American Healthcare Leader #17

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EQUAL CARE FOR ALL.

Discover the ways in which three inspiring individuals offer the IDD population a silver lining, moving one step closer to flexible, holistic care for every body

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The Path

The Issues

The Reason

32. Brian Haschmann gives employees more flexiblity with their health benefits at Anheuser-Busch

54. Julie Celano believes employee happiness starts with celebrating uniqueness at University of Kansas Health System

91. James Quick brings a fresh perspective to healthcare workforce management at SimpliFi

16. Uday Hardikar reveals the lessons he’s learned in leadership throughout his career

50. Kailee Goold of Cardinal Health rethinks what it means to be a lawyer

88. Corizon’s Jennifer Finger is helping bring safe, effective care to prison healthcare facilities

36. Hikma Pharmaceuticals’ Mohammed Obeidat uses his global perspective to propel the company forward

40. Otsuka’s Ed Stelmakh supports his team and his community inside and outside the office

82. Samara Penn Savary integrates her passion for education into her work at Bristol-Myers Squibb

21. Betsy McCubrey of DaVita Inc. encourages everyone to own every opportunity

76. Symantec’s Tony Douglas provides tips on how to keep systems secure during digital transformations

94. Laurel Faciane fits her legal team into her schedule any time, any day at Galderma Laboratories

Gillian Fry (Otsuka Pharmaceuticals), Aida Malik Photography (Bristol-Myers Squibb)

The Business

The Feature

138. Paula Wittmayer thrives in the innovative environment at Boehringer Ingelheim

119. Matthew Kaufman improves ER visits for IDD patients by using telehealth technology

186. Terry Webb is bringing medical care to rural communities by introducing Telepharmacy

144. Will Conaway has mastered building culture and enabling success in the IT space

168. Deanna Wise’s IT strategy has made her one of The Most Powerful Women in Technology

130. Chief Technology Officer Joe Bastante reveals three key techniques that help drive the success of a company

114. CEO Marco Damiani raises the bar of care for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities at AHRC of New York City

176. Learn about the unique way Irina Konstantinovsky and Horizon Therapeutics measure success

134. Allen Schiff celebrates team culture to bolster success at Schiff & Associates

124. John D. Kemp is making superior dental care possible for the IDD community through Project Accessible Oral Health

172. Heather Nigro gives us a sneak peek at CSA Medical Inc.’s new breakthrough device

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Beyond Proximity

I get bored easily—especially when I stay in one spot too long. Maybe that’s why I’ve lived in four cities and seven apartments over the last eight years.

As I move around, I pick up on new things I like and old things I miss. But regardless of how much or where I travel, I still feel the roots I’ve planted in certain spaces upon each return.

For example, in my hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania, I take great comfort in the curly fries and soft-serve ice cream at Sara’s Diner, in the ridiculously beautiful sunsets over the horizon of the peninsula, in the wild turkeys that wander carelessly across suburban lawns. These are the memories I carry with me everywhere, and they’re often what come to mind when I think about the building blocks that make up a community.

When the American Healthcare Leader team embarked on creating an entire issue based on community impact, I thought of the small things that make the communities in my life unique and warm. As I read more about the people within the healthcare industry whose careers and missions bolster communities by providing care to everyone within their own, it soon became clear that those missions aren’t just about making lives easier—they’re also about making them remarkable.

For me, the community I’ve built extends beyond the limits of any city in which I’ve lived. But for many, community is simply defined by proximity and commonality. And for those perceived as different from others, this version of a community doesn’t exist. The subjects within this issue seek to combat that.

In our feature section on page 112, our guest editor, Susan Constantino, introduces three incredible individuals who provide superior care to those with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Turn to page 160 and meet Lynn Gordon of New Hanover Regional Medical Center, an institution where no one is turned away from treatment, regardless of income or condition. Also, on page 60 is Dan Burke, an SVP with Pacific Dental Services who seeks to lessen physical ailments by improving dental health across the country.

Above all, the people in this issue are redefining what it means to bring care to and develop a new kind of community. Rather than being held together by location alone, they’re bringing us together by celebrating difference, distinction, and uniqueness, while also creating a healthcare system that unites our separate stories to make us feel whole.

KC Esper Managing Editor Gillian Fry

Our Journey to Integrated Healthcare

The world of healthcare has evolved significantly since 1946 when Cerebral Palsy Associations of New York State (CP of NYS) was founded by groups of parents who were looking for medical and clinical services for their children. Yet there is one constant theme that is as true today as then, the challenge of ensuring equitable access to health care for children and adults with disabilities.

Over seventy years ago, when families were unable to find doctors, dentists, or other clinicians to care for the special needs of their children, they helped to inform legislators and state government about the need and the disparity in their communities for medical personnel that would provide not only the direct services but would assist in finding clinicians who were interested in learning about disabilities, about training others, and about research to develop a new body of information about medical, dental, and therapeutic possibilities. And for families today, the struggle remains as there are often too few providers that support people with disabilities in their community practice.

As CP of NYS evolved, the organization worked with a network of providers across New York to establish their own clinics to support people with disabilities

and to ensure access to primary, dental, and other specialty healthcare services as well as therapeutic services such as physical, occupational, and speech therapy.

We worked closely with the New York State Department of Health to develop clinics in communities statewide that understood the unique treatment needs of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). One major drawback was that the medical and dental schools did not provide the training in special needs populations that is so necessary if we want to have a prepared group of clinicians to care for our children and adults with IDD.

Over the years, the affiliates of CP of NYS and a small number of other clinics specializing in healthcare for people with disabilities have played a significant role in ensuring that there is a health system that provides specialized care, but this is not necessarily integrated care in the community. It is true that people with disabilities often require more time than a typical patient, particularly if they are nonverbal and can’t explain what they are feeling or if they have complex behavioral diagnoses. And the financial stress on the clinics, due to an imperfect funding system, has boards of directors asking themselves how long they can subsidize the system.

Most often, the mission of the clinic outweighs the financial considerations, but there is no guarantee that will continue. Many of the clinics have gone through the process of becoming federally qualified health centers so that they might better leverage new funding sources while opening up their doors to the community at large—in essence setting up an accessible community clinic that serves all people.

There are a number of committed professionals, as are highlighted in this edition, who continue the journey begun so long ago by the families seeking services for their children and adult children.

StationMD’s Dr. Matt Kaufman has developed a training program that ensures his emergency care physicians have the skills they need to work with people with disabilities. This training will benefit more than seven thousand people statewide who will be supported by StationMD physicians in a telehealth grant over the next five years. That specialty training is critical to a wide range of primary care physicians and specialists in order to understand how to best treat people with disabilities and keep them out of emergency departments unless absolutely necessary.

Also in this issue, you will meet a leader in the disability field, John D. Kemp, who has spent all his adult life working on issues critical to those with disabilities. In John’s article, the focus is on ensuring dental care is available for all people with disabilities. Part of John’s effort includes the establishment of a national organization, Project Accessible Oral Health, focusing on ensuring that access to quality dental care is available for people with disabilities nationwide.

And finally, Marco Damiani has spent his career working to establish a health care system in New York City that focuses on the medical and dental needs and wellness of individuals with disabilities throughout the five boroughs. His work with the NYU Dental School will ensure that dental students graduating from NYU will be able to set up practices that integrate all people in a community.

We have come a long way since the 1940s to ensure the specialty nature of people with disabilities and other complex needs can be met by our healthcare system, yet we have much more to do.

The work of those featured in this edition demonstrates the outreach that is being done so that our clinicians understand how to treat people with disabilities while also addressing the need for accessible space in examination rooms that allow for the physical and behavioral needs that challenge traditional practitioners and the typical doctors’ offices.

Together with leaders in New York State and across the nation, we look forward to building on the success of the past and the innovative approaches described in this issue as we continue on this journey to achieve true integration of people with disabilities into their community healthcare system.

—Susan Constantino

Susan Constantino EVP and CEO Cerebral Palsy Associations of New York State

The Path

Every step executives take on their career journeys 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.

12. Nancy Ardell

16. Uday Hardikar

21. Betsy McCubrey

24. Jennifer De Camara

28. Debbie Locklair

32. Brian Haschmann

36. Mohammed Obeidat

Following the Pathway to Passion

Enlivant’s executive vice president and general counsel

Nancy Ardell pulls from more than two decades of experience to inform her legal work in the healthcare sector

By Clint Worthington

Nancy Ardell Executive VP and General Counsel Enlivant

John Gress Photography

Before joining Chicago-based senior living provider Enlivant (formerly Assisted Living Concepts) in April of 2018, Nancy Fox Ardell had already cultivated more than two decades of experience in the legal space of the healthcare industry, specifically in large healthcare institutions in Chicago. Today, she puts that expertise to good use, working to implement a culture of safety at Enlivant that ensures that both staff and residents are well cared for.

Ardell’s path to healthcare was an unexpected one. Her career started in the banking sector. As a loan officer for ABN AMRO Bank, she negotiated loan documents and worked on strategic sourcing initiatives. From there, she spent a short time at accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, whose reputation was built because of its involvement in the Enron scandal.

“I’m a big believer in ‘things happen for a reason,’” Ardell says of her tenure at Arthur Andersen. “It just shows that we must all be open to opportunities— you never know when you’re going to find that dream job.” For her, that job was in healthcare.

After Arthur Andersen went under, she found herself working at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (now the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab) as an associate general counsel, where Ardell quickly learned the specifics of taking on legal duties in the healthcare industry. She researched grant documentation, worked closely with inventors and physicians, and found ways to incorporate her existing legal knowledge in IT and financing into the broader healthcare sphere. “That job really informed my desire to work in healthcare,” Ardell says.

After her time at RIC, Ardell became managing counsel at Cadence Health in Winfield, Illinois, running the day-today operations of the legal department. Close to her home, Cadence offered Ardell the chance to play a large role in

her family’s healthcare system, which was particularly gratifying. There, her in-hospital office allowed her to see all areas of the organization, giving her a greater picture of how her work affected health outcomes.

In 2015, Cadence was acquired by Northwestern Memorial HealthCare, and Ardell moved to senior associate general counsel. There, she worked in an organization that had both healthcare and academic components, granting her a larger perspective of the strategy function of her job.

Ardell says that each of these experiences built upon one another to inform her understanding of the legal function of healthcare, allowing her to carry these lessons into her work as general counsel for Enlivant. Now, she provides strategic oversight for 230 assisted living and memory care facilities across twenty-six states.

Thanks to her in-house work in other healthcare organizations, Ardell understands the importance of partnering with clients, focusing on clinical quality, and handling regulatory matters in a way befitting the industry. This perspective comes in handy when working with her legal team to elevate Enlivant’s customer service initiatives, for instance. Upon first joining Enlivant, Ardell spent several days driving around the Midwest to eleven different senior living communities, learning how the buildings are constructed and what systems are put in place to care for residents. “It’s good to know the environment, and understand what they’re dealing with,” says Ardell.

Ardell has also engaged in a number of major initiatives, inspired partly by her previous healthcare experience, that have improved Enlivant’s quality of service in a number of ways. Enlivant’s

Culture of Safety Program, a partnership with Clinical Quality Group, for example, established a system-wide approach to safety for the organization’s 7,900 employees. Workers receive quarterly training on specific health and safety issues and are given easy pipelines to communicate ideas and concerns to leadership. “It provides straightforward talking points for leaders and engages community leadership in a way that everyone understands,” says Ardell.

