existing shortages of healthcare providers is predicted to only get worse over the next ten years, which will require us to transform the system and use the multiplier effect to optimize the performance, availability, and impact of providers and resources in new ways.
What are some challenges you have observed related to the shift toward digitizing healthcare?
Challenges exist in the intraoperability in the numerous systems that exist in healthcare. Humans, in many situations, are still acting as the interface between computer systems, which is creating duplication, increased work, and potential for errors. Moving to vendor-agnostic systems with universal standards is a must in the digital age, where data has to be transformed into information, then knowledge, and finally wisdom from which consumers and providers can make decisions.
What do you see as the next frontier in digital healthcare?
I see a continued focus on patient-supplied data into native health records. The maturation of machine learning and AI for health coaching, reporting, appointment reminders, accessibility, and clinician decision support has the power to disrupt the current system and provide real-time interaction and healthy behaviors. Innovations such as blockchain represent the integrative nature and power of technology in an environment with so many stakeholders. AHL