Another initiative Ardell prides herself on is the Nurse Navigator, a nonstop resource for workplace injuries that grants workers access to registered

nurse and triage care over the phone. “It’s a great resource for staff,” she says, “it helps them understand that we care about them and lets us more effectively manage our workers.”

As Ardell continues her work in the healthcare industry, she remains endlessly thankful for the knowledge and perspective her long career has provided. At Enlivant, she’s committed to using her long history in the industry to help the company carry out its mission of compassionate, high-quality care for its residents. AHL

Editor’s Note: at press time, Nancy Ardell is no longer with Enlivant.

“I’m a big believer in ‘things happen for a reason.’ It just shows that we must all be open to opportunities—you never know when you’re going to find that dream job.”

By Peter Fabris

The Tact of a Well-Traveled Leader

Uday Hardikar explains how diversity of experience serves as a priceless tool as he helps advance technology to meet major healthcare industry challenges

Many career paths lead to success. Uday Hardikar believes a route that includes stops yielding diverse experiences, such as working in multiple countries and within different business functions, is one of the most enriching and rewarding.

Hardikar’s journey has included corporate stints in India, Ireland, and North America in biopharmaceuticals, medical devices, and precision manufacturing industries. He’s served in operations, supply chain management, industrial engineering, and sales and service support, all leading to his current role as executive vice president of engineering and product development for Comar, a premier packaging and medical component supplier, innovating solutions for customers who lead the way to a healthier world. Hardikar’s breadth of experience has provided

important insights into how people in different cultures work as well as how different business functions can optimize how they work together for superior business performance. These precious opportunities have allowed him—an executive of a multinational company with cross-functional responsibilities—to gain critical skills. “My experiences have helped me understand how people think and work, what motivates them, and the things they don’t like or struggle with,” Hardikar says.

To fully comprehend how people in various global regions approach their work, one must understand the local cultures, he explains. In the Asia-Pacific region, for example, people hold age and hierarchy in reverence. Experienced, high-level executives are rarely questioned. “If the boss says something, it goes,” Hardikar says. “You are expected to follow instructions to the letter.”

Uday Hardikar

Executive VP, Engineering & Product Development Comar

By contrast, workers in the US, and to some degree, Western Europe, tend to ask more questions, wanting to know more deeply about the reasoning behind decision-making. Hardikar says this behavior is expected and encouraged by the culture. Recognizing these differences is important, as executives who don’t understand these fundamental characteristics in a workplace may struggle to communicate their intentions or get intended results.

Approaches to instructional or training protocols, for example, differ greatly between Asian and American operations, so flexible teaching methods must be adopted to be successful. One learning style is not necessarily better than the other, Hardikar says. Executives who are aware of the differences can more readily adapt their communication and leadership styles for each audience. This awareness, Hardikar believes, proves more effective than trying to change

innate behavior. “It’s difficult to take the culture out of someone,” Hardikar says. “It takes a lot of effort to help them think differently.”

With respect to the healthcare industry, Hardikar says the ability to connect with workers in locations around the world is a critical skill for driving changes in healthcare and staying on top of the life-changing trends in the field. Innovation, supported by new technology, will be needed for the industry to address its most pressing challenges, and technologists will play an increasingly important role in this effort.

The healthcare industry must find ways to deliver better products and services while lowering costs. “The cost of providing healthcare has ballooned, while the need for services has gone up,” he observes. By 2030, for example, many baby boomers will be on Medicare, and costs could escalate to an unsustainable point. Fortunately, advancements in

science, medicine, and technology as well as their convergence provide fantastic platforms for cost-reducing innovations.

From a patient experience perspective, point of care is shifting. Minimally invasive surgery allows patients to be sent home the day of surgery or just a day or two after. Reliable telemedicine apps and devices can help clinicians monitor patients remotely, allowing complications to be diagnosed and treated early, before they worsen.

From a product innovation perspective, companies can deliver more life-saving drugs, with the ability to tailor certain therapies for individuals. “Immunooncology therapies are getting smarter, but are not yet patient specific,” he observes. Artificial intelligence could help link new therapies to specific biomarkers to make treatments more effective.

From an operations perspective, the challenge is to deliver higher numbers of drugs in smaller batches, faster and Avni

STEADFAST IN THE LIFE SCIENCES

cheaper. “In the past, a few drugs would make most of the money for pharmaceutical companies,” Hardikar says. “We are now moving to an era of less of more— more products at lower volumes.”

To be successful, manufacturers will have to be nimbler, and most large companies are not hardwired for that. “If it takes a long time to change over from one product run to another, that will be costly,” he says. Manufacturing facilities will need to be designed as multiproduct facilities, equipment design will need to enable faster changeovers, and people who work in manufacturing facilities will have to have diverse sets of competencies to support such operations. ERP systems will have to adapt to this new environment as well. Being smart in implementing Industry 4.0 will be a key differentiator.

The supplier base and partners serving Hardikar while at Bristol-Myers Squibb and B. Braun have built collaborative and mutually beneficial relationships formed from Hardikar’s strategic vision. “Uday’s focus on establishing added value and a differentiated vertical supply chain in a true partnership model has allowed CRB to align its services and expertise to meet both near-term needs and longterm strategic business objectives,” says

Shannah Falcone, senior associate and director, strategic accounts for CRB. “He has empowered our collective teams to deliver forward-thinking, holistic solutions with an emphasis on maximizing operational efficiency and reducing cost of goods sold.”

For young technologists making their way in the dynamic healthcare industry, Hardikar encourages being patient and staying focused on learning new skills. He emphasizes the importance of taking chances and not fearing failure during change. “Pay your dues,” he advises. “What you put into your job is what you will get out of it. Everyone fails one time or another. Most important is what you do after you fail. How do you learn from it, and how do you respond?”

Reflecting on his evolutionary and global career, Hardikar says that young technologists looking to assume leadership positions should also strive to diversify their experiences, recognizing that sometimes, one must move laterally or even take a step down to do so. “Think of it as a career jungle gym, not a career ladder,” he says, quoting Pattie Sellers of SellersEaston Media. Broad experience, both geographically and functionally, is critical today, and will be even more so tomorrow. AHL

“Most important is what you do after you fail. How do you learn from it, and how do you respond?”

By Andrew Tamarkin

Owning the Opportunity

Having crafted her own development journey, it is only natural Betsy McCubrey encourages others to do the same. “Grab every opportunity you are given,” she advises. “Treat people well and create your own flexibility and capacity so you can evolve.”

As group vice president and deputy general counsel for DaVita Kidney Care, she engages with her team as a community, empowers individuals to set goals, and opens space for progress.

From a young age, McCubrey set her goals high. “I knew before healthcare that I wanted to be an attorney, because, well,” she laughs, “I didn’t want the scratchy tissues.” When her parents refused to spend the extra few dollars on a new ‘puff-plus’ tissue line, ten-year-old McCubrey asked her grandmother what it would take to buy the softer brand. What her grandmother told her would instill a particular drive in her that would grow larger than the deluxe tissue matter at hand. “I’m going to be a lawyer,” she recalls saying, “and I’m going to buy the soft tissues.”

While she always knew she’d be a lawyer, her desire to specialize in healthcare would mature over time. It was in college when she was first attracted to the idea. “It’s this area that truly impacts every single person,” she reflects. “It’s complex and it’s different, and it was constantly evolving. It’s something that affects everyone—and it impacts me.”

McCubrey took a risk. At the time, healthcare law was in its early phases. Not to mention she was poised to take on enormous debt to attend both graduate and law school. Achieving her goals amid these challenges took a fervent sense of determination. “I knew if I worked hard, was passionate about it, and invested in it, it would work out.” With a cast of supportive parents, helpful professors, and mentors along the way, McCubrey actualized her dreams and enjoyed the journey getting there.

At DaVita, McCubrey bears the advantage of having a legal background in healthcare. She was offered an opportunity in the compliance department upon hire, which led her to the legal division shortly thereafter. In her role, she is currently accountable for the company’s regulatory, operations, and subsidiary attorneys for its more than 2,600 clinics and adjacent businesses across the country. With the duality of a healthcare-legal foundation, DaVita entrusts McCubrey to lead a team of more than ninety attorneys, paralegals, specialists, and administrators. Interacting with the many faces of her team is by far her favorite part of the job.

DaVita’s Betsy McCubrey paved her own path— and she encourages others to do the same

Betsy McCubrey Group Vice President and Deputy General Counsel DaVita Inc.

Cultivating a sense of community—what they call “people development”—is intrinsic to her leadership style. “Most people can do what they do in a lot of places,” McCubrey explains. “You spend a lot of your time working, so you want to work somewhere you want to be.”

One strategic pillar of the legal department is dedicated entirely to “creating a special place.” And by voluntarily assuming ownership of this pillar, McCubrey is helping drive professional development, personal alignment, and “team,” all with an eye toward diversity and belonging. “Team” allows everyone to feel like they are part of something, empowers employees, and leaves room for fun. Furthermore, she seeks to create the space

for others to both pave their own paths forward and invest in the paths of their colleagues. Professional development reflects continued growth and learning, adds to fulfillment and retention, and makes employees better. But she believes that “you own your professional development.” And the same is true for personal alignment. She says, “It’s necessary to do your job and do it well, but find those things that make you want to come to work in the morning and really embrace them.”

McCubrey’s modus operandi has had positive effects throughout the legal department. By facilitating the creation of employee committees, outwardly sharing goals, and supporting fun, the department has continued to see increases in retention and fulfillment. These

committees—the fun committee, newsletter committee, and service and volunteer committee, to name a few—are empowered to develop themselves and the individuals on board. “It gets people out of their boxes,” McCubrey indicates. These team-engaging activities offer employees a way to personally align with their positions. In fact, for her, developing oneself as a collaborative and spirited teammate is an essential part of being on staff. In other words, “If you’re not a team player, then no one cares how smart you are.”

McCubrey supports all members of the department but works to really extend the concepts of professional growth and development to the women on her team and throughout DaVita, driven by her own journey in the field. She wants to be an advocate and serve as a visual role model, proving that a woman can have a family and still be very successful, both within the legal profession as well as in a large healthcare corporation. “We have a big push for diversity and belonging, but if everyone at the top still looks the same, it doesn’t resonate—it’s important to be intentional.” As a mother of two young children herself, she is motivated to raise other women up when she can to positively change what the role of a leader can be.

When she considers the future, McCubrey aims to resist complacency, accept new challenges, and open the space for others to lead—or as she would say: “own it!” AHL

Healthcare roots that run deep

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“It’s necessary to do your job and do it well, but find those things that make you want to come to work in the morning and really embrace them.”

By Sara Deeter

Undoubtedly, Jennifer De Camara loves what she does.

In law school, when her mother told her to find a job she could love, De Camara shied away from the advice—she didn’t want to live and breathe her job. But now, as vice president of law with Johnson & Johnson’s US Pharmaceutical Strategic Customer Group, De Camara acknowledges the wisdom of her mother’s words.

“I do love my job,” she admits, laughing. “I’m inspired by it every day, and I think that’s really all you can ask for.”

De Camara

According to De Camara, her position as VP of law at Johnson & Johnson is a perfect fit for her for two reasons. First, she says, is her lifelong fascination with science and her drive to transform that passion into a practical, immediately useful service. The second reason, De Camara explains, is that her own experiences in the healthcare system have instilled in her the importance of keeping one’s mind on “the right purpose” in the course of legal work.

“My experiences as a patient, the mother of a patient, and the daughter of a hospice nurse have all taught me to never lose sight of what I’m working on,” De Camara explains. “We’re trying to help people here at Johnson & Johnson. Those people just happen to be patients at the time, and we have to understand that they are going through what may be the most difficult time of their lives.”

De Camara says that both of those factors, her love for science and her personal healthcare experiences, impact her everyday work at Johnson & Johnson. She loves being a part of the medication development process and being able to watch as the company makes medicines that will help improve and save lives. At the same time, she has been able to leverage her background in biology, biochemistry, and biotechnology.

“One of the principles for me that has translated most strongly across both pathways, biology and the law, is the scientific method,” De Camara offers. “The scientific method calls for the development of a hypothesis and an experiment, and you draw conclusions based on your understanding of that experiment and its limitations. It’s very factual and scrupulous about what you know— and what you don’t know.”

Jennifer

VP of Law, US Pharmaceutical Strategic Customer Group Johnson & Johnson

Mark Krajnak

Quantified Commitment

The commitment of her team at Johnson & Johnson isn’t the only thing that inspires De Camara. She is also deeply dedicated to—and inspired by—the company’s commitment to D&I initiatives. “When you measure diversity and inclusion, it moves from being a lofty goal to being an everyday expectation,” De Camara asserts.

Johnson & Johnson has found a number of such measures, she reports, allowing them to track leaders’ abilities to live up to that expectation. “I’m very fortunate,” De Camara notes. “My company has an extensive commitment to these initiatives and a deep bench of resources to support their leaders.”

The ideals of the scientific method are what De Camara adheres to when evaluating marketing claims for the company’s products. “Sometimes scientists are really excited about the potential for a medication,” she says. “But talking about the scientific method is helpful grounding to remind them of what is known, and what can be stated factually, versus what is aspirational and what we hope will ultimately be proven to be true.”

De Camara has now been at Johnson & Johnson for more than twelve years. During that time, she has dedicated herself to driving diverse and talented teams, developing impactful and patient-minded partnerships with senior management, and supporting vital patient access programs. She has also realized a talent for bringing clarity to ambiguous legal processes.

“I specialize in advising on innovative programs and activities where the legal requirements are not completely clear,” De Camara says. “I love helping the Mark

Krajnak

company identify a path forward that can be operationalized by the business, and that skill has translated really well across different areas, like our social media communications and our establishment of patient support programs.”

These opportunities to grow and diversify her skill set while helping patients in meaningful ways are exactly what drew her to the company in the first place, De Camara says. She’d had her eye on Johnson & Johnson for several years before she actually joined. But while its stellar reputation and wide array of products were what initially caught her eye, the people at the company— and their attitude toward the work—are what really hooked her.

“I actually interviewed with about fifteen lawyers in the course of getting an offer,” De Camara recalls. “To a person, I felt a sense of kindred ethics, practice philosophy, excitement about how pharmaceutical companies can help people, and a strong belief that lawyers who are trusted advisors can have a meaningful and positive impact on the business. That was so striking, and over the years I’ve continued to be struck by how the company lives up to its credo.” AHL

When the human body is the biggest data platform, who will capture value?

EY Health Sciences & Wellness helps our clients deliver on their strategic goals, design optimized operating models, and form the right partnerships to thrive today and succeed in the health systems of tomorrow. We work across the ecosystem, to understand the implications of trends and proactively find solutions to business issues.

“My experiences as a patient, the mother of a patient, and the daughter of a hospice nurse have all taught me to never lose sight of what I’m working on.”

By Kathryn Kruse

Keeping People in the Picture

Debbie Locklair’s ability to connect individual experience to large business choices is no accident. It mirrors her career trajectory. Before moving into administrator roles, she started her career at McLeod Health, a South Carolina nonprofit hospital system, as a NICU social worker in 1989, drawn to the work after delivering premature twins. “From the beginning of my career in healthcare I have had the perspective that you must consider the whole person, whether a patient or an employee,” she says. “The best way to make big decisions means

thinking through how those decisions impact the individual’s delivery of care and receiving of care.” Eventually, she moved on to become senior vice president and chief human resources officer of McLeod Health—a position she accepted with utmost dedication.

As both a business partner and a business builder in her role, Locklair takes a seat at the table in executive operations committee meetings, helping guide responses to overarching health system concerns. As the organization works to answer challenging questions about the

CHRO Debbie Locklair’s skill for building time-honored relationships supports the mission of providing excellence in care for employees and patients alike at McLeod Health

maintenance of strong financial stability, growth in new markets and services, and implementation of best operational practices, Locklair recognizes that each decision impacts McLeod’s ability to fulfill its mission of clinical excellence, and more so, individual patient care. Since starting in her new role in December 2018, Locklair has learned to address problems with a variety of tools. Most importantly, she develops authentic relationships, builds collaboration through common goals, and aligns outcomes for shared success.

Locklair feels understanding both personal and organizational vision is critical to a senior role. She also knows that, in such a role, positive change must be led through a cascade of formal and informal influences and key messaging that creates buy-in among stakeholders. She recalls a twenty-three-bed emergency department she helped design in a McLeod’s hospital in Dillon, South Carolina, where she spent ten years as the hospital’s administrator. “Hospitals in rural areas don’t get to replace large, expensive technology very often,” she says. As such, the design and patient flow needed to take longevity into account. The emergency department that was built guarantees care for future generations. “I love this organization,” she says of McLeod. “It was founded by a local, dedicated physician and continues to have a local volunteer governing board. We are sustaining and positioning McLeod Health to continue to provide excellence in healthcare for generations to come.”

Debbie Locklair SVP and CHRO McLeod Health

Locklair is, among other things, responsible for building strategies and tactics around employee benefits and relations, regulatory requirements, and, when they happen, acquisitions for McLeod. Considering the network’s eighty-five hundred employees, Locklair says, “You have to use data to understand changes that are occurring and look ahead to mitigate threats to the organization, like labor shortages and pending retirement of key talent.” Currently, she focuses on solutions for concerns many medical providers face: a market that puts McLeod in tight competition for talent, increased baby boomer retirement rates, and a heightened need for skilled bedside nurses and clinicians.

In the face of these challenges, Locklair and her team have launched several initiatives to ensure strong results. McLeod has developed pipeline collaborations— partnerships with local universities, technical schools, adult learning programs, and high schools—to deepen the trained employee candidate pool.

New technology also comes into play to increase McLeod’s rate of applicant responses by reaching out to a broader base of candidates to help tell its story. “We receive over 80,000 job applications per year,” says Locklair. “We want to make sure that we can find the best external candidates who meet our standards while also developing our own internal talent.”

Once employees are in the system, Locklair and McLeod Health continue to develop and grow their own staff by supporting them with ongoing education, including online learning through “McLeod University,” targeted education, and scholarships. Additionally, Locklair and McLeod leadership continue to evaluate the life-stage needs and performances of employees, exploring options for flexible scheduling and added job duties to respond to employee preferences. For all employees, Locklair and her team are working to build methods to “bridge gaps” and foster a sense of belonging and friendship as well as a

“From the beginning of my career in healthcare, I have had the perspective that you must consider the whole person, whether a patient or an employee.”

is proud to support Debbie Locklair

as she leads the effort to create a Total Rewards environment that positions McLeod for future success.

personal connection to McLeod’s larger mission. “We have to tell our story through messaging that everyone can hear or visualize and relate to,” she says.

Like many organizations, McLeod sees the challenge of developing intergenerational employee teams. Locklair considers how to help people be open to new approaches and to value different experiences. In responding to this issue and others, Locklair is implementing new HR technology that will increase agility and access to data. Furthermore, she believes assessing this data and providing directional trends for leaders act as tools to help develop strategies to strengthen personal relationships. Currently, she’s using directional data to tackle first-year turnover rates and establish best practices in keeping a workforce engaged. She recognizes, however, that “data is directional; one solution won’t work for every department, location, or individual.”

Fortunately, proactively developing McLeod’s workforce is no new task. More than one hundred years after Dr. McLeod founded McLeod Health in 1906, the organization continues to experience strong growth, expanding from its original location, in Florence, South Carolina, to a network of seven hospitals across the eastern portion of South Carolina. Locklair explains that intrinsic to growth is dedication to Dr. McLeod’s original vision of medical excellence. AHL

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By KC Esper

Flexible Benefits for Dynamic Lives

Brian Haschmann helps Anheuser-Busch develop an all-encompassing flexible benefits program aimed at supporting all employees

When Brian Haschmann graduated with a degree in communications, he never realized how many opportunities existed for him within practically any corporation. But, in his first job as a benefits specialist, he learned how his role impacted the operations of a company behind the scenes, gravitating toward the benefits portion of the job, where he developed a knack for creating the perfect balance of program offerings and employee needs. He became adept at providing employees healthcare solutions that helped better their lives no matter what kinds of challenges they faced.

Eventually, he moved to the beverage industry and worked throughout a nineyear tenure at Constellation Brands to help enrich the well-being of employees. He learned how to match people to healthcare plans that fit their lifestyles. He learned how to choose plans that worked for a broad demographic—one that constantly changes. He learned how to communicate plans effectively to show people the pros and cons of choosing a particular path. Then, with the countless skills he developed over the years, Haschmann moved to Anheuser-Busch (A-B), where he now stands as director of health and welfare benefits.

In his position, Haschmann helps A-B’s employees live happily and healthily inside and outside work. During his thirteen years of experience prior to coming to A-B, Haschmann learned how to cater a benefits program to a wide demographic—a skill that becomes especially useful when considering the scope of A-B’s work, spread across more than thirty locations and twelve breweries. As intimidating as it may seem, Haschmann completes his work using a simple mentality: give employees what they want by asking what they want.

Brian Haschmann Director, Health & Welfare Anheuser-Busch

David Logger Photography

Over the past year, Haschmann used this tactic to renovate the company’s healthcare offerings so employees would feel like their health was in their hands, able to change at the same pace as they do. He created and distributed surveys and questionnaires to help gauge the needs of A-B’s employees. His goal was to develop a program that not only met the needs of the entire demographic within the company but that also went beyond the traditional method of just checking boxes on a static list of options. As a result, Haschmann developed an entirely new flexible benefits program that allows employees to customize their options rather than feeling restricted to a few choices.

“We worked closely with Aon to develop a multiyear strategy,” Haschmann explains. “We’re noticing that the millennial workforce today wants a much different plan than employees did twenty or thirty years ago. This flexible approach allows our employees to dictate where their money goes and cater to anyone’s wants regardless of circumstance.”

In addition to providing an all-encompassing benefits program, employees can choose more sustainable options that remain pertinent over a longer period of time. Overall, A-B’s flex program allows employees to have a stronger voice when it comes to their health. Using a corresponding program called “My Flex Pack,” healthcare users can adjust their plans as they see fit and see how their money is split among the plan’s different features. By completing the company’s wellness program, which entails a checkup from a primary care physician and a biometric screening, employees unlock “flex credits” that they can earmark for various plans as they see fit. Credits are first applied to medical coverage; then any remaining credits can be used to either buy up on dental or vision, allocate money to an HSA, or purchase voluntary benefits, like accident insurance.

Eventually, the health and welfare team wants to transform the flex program

into a total benefits reward program that meets specific needs and allows employees to feel empowered to handle their health during any stage of their lives. As such, millennial professionals looking to save money or tenured professionals looking toward retirement can find options that suit them throughout their careers. By developing this benefits spectrum, Haschmann has allowed A-B to remain competitive from as much of a professional awards perspective as a salary-based perspective.

Holistically, Haschmann’s position plays a role in every member’s job at A-B. Due to the breadth of his work, he describes his team as “being there for our employees through everything.” In addition to the benefits changes he has implemented over the past year, Haschmann’s team also acts as a support group to handle any sort of health- or

wellness-related matter. If a mother needs suggestions for daycare, for example, A-B’s health and welfare crew can provide a list of suitable options to save her the hassle of looking. Being the company’s wellness mentor not only aids in the happiness of its employees while they’re at work but also supports their work/ life balance outside of work. Haschmann says that everything his team does for A-B supports its mission to remain relevant and cutting edge, both in the sense of its products and its employees.

“My job has the potential to impact the lives of everyone in the company,” Haschmann expresses. “We make sure that we’re giving them the tools and resources they need at any point in time so that they can live a healthier lifestyle. Knowing that my job helps nourish our employees’ well-being makes everything worth it.” AHL

“We make sure that we’re giving [our employees] the tools and resources they need at any point in time so that they can live a healthier lifestyle.”

Our deep data & analytics, and industry expertise allow us to develop solutions designed to meet the

to making it easy and affordable for valued employees to stay healthy and live well.

Calm & Sense applauds Brian Haschmann, Director of Health & Welfare at Anheuser-Busch, for his visionary leadership in support of “employee-first” benefits innovation. Learn

By Billy Yost

Enabling Expansion through Expedition

Hikma’s Mohammed Obeidat relocated from Jordan to help oversee and propel the pharmaceutical company’s US push

On May 1, 2019, Hikma Pharmaceuticals announced the launching of its one hundredth injectable medicine in the United States, an antibiotic developed to combat the rise of drug-resistant super bacterias. It was a huge milestone for the London-based pharmaceutical company, which was founded in Jordan forty years ago and whose global reach now spans more than fifty countries with twenty nine manufacturing plants, seven research and development centers, and hundreds of generic, injectable, and branded medications.

Mohammed Obeidat has been at Hikma since 2004, and in that time company revenue has grown from $200 million to over $2 billion, ten times the annual yield from the Obeidat’s first day. Obeidat relocated from Jordan to the US in 2013 to become chief financial officer of Hikma’s fastest growing regional business, where he immediately set to work strengthening financial processes and practices that would help accelerate Hikma’s growth in North America. The company is now one of the US’s top generic pharmaceutical companies.

After nearly two decades at Hikma, Obeidat has leveraged his diverse financial background to incite impressive growth in a variety of roles, including his involvement in deals and acquisitions, the launching of new products,

financial forecasting, and external audit oversight. “I believe my diverse early career experiences working within a range of Jordan-based companies and then in different parts of Hikma built an important foundation for me,” Obeidat says. “There was a significant amount of global interaction in my roles that would be important later when assuming my new role in the US.”

Obeidat joined Hikma in Jordan just in time to help the company go public only a year after his hiring in 2004. Since then, the company has grown exponentially,

demonstrating a willingness to acquire businesses across its key markets in the US, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. After relocating to the company’s US headquarters in New Jersey, Obeidat was tasked with aiding expansion. “Before I joined, US sales were around $500 million, and the plan was to expand through acquisition and development deals,” Obeidat says. That plan meant that Hikma would have to relocate not only himself but his wife and their three young children. It wasn’t a decision that was made lightly.

Mohammed Obeidat CFO Hikma Pharmaceuticals

Steven Weiss

“I lived most of my life in Jordan,” Obeidat says. “When it came to the decision, we tried to think more logically and less emotionally.” The Group VP of Finance says that the benefit for his children proved favorable: learning English in school, meeting neighbors and new friends, and interacting with an entirely different culture. After only a few short weeks in the US, Obeidat says his family adjusted as if they had been living there for years. “We’ve all been very happy here,” he remarks.

With his family content, Obeidat rolled up his sleeves and got to work getting to know his new department.

“I tried to gain my team’s acceptance quickly,” Obeidat says. “I think I was able to do that because my leadership style is demonstrated in working shoulder to shoulder with the team on a daily basis. I didn’t want them to feel any difference in status among us.”

Obeidat says he made an effort to lead by example by being the first one there if work was required on the weekends and always the last to leave. “I worked hard to mentor my team so they can go and help other departments within the company,” Obeidat says. “The finance area is one of the most wide reaching departments in every part of the organization, and because we’re knowledgeable about what’s going on in

these departments, we’re really able to help effectively drive change.”

For the detail-oriented finance team, navigating change is a serious mandate. But Obeidat says his penchant for thinking through tough problems has helped the finance team tackle issues by addressing root causes. “I think we had several challenges to address, especially with the integration of several large US acquisitions, but we worked together and delivered results,” Obeidat says.

Looking ahead, Obeidat says that the company’s continued growth in the US alone is a positive indicator of what’s to come. “The US is our largest market, and we now have 2,000 employees, two stateof-the-art manufacturing centers, and two research and development facilities serving the needs of hospitals, doctors, and millions of patients across the country,” Obeidat says. “I’m proud to be part of a company that provides quality medicines at affordable prices to the patients who need them—this is the most rewarding impact I can imagine.” AHL

EY Health Sciences & Wellness helps our clients deliver on their strategic goals, design optimized operating models, and form the right partnerships to thrive today and succeed in the health systems of tomorrow. We work across the ecosystem, to understand the implications of trends and proactively find solutions to business issues.

“I didn’t want the team to feel any difference in status among us.”

When the human body is the biggest data platform, who will capture value?

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. Ed Stelmakh

46. Denise Waters

50. Kailee Goold

54. Julie Celano

60. Dan Burke

66. Dale Beatty

70. Myra Davis, Teresa Tonthat, John Hamm

76. Tony Douglas

Success by Numbers

How Otsuka Pharmaceuticals’ Ed Stelmakh is redefining the role of CFO

By Chris Gigley | Portraits by Gillian Fry

Otsuka America Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s Ed Stelmakh is always ready for change. Over the course of Stelmakh’s thirty-year career, his roles have evolved and continue to do so.

Stelmakh’s career has taken him across the globe, including eight years in expat postings in Russia and the Netherlands as well as domestic assignments in the NYC metro area, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore. The underlying theme of all of his career moves: an opportunity for continuous learning and exposure to the diversity and adversity of the global business environment.

“Looking back at the early days of my career, finance was focused more on transactional activities, given the nascent state of technology and a mostly domestically focused business environment,” says Stelmakh, senior

vice president and CFO at Otsuka. “Expectations were generally much more basic—you reported on what happened rather than looking forward, providing useful insights, and influencing outcomes, which is certainly the expectation today.”

Stelmakh held senior-level positions in several healthcare companies, including Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi-Aventis, Organon, Mylan, and Covance, before joining Otsuka as vice president and CFO in December 2015. In 2017, Stelmakh was promoted to his current role and, in addition to traditional finance functions, now also manages IT, tech ops, and business services.

He has earned his place as a trusted advisor at Otsuka. During Stelmakh’s early years, the company was facing significant sales challenges due to loss of exclusivity for its flagship product, Abilify. His first order of business

Ed Stelmakh

SVP and CFO

Otsuka Pharmaceuticals

was to grasp the financial dynamics of the business so he could help Otsuka “chart a path to profitable growth.”

“I was working with the operations and sales teams to understand where we needed to focus our attention and either dial up or dial down our resources and investments,” he explains. As such, Stelmakh restructured the finance team, repositioning them to serve more as business partners than analysts with the various departments they work with.

“My general philosophical approach is to get quite involved across a wide spectrum of the business,” Stelmakh says. “I spend a good proportion of my time away from my desk, engaging with the business and getting a sense of key challenges and opportunities. The overarching goal is to be in the best position possible to be able to deploy resources where they will create the greater value for the organization, and I strive to have everyone on the finance team have a similar approach.”

Today, Stelmakh says he spends more than half his time helping develop strategy and supporting operations by playing active roles in key alliances, business development deals, and engaging across a wide spectrum of operational activities.

“I spend a good proportion of my time away from my desk, engaging with the business and getting a sense of key challenges and opportunities.”

Outside of work, Stelmakh actively engages in charity work by giving back to his local community as well as causes that he feels passionate about. He currently serves on the board of directors of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, a national organization dedicated to saving lives and bringing hope to those affected by suicide. He also sits on the board of trustees and is a former treasurer for the Arts Council of Princeton in New Jersey, which offers exhibitions, performances, studio-based classes, and other programs.

But Stelmakh’s commitment to community service goes deeper than that. As a first-generation immigrant who arrived in the US from the former Soviet Union almost forty years ago, he and his family received significant assistance and support starting out from rather limited means in Baltimore. He says that generosity instilled a responsibility to pay it forward and do the same for others now that he is able to do so.

Furthermore, his community focus likewise resides within Otsuka, where Stelmakh has helped build a popular wellness program. He is part of an Otsuka running team, which runs the New York Half Marathon to raise money for the Alzheimer’s support organization CaringKind. The group has raised more than $80,848 over the past four years, which includes a $30,250 donation from Otsuka.

“It’s all about connecting mental health with physical well-being and corporate responsibility and having it all tie back to Otsuka’s philosophy of making a lasting difference,” Stelmakh says. AHL

Finance for a Better Future

Ed Stelmakh has watched the finance function evolve over his thirty-year career from a relatively passive spectator to an active participant role, heavily involved in shaping business strategy and outcomes. His best advice for business leaders looking to tap into the finance side of their businesses to advance is to “develop an above average level of financial literacy and understanding of economic value creation, using data-driven and fact-based insights. The speed and quality of critical business insights and decisions continue to increase and will create a competitive advantage for organizations that embrace this approach.”

“It’s all about connecting mental health with physical well-being and corporate responsibility and having it all tie back to Otsuka’s philosophy of making a lasting difference.”

By Lior Phillips

Removing the Guesswork

Denise Waters helps restructure

Beaumont Health’s billing services with a patient-centric focus

Every healthcare organization stands at the apex of business complexity— fusing all of the traditional challenges and opportunities of any company with the work of making a difference in the equally complex health outcomes of patients. And as vice president of revenue cycle at Michigan’s largest health system, Beaumont Health, Denise Waters fulfills a powerful duty in being able to impact touch points throughout that massive web. That’s become even more true as the insurance world has gone through extreme change.

“All of our initiatives are focused toward the patient and our ability to provide them with the service that we did five, ten years ago, and yet have them still be able to afford to pay the cost share with it,” Waters says. “Employers and insurance companies have changed over time and shifted more of the cost of healthcare to that patient. There’s a growing balance after the insurance of true self-pay debt that’s owed to us, but we remain focused on the patient.”

After earning degrees in accounting and an MBA in healthcare business management, Waters quickly learned that the revenue cycle sits at the center of the viability and success of organizations. This was further reinforced when she took her first position, beginning at HCA Healthcare, remaining at the organization for about ten years. “The leaders at HCA really understood the importance of consolidating revenue cycle into the

shared services organization,” she says. “We invested in the technology and those processes and people to build that strength. I learned the importance of working with a team of ethical, passionate workaholics.”

One of the most important lessons Waters learned at HCA was that the revenue cycle never stops changing. But rather than seeing that as a hurdle, she saw it as an exciting opportunity to constantly learn and grow. The role involves work with so many different partners—vendors, hospital leadership, care management, and patients alike— which of course requires a collaborative mind-set. “You have to evaluate all of the different constituents that you’re working with and make sure that partnership worked for both of you,” Waters says. Waters joined Beaumont Health in 2017, looking at the opportunity to continue that collaborative leadership and transformative mind-set. Upon arriving, she immediately set her sights on something that Beaumont considers its overarching goal year after year: patientand family-centered care. “No matter who you are within the organization, we all contribute to that. If a patient can be financially cleared and not really have to worry about their future bill, they can focus on their health,” Waters says. “So all of our 2019 revenue cycle priorities are aligned but focusing on improving that revenue cycle from the patient’s point of view.”

As such, the organization has moved toward clear patient estimates and smart statements, pricing transparency, presumptive charity, and payment plans. The company has also invested in artificial intelligence, propensity-to-pay data, and other technological advancements that will make it easier for staff to accomplish objectives without compromising patient care. “It’s all about putting yourselves in the shoes of that patient while also trying to integrate those processes,” Waters says.

The Affordable Care Act, she explains, was built with the intention of delivering patients with further transparency on pricing; however, when the rubber hit the road, not all hospitals and systems were actually providing patients with an experience that reflected that. “Patients aren’t going to be able to tell heads or tails of what it’s going to cost you to go have an MRI with contrast just because we can post chargemasters online,” Waters says. “So last year at Beaumont, we started focusing on providing our patients what we think their cost share is going to be before it happens.”

But this entailed a lot more than sharing a flat cost of what a procedure generally costs. “We also know that something might go wrong or that they might have other

charges before our bill gets sent, which may change their deductible,” she adds. “But we want them to have an estimate, so we set up patient SMS so we can send an estimate at the time that they’re doing their preservice. They can then calculate out the different costs for self-pay and insurance and look at other adjustments.”

That focus on improving patient escrow permits means constantly tweaking the process to further improve clarity for patients, Waters explains. Also, at time of service, Beaumont has begun to run a propensity-to-pay check on patients in order to build out a stronger drive for presumptive charity. As a provider of patient-focused, family-friendly care, Beaumont leadership wanted to use artificial intelligence to ensure they were giving back wherever possible and not putting an undue burden on the community.

“If a patient comes in and has insurance with a $5,000 deductible, rather than asking me for the $5,000 deductible, our system may note that that patient qualifies for presumptive charity, which allows that registrar to have that conversation with the patient,” she says. “The artificial intelligence will be able to tell based on credit availability and insurance costs what a patient can afford

from a payment plan, which takes the guesswork out of it and it doesn’t put that pressure on that patient.”

This initiative, Waters explains, is like all of the organization’s recent efforts: focused on patient responsibility. “When you look at the amount of balance after insurance and self-pay, in 2018, Beaumont Health had more debt owed to us than 74 percent of what Michigan banks loaned out. But we’re giving people these interest-free loans so they can stop looking at numbers and focus on their health,” she says. “And by working AI into that process, we can free up our staff to make sure Beaumont Health remains strong financially while delivering better care to patients. It’s all about jumping through and over the problems that we have to actually accomplish the goal of better care at the end of the day.” AHL

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“It’s all about putting yourselves in the shoes of that patient while also trying to integrate those processes.”

By Billy Yost

Don’t Act Like a Lawyer

Cardinal Health’s Kailee Goold wants lawyers to rethink how they interact with their colleagues

It’s very possible that this is how Kailee Goold introduces her own best practices—the “Scared Straight” of better communication—to outside counsel. As the senior litigation counsel for Cardinal Health, Goold stands apart, literally. Her mass of curly hair and personable approach catch some off guard. “My attitude and approach have genuinely surprised lawyers working with me for the first time,” Goold laughs. But it’s the senior counsel’s willingness to speak out on issues ranging from email subject line etiquette to improving your PowerPoint skills to taking vacation that has earned Goold the reputation as a disruptor, urging lawyers to recognize that while

they’re in a privileged position, it is, first and foremost, a position of service.

The Team Dynamic

Growing up in Cleveland, Goold is quick to nullify the idea that law was in her DNA. “Being a lawyer isn’t something I’ve been dreaming about since I was five,” Goold says. “There are probably one hundred other people who have the technical skills to do my or anyone else’s job, but it’s why others choose to work with you that matters.”

At least initially, Goold’s early collaborators were on the volleyball court. Goold played Division 1 volleyball at West Virginia University, an experience she

Kailee Goold Senior Litigation Counsel Cardinal Health

says prepped her for her future career far more than any classroom could. “As a captain, you learn to lead while being part of a team that you did not choose, to execute goals that you may not have set,” Goold says. “You learn to be self-motivated and realize that sometimes, you try your absolute best and still come up short.” The more her career has progressed, the more Goold says she’s realized what a valuable growth experience life on the court provided.

Making a Name

After school, Goold was urged by former coaches to take up coaching at the highest levels, but she opted for law school instead. Working at a firm fresh out of law school, Goold says she recognized an absence of what she calls “the simple and straightforward.” Motivated by this realization and a desire to set herself apart, the young lawyer began writing and speaking about frankness, transparency, and clarity from lawyers. As a young associate, Goold’s unique approach to providing advice in relevant, easy-to-digest ways caught the attention of many on social media. “None of this was rocket science,” Goold says. “This should not have been disruptive or innovative, but in the legal profession, it is.”

Outside Transparency

Since coming to Cardinal Health, Goold has developed an outside counsel onboarding process that she says, at least initially, caught the firm’s lawyers off guard. It sets a tone for inclusion and trust and demands the kind of clarity that Goold believes is essential in building relationships. “I don’t want the smoke and mirrors of dealing with the most senior partner if someone else is doing the work or knows more about the topic,” Goold says. “I have a checklist I run through of what information I need and when and how I want it; why wouldn’t you do this?”

Kelly Koolhoven

Goold has also instituted a 360-degree feedback process. “When the firms first get it, they are uncomfortable,” Goold says. “They don’t ever want to say that I—the client—might be doing something that’s driving them nuts, but what use is that?”

Goold says it’s helped build relationships where problems can be addressed immediately, instead of waiting for the formal feedback meetings, or worse, never getting the feedback at all. The lawyer stresses that an open dialog builds stronger partnerships.

D&I at the Individual Level

While stressing diversity and inclusion

in her outside counsel onboarding process, Goold also takes a more personal approach to working for progress on this front. “There are all sorts of unacceptable stats about how law is one of the least diverse professions there is,” Goold says. “And although there are a lot of great organizations trying to move the ball forward, I try to think about what I can do at my desk on an individual level to make a difference.” Goold also asks outside counsel to identify and talk about their own D&I pain points.

The success of her social media presence has provided her the opportunity to speak publicly, and Goold says it’s the reoccurring feedback that means

the most to her. “People say I don’t act like a lawyer,” Goold says. “That’s when I know I’m doing a good job, or at least trying something new.” In her mind, there are a lot of bad habits lawyers could curb. “Law is a service industry; we don’t invent things or create widgets,” Goold says. “We exist solely to help other people do amazing things, and that’s a hard hurdle for some lawyers to get over.”

The bright spot, Goold says, is that the solution is so easy. “Think about your audience and stress common sense and simplicity, not yourself,” Goold says. “And have some fun once in a while.” AHL

“I’d like to start by saying that this is all fundamental human behavior, but for some reason, lawyers see themselves as unique professionals that don’t need to follow normal human rules.”

Be Here, Be You, Belong

University of Kansas Health System’s Julie Celano on making every voice heard

By Billy Yost

The now senior vice president and chief human resources officer at the University of Kansas Health System says she’s found a home and is spearheading initiatives to make all those at UKHS feel seen and heard. She feels very fortunate to build on what she says is a wonderful culture with remarkable leadership.

Keeping it Simple

Celano says that regardless of the task, the manner in which she pursues it is largely the same. “What’s most important to me is distilling a lot of complexity into simplicity,” Celano says. “Thinking simply is not the opposite of complexity; it’s creating processes that are more consumer minded.”

The SVP says she is always intent on creating processes that replicate what a consumer would experience. In her prior role, Celano rolled out a new employee orientation app that allowed new hires to complete a process on their phones instead of having to come into the office. “We’re now used to Uber and going to our phones for just about anything, but healthcare in the administration role has remained largely stagnant,” Celano says. The ultimate goal is to work to clear some of the red tape and hierarchical confusion that are often hallmarks of healthcare, both in the administrative sphere and beyond.

Julie Celano first entered the healthcare sphere working in physiology, then in HR roles in the for-profit sector, until tragedy struck.

“I had a defining moment where a number of people close to me died of cancer and heart disease, and it made me realize I was a mission-driven person who needed to be part of a mission-driven organization.” Celano wanted to work in a field where she knew her daily efforts would impact lives for the better and not simply for the end of the business quarter.

Embracing Difference

Celano isn’t afraid of the word “disrupter” when it comes to her own work. In fact, she embraces this word to enforce that people should be valued for the differences they bring to a role, not their capacity to fit in.

“I’m trying to disrupt the idea of what we think of when we use the word ‘difference,’” Celano says. “People tell you to treat everyone the same, and I think that is completely misguided. We have to treat everyone differently and respond to their uniqueness.”

In her various roles, Celano seeks to create what she calls “gracious space” for her team. “I care deeply about everyone that I come in contact with, that they’re allowed to speak their truth and be themselves, not just fit in,” Celano says. “I let my team really wrestle with issues so we can come together and provide the best ultimate outcome for all involved.” Creating that space isn’t easy, and it certainly isn’t for everyone, but the SVP says it’s the first step toward accounting for real and lasting diversity and inclusion changes.

As part of an upcoming diversity and inclusion push, the HR team has created a slogan for UKHS to rally around: Be Here, Be You, Belong. “Any time you join a group, I worry about groupthink,” Celano says. “That can involve losing the

best part of yourself just to fit in, and we cannot afford to do that if we want the best.”

Thomas P. Flannery, a close colleague of Celano at Korn Ferry, has witnessed her people-centric strategy firsthand. “Julie brings talents that are essential for success in an institution as complex and growing as UKHS,” he says. “She has demonstrated an ability to deal with tough issues and does it in a manner that, when underpinned with a positive set of values, is collaborative and enhances the mission. There is no question that she puts people first—all members of the UKHS community, be they physicians, nurses, social workers, or food service workers.”

Julie Celano SVP and CHRO University of Kansas Health System

Mission-Driven

Celano says she frames the hiring process as working to find a culture add instead of a culture fit. “Obviously, values have to fit, but I’m looking for someone who is going to add and push us to be even better. I don’t want someone looking to simply fit in,” Celano says.

That can admittedly be a difficult conversation to bring to academic medicine. It’s why Celano has endeavored to bring some of that for-profit mind-set and talent to UKHS. “In coming here, I realized that many people have been here for a long time and that their way of doing things has yielded tremendous success,” Celano says. “But in working to create some positive transformation and a slightly more for-profit mind-set in a mission-driven organization, we’re able to get us where we need to go a little more quickly.”

Celano says that she spent her first year establishing this process while developing relationships in order to build trust, or as she puts it, “going slow now to go fast later.” In working to recruit talent from the for-profit sector, Celano says it’s imperative to find individuals

who are mission driven to their core. “In coming here, I had great respect for the people here who had created so much success, which provided a terrific platform on which I could build,” the SVP adds.

There is one mind-set from the for-profit world that Celano says comes in very useful in a mission-driven organization. “We always used to describe a situation as life and death or that the sky was falling, but it was just business,” Celano says. “Now, we can employ that sense of urgency, because it is life and death we’re talking about here.”

As she continues to push for transformation, Celano says that UKHS may have initially seemed an unlikely home for a woman who had never been to the Midwest, but that the selfless and team-oriented style of the organization has proved inspiring. “They are truly committed to doing the right thing here,” Celano says. “It was so clear that was the ethos here and the driving motive; I knew this was where I needed to be.” The SVP says her position is an honor, allowing her to help a wonderful organization look ahead. AHL

“People tell you to treat everyone the same and I think that is completely misguided. We have to treat everyone differently and respond to their uniqueness.”

WE ARE MORE THAN STRATEGIC ADVISORS

SYNCHRONIZE STRATEGY AND TALENT TO DRIVE SUPERIOR PERFORMANCE IN HEALTHCARE ORGANIZATIONS.

Korn Ferry is a global organizational consulting firm. We help companies design their organization—the structure, the roles and responsibilities, as well as how they compensate, develop and motivate their people. As importantly, we help organizations select and hire the talent they need to execute their strategy. Our approximately 7,000 colleagues serve clients in more than 50 countries.

For more information visit: kornferry.com/industries/healthcare

Tom Flannery, PH.D. , Senior Client Partner, Boston Tom.Flannery@kornferry.com

By Andrew Tamarkin

“The difference between a company and a community,” Dan Burke says, “is passion for the mission.”

Burke, senior vice president of platform strategy and general counsel at Pacific Dental Services (PDS), aligns his personal and professional goals with the goals of the company. It happens naturally, he believes; they’re one and the same.

Burke is a key right hand for Stephen E. Thorne, IV, the CEO and founder of PDS, a leading dental support organization established in 1994 and headquartered in Irvine, California. PDS’s primary purpose is to help dentists make their patients healthier and happier by providing business and administrative support to more than 740 dental practices throughout 21 states. The company is experiencing phenomenal growth, adding nearly ninety new practices in 2019 alone, with even more slated for 2020.

Despite their rapid growth, Thorne, Burke, and the PDS team remain laser focused. “When we partnered with our first owner dentist to open the first supported dental practice in Costa Mesa, California, little did we know then we’d grow to support more than 740 offices,” Thorne says. “While we are national in scope, our business remains locally focused. We remain committed to each one of our supported clinicians and their individual dental practices so they can continue to create healthier, happier patients—one patient at a time.”

Piloted by a committed leadership team at their headquarters as well as best-in-class, regionally based operations leaders, the PDS collective shines a light on community power and collaborative strength. For Burke, PDS’s passion for the mission fuels his integrative approach to leadership, encourages rapid company growth, and positively reflects itself in the patient experience. In fact, Burke has only worked for organizations that had a higher ambition than simply making a profit. And PDS certainly embraces this socially dynamic motif.

At PDS, leaders wear many hats. As Burke puts it, “We are all expected to bring our whole selves to work. Job titles are not important. We work together across traditional corporate boundaries.” In addition to enterprise strategy and legal functions at PDS, Burke works with the innovation group, IT and digital transformation teams, and revenue operations. Burke, who has been recognized as one of the Top 10 Innovative In-House Lawyers in the state of California by the Daily Journal and General Counsel of the Year by the Orange County Business Journal, advises that one must live within and embrace the business at hand.

Wearing more hats than simply the legal hat has not only been part of his professional journey but has also granted him the ability to understand how the company functions with a wider depth of field. This approach has engaged Burke, in alignment with

Dan Burke SVP, Business Services and General Counsel Pacific Dental Services

Thorne, and his multifaceted legal team of lawyers, legal administrators, paralegals, and staff. Taking on multiple roles has empowered him to advocate for the business as a whole.

“I think we’re one of those special companies,” Burke says. “I think people will talk about PDS and compare us to other iconic companies that experienced dramatic growth while solving important problems. They’ll say, ‘Wow, you were with Pacific Dental Services during that special time when they became a company that actually contributed to the overall improved oral healthcare of America.’ And I think that’s pretty remarkable.”

The company’s recent and rapid expansions have the advantage of a number of dynamic shifts in oral healthcare, including consolidation, advances in medical science, and the digital revolution. At present, the dental delivery model in the United States is consolidating. The dominant track has traditionally stemmed from the solo practicing dentist, unaffiliated and unconnected from others in the profession and industry. Contrarily, larger groups like PDS have the buying power and the resources to enable dentists to own their individual practices but also avail themselves of the advantages of size and scale.

As for the legal team, Burke dubs growth as “our bread and butter.” Energizing the de novo growth

business strategy engenders an unusual legal question: how do you scale trust? “It’s their clinical practice and their name on the door,” Burke states. “The owner dentists need to trust us on a very personal level.” Through operational excellence, leveraging the best technology, and consistently delivering on its promises, PDS has ultimately gained the trust of hundreds of practices nationwide.

Not coincidentally, company growth runs parallel to the growing scientific body of evidence around the critical link between oral health and overall systemic health. The science of systemic health is ultimately a disruptive force on the market. He says, “We believe

Currently, PDS has over seven hundred supported offices in twenty-one states.

that the companies that embrace these disruptions as opportunities can have really significant competitive advantages, as opposed to those that view those as threats.”

Recent studies have demonstrated that oral health conditions are indicative of systemic health conditions. PDS has actively involved itself with this discovery by coining this anatomical relationship “the mouth-body connection.” Research shows that harmful bacteria and inflammation in the mouth can indicate and even cause systemic conditions throughout the body. Maladies of the mouth, including periodontal disease, may be linked with other medical conditions, including oral cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and more.

As dentists and doctors work together to further explore this connection, Burke’s strategy, IT, and legal teams examine possible structures that will enable patients to enjoy a systemic health system while protecting their information and privacy along the way. Playing this small but mighty role in the country’s overall healthcare system is one of the more rewarding aspects of Burke’s job.

“The current healthcare delivery system is artificially separated into silos, where a patient is forced to almost rip their body parts into pieces,” Burke explains. In other words, each part of the body—from the eyes to the mouth to the mind—involves its own doctor, a separate clinic, and a different insurance company. Burke and his team believe that current technology will lead to “a health system of one,” where the quantification of self will allow for patients to be guardians of their own data.

“The current healthcare delivery system is artificially separated into silos, where a patient is forced to almost rip their body parts into pieces.”

The Next Generation of Oral Healthcare

At Pacific Dental Services®, we proudly support over 700 dental offices from coast to coast with a full array of business services. Our purpose is to help clinicians create Healthier, Happier Patients® while enjoying the freedom to focus on comprehensive, patient-centric oral health care.

PDS-supported dental practices offer patients modern dentistry with proven technology with CEREC® CAD/CAM same-day dentistry, Cone Beam Computed Tomography, digital X-rays, laser, online scheduling, and the VELscope® Enhanced Oral Assessment System, among other technologies at the forefront of oral and whole-body health care.

By refashioning the oral healthcare system around the patient, PDS is concerned with making health decisions easier for the individual—and has the wherewithal and legal framework to technologically elevate the dental practices it serves and digitally empower its patients. PDS has been experimenting with cohabitating medical and dental clinics. So far, patients have welcomed this clinical collaboration between doctors and dentists; they value having different clinical actors collaborating around their individual health systems.

As Burke looks to the future, he gets excited about the continued pace of growth. “Our goals are extraordinary,” he reflects. “We believe in the opportunity ahead of us, such that if we don’t achieve the extraordinary, we will have missed, and quite frankly will have failed.”

Learn how we’re impacting the next generation of healthcare at PacificDentalServices.com

Keith Carroll, attorney at Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky & Popeo PC, says, “For as long as I’ve known Dan, he has always been a thoughtful leader. He never tries to be the loudest voice in the room, though he always seems to have the right answer and it usually falls in line with a plan he already mapped out in his head. I saw this happen in law school, and it continues today with the business deals Mintz has helped PDS complete. He has an innate ability to see a problem from different perspectives and then apply that vision to craft the best solution for all stakeholders.”

Burke’s passion for the mission will certainly win his team continued triumphs. He says, “This is who we are and what we want to do.” AHL

“We believe in the opportunity ahead of us, such that if we don’t achieve the extraordinary, we will have missed, and quite frankly will have failed.”

Congratulations and kudos to Dan Burke and Pacific Dental Services. We support your commitment to transforming the delivery of dental care and look forward to celebrating your future growth and success.

By Billy Yost

The Perfect Components of Caring

Dale Beatty helps give frontline staff a voice at Stanford Health, supporting it as an industry leader for nursing

Nine different nurse executives who have served under Chief Nursing Officer Dr. Dale Beatty have gone on to serve as CNOs of other organizations. In a thirtythree-year career, Beatty says that when he reflects on his accomplishments, that may top the list. Over the course of three decades, Beatty, now the CNO at Stanford Health, has endeavored to bring awareness of what’s happening on nursing’s front lines to the highest levels of the organization. He has done so in part to make organizations more responsive to the ever-evolving needs of clinicians and nurses, and also to make those voices better heard in changing and modernizing healthcare systems. Beatty has also demonstrated repeated commitment to discovering, and sometimes rediscovering, just what it means to “bring care to healthcare.”

Beatty transitioned into the healthcare sphere in the early ’80s, when he was working in a nursing home and was drawn to the interaction with residents and other caregivers. “It was actually my mother who suggested becoming a nurse,” Beatty says. “The idea was completely out of my paradigm, and when I wound up going to nursing school, I was the only man in my class.” It did little to deter the future CNO, who says the best piece of advice he’s able to offer is to follow one’s passion. “The title and the money will never satisfy you,” Beatty asserts. “It has to be something that you love and have passion for.”

Nearly thirteen years at Northwestern Memorial Hospital provided Beatty with the foundation for his future as a CNO. “I had the opportunity to get both a depth and breadth of experiences from critical care, emergency, and trauma services to providing leadership in the interventional platform,” Beatty says. “These

professional career development experiences really helped pave the way for my future.”

As CNO of Northwest Community Hospital, Beatty says his direct work with Dr. Kathy Reno was instrumental in providing direction for his future work. In almost eight years, Beatty’s team was recognized as an ANCC Magnet institution, the highest and most prestigious distinction a healthcare organization can receive for nursing excellence.

Northwest was also recognized three different times as a Forbes Top 100 Places to Work employer. “CEO Bruce Crowther was laser focused on culture and engagement,” Beatty says. “It taught me the importance of people and developing a culture of engagement that supports system process redesign and helps build better care delivery through their eyes and expertise.”

Northwest Community Hospital is also where Beatty developed a passion for shared leadership, a leadership style he continues to practice at Stanford.

“It’s powerful when you are using the organization’s whole brain and expertise,” Beatty says. “You have to bring your experts to the table so the work can be designed, adopted, and accepted.” At Stanford, the shared leadership model engages about 350 frontline staff, helping design their professional workflows supported by technology and prepare the workforce to move into a new $2.2 billion facility in 2019.

Prior to coming to Stanford, Beatty spent time at the University of Illinois at Chicago working as the organization’s CNO while also pursing his own Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) in executive nursing administration. It was a redefining moment for the CNO,

Dale Beatty, DNP, RN, NEA-BC Chief Nursing Officer and VP of Patient Care Services Stanford Health Care

who says that he was humbled in realizing that all of his years of learning and experience needed additional academic preparation with the infusion of new, advanced knowledge and evidence. “When I took my first exam, I didn’t do very well,” Beatty admits. “I had to deconstruct some of my prior knowledge and realize that some of the knowledge I had been operating on wasn’t necessarily correct anymore.” Beatty says he is grateful for the opportunity he had at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Nursing, which is one of the top ten DNP programs in the country and is known for its academic rigor.

Beatty’s reeducation of sorts also put him in a classroom with frontline clinicians and nurses who were able to relay their experiences more personally and in a way that would help propel Beatty’s own focus on shared leadership in his later roles. It also opened his eyes to the power of multigenerational workforces.

“I found the younger people on my project teams were incredibly resourceful and efficient,” Beatty says. “When you combined that with my experience and application skills, it was a perfect combination. We augmented each other’s skills, knowledge, and abilities.”

In coming to Stanford, Beatty and his team have dived more deeply into the work of Dr. Jean Watson’s Philosophy and Science of Caring. “Our goal is to create transpersonal relationships with our patients, families, and with each other,” Beatty says. “Part of the work really has to do with helping clinicians and nurses to self-reflect and also to provide self-care so that they, in turn, can better care for others.” Beatty says that in a field that is all about caregiving, caregivers have to better understand that they, too, are in need of self-care and that enhancing one’s resilience is critical to the care of self and others. There are now twenty-one certified Caritas Coaches at

Stanford, Beatty having completed his own certification in April.

Part of the focus of Caring Science is to combat nurse burnout. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Stanford’s turnover rate is an outlier among health organizations, whose average employee turnover numbers continue to climb. Stanford is even advancing to its fourth designation as an ANCC Magnet organization. Stanford also participates in the National Database for Nursing Quality Indications survey to measure its nurses’ satisfaction and examines ways that it might improve its nursing practice environment.

In all ways, Stanford seems to be as focused on care provider wellness as its CNO has demonstrated, and Beatty says that it’s his job to continue to help lead the way. “You can’t advocate for others what you yourself haven’t done,” Beatty says. “In all things, I’m just grateful for a rewarding career and to be able to help people in a meaningful way, period.” AHL

“The title and the money will never satisfy you; it has to be something that you love and have passion for.”

Stanford Hospital Celebrates Another Year

Ranking in the Top 10 of Hospitals Nationwide

Ranking on U.S. News & World Report Honor Roll based on quality, patient safety, and reputation

Deloitte is proud to celebrate Myra Davis, Senior VP and Chief Information Officer, Children’s Hospital on her accomplishments and dedication to the industry.

Congratulations to Myra and to Texas Children’s Hospital on continued success.

Stanford Hospital was just named to the Honor Roll of the top 1 percent of best hospitals in the country by U.S. News & World Report. The ranking, which reflects the hospital’s spot among more than 4,500 hospitals surveyed, is based on outstanding performance across multiple areas of care, with factors such as quality, patient safety, and reputation.

By KC Esper

Limitless Leaders

Myra Davis, Teresa Tonthat, and John Hamm channel their greatest leadership lessons learned through parenthood to tackle the digital evolution at Texas Children’s Hospital

As a team, Myra Davis, Teresa Tonthat, and John Hamm combine their ever-evolving leadership styles to bolster the successes of each other, their teams, and the mission of Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) to provide optimal care for women and children. Over the past year, the team worked together to drive TCH through its digital transformation, which aimed to optimize and streamline digital assets throughout each department and drive the organization toward safer, more accurate healthcare practices.

As full-time leaders and full-time parents, the team united their management styles to bring the project to fruition. Davis, Tonthat, and Hamm spoke to American Healthcare Leader about the ways in which their parenting styles inform their leadership styles and vice versa as well as their strategy behind enhancing TCH’s digital processes.

From left to right: John Hamm, Myra Davis, Teresa Tonthat Allen S. Kramer

A Direction Toward Delegation

When Davis first arrived at TCH seventeen years ago, her sons were two and ten years old. As time passed, she watched her career progress, as she moved up the ranks from director of customer support to her current position as senior vice president and chief information officer. But more than that, she watched her sons grow into young men. And now, as her youngest son moves away to embark on his first year of college, she reflects upon her experience and journey as a proud mother as well as each lesson she learned along the way that made balancing work and life possible.

“When I started here, my sons were just kiddos,” Davis reflects. “So my philosophy, and the one I encourage others to have, is to accept that the ball will be dropped. We need to pick it up and move on. In other words, mistakes will happen—own them and move on. It’s about recognizing that a missed homework assignment is not the end of the world. Delegation and empowerment are key to your sanity, and focusing on your sanity and mental health is critical.”

In Davis’s household, delegation is vital to maintaining a positive equilibrium between the duties of a parent and those of a business leader. Though admittedly, Davis says her system at home operates like a business, too—which is why it’s so successful. “In my home, we have sheets that show the food, maintenance, and cleaning we outsource,” Davis explains. “We run it like a business because I can’t do everything myself. My husband and I have been together for thirty years because I delegate and empower, and he grows with it.”

At TCH, Davis echoes these messages throughout her leadership, reinforcing the importance of moving with the highs and lows of life but not being held back by them.

“While my message is the same for both female and male leaders, I strongly emphasize it with my female leaders who are mothers,” Davis says. “We tend to hold ourselves to an extremely high level of standards and expectations, professionally and personally, that are not realistic. It’s important to recognize that we can’t do everything by ourselves.”

Myra Davis SVP and Chief Information Officer

Allen

S. Kramer

Synthesizing Standards

Compared to Davis, Chief Information Security Officer Tonthat currently stands on the opposite end of parenthood as a mother of three young children. Throughout the journey of raising a five-, six-, and seven-year-old, Tonthat and her husband have learned to evolve their parenting styles to harmonize with their kids’ growth, developing as problem-solvers and rule setters while keeping their children at the forefront of their priorities.

“In 2015, when our children were younger, our parenting style was definitely on the permissive spectrum,” she explains. “Now that our children have grown, we’ve shifted our parenting style from permissive to more authoritative. We have clear standards and some level of expectations but also make time to reciprocate attention to them.”

“The fact of the matter is that we constantly feel outnumbered!” Tonthat laughs. “The greatest lesson we’ve learned throughout our journey as parents is with constant communication, compromises,

alignment on expectations, and both parents putting in 110 percent, we are able to overcome every obstacle that comes our way.”

Naturally, Tonthat’s authoritative yet communicative parenting style transfers seamlessly into her leadership style at TCH. While she says it has evolved over the past eighteen years, she’s noticed the most change during the past year after joining TCH. Tonthat emphasizes respect and transparency on all levels of her team and holds weekly meetings to ensure that everyone is on the same page. Overall, she believes that these efforts strengthen team alignment and trust.

“I’m respectful to other’s opinions while having high expectations and maintaining clear boundaries,” she says. “However, I believe a strong leader holds the skill of knowing when to adapt to introduce a bit of the permissive style. You have to empower your team to make their own decisions. I am truly a proponent of the ‘fail fast, learn faster’ approach. This approach is only successful if my team is confident that I will always have their back.”

Teresa Tonthat Chief Information Security Officer

Learning from the Little Things

Hamm, the vice president of information technology and biomedical engineering at TCH and a vital member of Davis and Tonthat’s team, says that, for him, building strong relationships was a key skill he developed during his years as a father then transferred to his team.

Hamm started his first season of fatherhood at the age of nineteen, when he and his wife had two boys. Naturally, as a young father, he focused heavily on establishing a secure and safe environment for his family, “checking the standard boxes” that ensured stability and prosperity: a strong career, a comfortable house, a reliable car, college savings accounts, and good educations.

As time went on, however, and Hamm entered his second season of fatherhood more than a decade later when he and his wife had two more boys and their first girl, he realized that being present and understanding were more important than ensuring the standard boxes of parenthood were checked. As he reflected upon his career, he realized that the lessons learned in parenthood and his professional life were the same, and with the help of his team, he was able to bring value to both his work and his relationships.

“Now, I focus more on building lifelong relationships, instilling forever core values, and creating lasting memories,” he says. “Looking back, I can now recognize the areas of focus and attention that were truly meaningful. When I started my career, I was taught that you could never have friends at work, which initially caused me to keep an arm’s length with people that I worked with. Like parenting, I checked the boxes to ensure successful business outcomes.

“After a significant job change and through some wonderful mentors, I now realize that my true treasures of my career are those relationships built along the way,” he continues. “I hope to continue to learn how to build meaningful relationships. The more I practice this, the more I am finding joy, interests, and opportunities to make life for myself and those that I care about better.”

Joining Forces

Recently, the trio joined forces to commence the hospital system’s digital transformation to improve services for all its members. Health organizations across the world are embarking on a similar transformation, integrating artificial intelligence, telemedicine, and electronic record keeping into their systems. If enacted properly, this allows doctors to work more precisely and patients to have better access to—and understanding of—their health.

Allen S. Kramer

John Hamm

VP, Information Technology & Biomedical Engineering

“The world has become digital outside of us, and more of our patients want to be able to gain access to our physicians and services through different channels, like their mobile phones,” Hamm explains. “So over the last year, we’ve been working on enabling our technology so that we can better connect with our patients.”

Along with permitting this level of accessibility to both healthcare services and user information, the team acknowledges the possible dangers posed by hackers who could breach the system. As such, implementing precautionary measures was an essential step to avoid these problems in the future. Of course, a transformation of this sort never happens overnight. The TCH tech team worked with its partners to ensure the foundation established beforehand served as a solid digital groundwork for years to come.

“Texas Children’s approach just makes sense,” says Tony Douglas, vice president of healthcare at Symantec. “Digital transformation requires using data and digital technologies to put the patient experience first. However, until a health system’s data is secure, they are not able to move forward as quickly as they might like.”

“I encourage my team to keep abreast of new technologies that address emerging cyberthreats,” Tonthat says. “Our key strategic partners have helped us along the way as we embark on our technological evolution. Symantec has partnered with us for more than five years as we’ve built upon our security layers of defense. Their product portfolio around security technologies has enabled us to continue to safeguard our information assets. Symantec

even provides ongoing training for my team on how we can continue to leverage our products to mature our security posture.

“We view Deloitte as one of our primary business thought leaders when it comes to information security and cyberrisk,” she adds. “They have significant expertise in risk assessments, healthcare regulations, and security strategy development for large organizations such as Texas Children’s.”

By combining leadership styles and delegating portions of the project, the tech team is now seeing its months of hard work come to a close. For each leader, working together to strike a balance between permissive and authoritative approaches and empowering individuals to cultivate purposeful relationships has been the lifeblood of the project itself. In many ways, much like the patient-centric mentality embodied by TCH as a whole, Davis, Tonthat, and Hamm leveraged the human aspect behind technology to offer better care for the women and children in their community.

“This project has been so successful because of the dynamic changes and growth that happened within Texas Children’s since we first began,” Davis says. “We brought the health plan into our infrastructure, which supports more than four hundred thousand members, and broke silos that existed between teams. The way we’ve grown as leaders while growing as parents speaks to the level of humility and grit and strength of our leadership. The light at the end of the tunnel of this very complex project wouldn’t have the success it has today without my team.” AHL

“We tend to hold ourselves to an extremely high level of standards and expectations, professionally and personally, that are not realistic. It’s important to recognize that we can’t do everything by ourselves.”

—Myra Davis

By KC Esper

Steadfast in Cybersecurity

With more than twenty years of experience in healthcare

IT, Tony Douglas has a solid track record of successfully guiding healthcare providers through their digital transformation journey using three essential steps

Tony Douglas entered the healthcare technology field in 2001, inspired by the mission of patient care. He wanted to be part of an industry that focuses on a meaningful function in society. Since the start of his career, Douglas has been hooked on technology within healthcare because of the benefits realized, ranging from operational efficiencies to breakthrough enhancements to patient care. He initiated his career at Kodak within its health imaging division and has since accelerated to become vice president of sales and operations for healthcare at Symantec, a Fortune 500 cybersecurity software and services provider.

There is no doubt that technology has advanced healthcare by leaps and bounds. Conversely, it has also added a layer of complexity, especially with regard to data security. “With the

inception of the HITECH Act in 2009, hospital systems rushed to adopt EMR capabilities; however, cybersecurity was a bit of an afterthought,” Douglas says.

As protected health information and sensitive data were being shared electronically with minimal security measures in place, systems became a prime target for malicious hackers, who swooped in with a wide range of targeted attacks on the provider community and a plethora of reported breaches. The good news is that healthcare leaders now understand that security is a necessity, as it poses major consequences and risks to patient safety.

Now, more than ever, security needs to be an enabler of innovation. The proliferation of mobile devices, benefits of cloud computing, AI, and machine learning are just a few examples of how

Tony Douglas VP Symantec

Jim Hale Photography

hospital systems are embracing their digital transformation journey to drive improved outcomes. Douglas contends, however, that until a sound approach is adopted to securing the data, hospitals will not move as fast as they’d like. For organizations to truly benefit from the digitalization process, he explains, they must embed cybersecurity as a core tenet of each project.

While this concept may seem obvious, this mind-set often gets overlooked and causes detrimental effects for organizations who neglect to do their due diligence. Considering the amount of sensitive data that a health system maintains, hurrying through the initial steps to ensure a safe digital environment could lead to potentially damaging consequences, including patient harm, loss of revenue, and reputational impacts to the health system’s brand. As Douglas puts it: “If you don’t build your home on a solid foundation, then the entire structure is at risk.”

For the VP, keeping security at the forefront of this transformation is vital— making sure information is accessible solely to the right people and routinely assessed for risk is key. Douglas shared with America Healthcare Leader three key precautionary steps for providers to consider when executing their digital transformation initiatives and revolutionizing the way patients, doctors, and stakeholders alike experience healthcare.

Devote Appropriate Resources to Security

Healthcare consistently lags behind other industries when it comes to investing in

cybersecurity. “Industries that are technologically driven and subsequently more mature with respect to IT security will allocate an average of 12 percent or more to their overall IT budget to security,” he explains. “Whereas healthcare today typically devotes an average of 6 percent. IT leaders must ensure that funding is being proportionately allocated to make sure the security program established can meet the needs of the overall health system as they continue down the path of digital transformation.”

The industry has also struggled with recruiting and retaining a workforce with the necessary skill set to protect their organization from cyberthreats. To help solve for this, Douglas recommends that hospitals consider outsourcing areas within their security operations that can serve as an extension of the team to guarantee a constant watch on the environment. In turn, this will return valuable time to the internal team to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Give Security a Voice

“IT security needs to be properly represented when changes or new endeavors are pursued within the health system,” Douglas says. “Security, historically, has been an afterthought. Security must have a seat at the table when decisions are made, whether it’s being part of the due diligence process of a potential acquisition—or say, if the organization is pursuing a cloud initiative. Any endeavor that will have a technology impact must incorporate input from security and be factored into the overall decision process.”

Reduce the Complexity

As the traditional four walls of a hospital dissolve, the security environment is becoming even more complex of its own accord. “As providers continue to embrace the cloud and the definition of an endpoint expands to IoT and mobile devices, it’s imperative that security programs and corresponding controls extend out to those expanded areas,” Douglas says. “Be sure to define where your IT environment begins and ends, and where you and your business associates assume responsibility.”

“Vendors, too, have played a part in creating some of this complexity,” he acknowledges. “We’ve been selling tools to fix one specific problem, causing tool fatigue and putting the integration

in the hands of the customer.” Douglas recommends that hospitals look to adopting an integrated cyberdefense approach to ensure they can adapt their security to meet the changing needs of patient care.

Douglas and the Symantec team are working to solve this dilemma by helping organizations shift from a reactionary position to a more strategic approach to holistic security. “We want to be a trusted advisor for our clients as they go through this digital transformation. We are here to partner long term and help the health care community achieve their digital goals and objectives. It’s important that we align by understanding the organization’s strategic objectives and map the

necessary security framework to ensure those objectives can be achieved safely, securely, and with confidence. That’s our mission.”

Digital transformation can mean different things to different stakeholders depending on the initiative. “Whether it’s leveraging technology to reach a better patient outcome or streamlining operations to create better efficiencies and reduce costs, digital transformation is fundamentally about patient care,” Douglas says. “The core of the success of these initiatives is a confidence that the data used is secure and reliable. I believe that by demonstrating a commitment to IT security up front, we will give patients the same level of trust with the handling of their data as patients do with their clinicians.” AHL

“I believe that by demonstrating a commitment to IT security up front, we will give patients the same level of trust and confidence with their data as patients do with their clinicians.”

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.

82. Samara Penn Savary

88. Jennifer Finger

91. James Quick

94. Laurel Faciane

100. Allison Vessels

104. Stephen M. Paskoff

108. Dan Healey

Aida Malik Photography

Education Lies at the Heart of Health

Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Senior Counsel Samara Penn Savary highlights the intersections and connections between education and well-being

By Sara Deeter

That emphasis on access to educational opportunities is exactly what drew Penn Savary to Zeta Charter Schools, a New York City-based charter school network that focuses on holistic education.

“I believed in the mission of Zeta, in the values of ‘strong mind, strong body, strong soul, strong connectedness,’” Penn Savary says of her decision to join the board. “Emily Kim, Zeta’s CEO, really is seeking to develop the whole child and to provide unique learning and cultural opportunities for students. For example, students learn tae kwon do, they practice healthy eating habits, they celebrate Pi Day (as kindergarteners and first graders!), and they work on building their confidence. It has been amazing to see how the students are thriving and how excited they are to go to school.”

In her role as senior counsel at Bristol-Myers Squibb, Penn Savary extends the idea of comprehensive learning to her legal practice. She operates in a hybrid role, balancing litigation duties with commercial law work, but she is determined to learn about all aspects of the pharmaceutical company.

As a member of the Zeta Charter Schools and New York City’s Board of Trustees, as well as senior counsel at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), Samara Penn Savary explores her passion for education. “Neither of my parents had personal higher education experiences upon which to draw; they both grew up in the Jim Crow South. The opportunities my mother had coming out of a segregated high school were not the same opportunities she and my late father worked to ensure that I would have,” Penn Savary explains. “But, because of their experiences, they instilled in me from a very young age a conviction in the importance of education and educational opportunities.”

Samara Penn Savary Senior Counsel, Litigation Bristol-Myers Squibb

Aida Malik Photography

SHOULDER TO SHOULDER.

“Sometimes input from someone in a completely different group is most valuable to what you’re doing,” Penn Savary says. “Many of my greatest lessons learned at BMS have come from sitting down with a regulatory, commercial, or medical colleague and really learning about what they do—hearing their perspective. It’s helpful because when you’re providing advice to an organization in a regulated industry with so many different departments, it’s important to understand how they all work.”

“If I was a lawyer working only with members of the law department every day, I would be failing,” Penn Savary continues. “I wouldn’t have a clear understanding of what drives BMS, the wide-ranging effects of my legal advice, and how that advice fits into our company’s strategy and business goals.”

According to Penn Savary, that sense of

teamwork and meaningful collaboration is vital to the company’s ability to achieve its goal of discovering, developing, and delivering innovative medicines. “The focus on patients, and delivering medicines to appropriate patients who need them, drives everyone at the company, regardless of their department,” Penn Savary says. “Bristol-Myers Squibb has a culture and a deliberate commitment to making sure that every voice is heard and that all perspectives are considered.”

“When the employees within the company collaborate well and communicate clearly with one another,” she explains, “the company as a whole is better able to deliver clear and helpful information to the patients it serves. It is incumbent upon a pharmaceutical company to do what it can to convey information about our products in a responsible and understandable way.”

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 focus on patients, and delivering medicines to appropriate patients who need them, drives everyone at the company, regardless of their department.”

As one of the only lawyers at the company to have been hired into a hybrid legal role, Penn Savary is in a unique position to deliver clear and responsible information to the company. “On the litigation side, I learn a lot about the company’s history, our business, and our products, including products that the company no longer markets,”

Penn Savary says. “And that gives me perspective when I advise my clients at the company of how decisions have been made, the results of our decisions, and the lessons we’ve learned.”

For Penn Savary, working as senior counsel at Bristol-Myers Squibb is the culmination of her past and the lessons she’s learned in multitudinous ways. “Both of my parents were actually union employees at BMS,” Penn Savary says. “My mother worked here for almost forty years before she retired, and my late father for over twenty-five years. The core values they taught me have guided me throughout my education and career and have been at the forefront of every major chapter in my life, including my current role at BMS.”

And, throughout every new chapter, Penn Savary strives to continue learning and growing as a lawyer, reflecting the values of her parents, the aspirations of the students who inspire her, and the mission of the company she’s taken on as her own. AHL

Bristol-Myers Squibb partner Kirkland & Ellis is an international law firm with more than 2,500 attorneys representing clients in private equity, M&A, and other complex corporate transactions, litigation and dispute resolution/arbitration, restructuring, and intellectual property matters. Kirkland congratulates Samara for her accomplishments and wishes her continued success in her role.

By Kathryn Kruse

Collaborating for Equal Care

Jennifer Finger brings her legal expertise to Corizon Health’s care model as it continues its forty-year-old mission of staffing prison healthcare facilities

Court cases ruled in the 1960s and 1970s granted incarcerated persons a constitutional right to healthcare. Responding to this demand, Corizon Health has managed healthcare in many prisons and jails for over forty years. According to Jennifer Finger, assistant general counsel for Corizon, the goal for the company is simple: “provide safe, effective, and efficient care.”

Corizon Health contracts with over twenty sheriff departments and eight state departments of corrections to staff facilities with doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals. As of March 2019, they work with thirty-one clients in seventeen states, overseeing 215 facilities with 179,000 prisoners.

The legal team, consisting of Finger, the general counsel, two other attorneys, and two paralegals, develop and guide these contracts throughout the country. Following the general counsel’s lead, the department, Finger says, has a collaborative culture, where individuals work together to solve similar cases while focusing on different territories. Following on the heels of her previous role in a company where she was the sole attorney on staff, Corizon’s larger, more established department offers the opportunity to develop relationships that enhance strategy and efficacy.

Beyond the collaboration within the team, the legal arm of Corizon sees themselves as advisors to business units as they

help other staff members make business decisions. Finger brings knowledge and focus to the task of minimizing risk in order to support the company as a whole. Naturally, this business engagement role has developed over time as the benefits of such relationships became clear.

To spur interdepartmental work and ensure she functions outside of a silo, Finger acts as part of a risk management committee that meets monthly and includes individuals from nursing, medical, and other divisions. This collaboration allows the company to respond quickly to concerns. Acknowledging that information and facts from a lawsuit can take years to come to light and to parse, Finger constantly seeks to find other information that can help inform decisions. She says that it’s better to “gather points of information from all of the company. Working collaboratively to identify trends can determine how to respond.” Together, the team uses many data forces to understand trends and comparisons. With this information, they explore issues that extend throughout Corizon’s structure, including developing and revisiting training, refreshers, and layers of best practices.

Finger attributes Corizon’s ability to be effective and efficient in realizing goals attributes to its status as one of the oldest companies in the industry. She especially points to established mental and behavioral health practices that are critical to have in place when working with an incarcerated population, as a large portion of the individuals that receive care from Corizon need this specialized support. This history and resulting

Jennifer Finger Assistant General Counsel Corizon Health

protocol are part of what excites Finger about working at Corizon. She says, “I like the idea of working with a company that provides assistance, that does something to better the lives of people.”

Finger’s work specifically focuses on developing preventative care. She says the intent around Corizon providing necessary and effective care is to prevent catastrophic events or disease progression, which is best achieved through offering healthcare on a regular basis. “It is more cost-effective to not withhold care from those who need it,” she says. Along with issues of client contracts and risk management, Finger also works on legal concerns with employees. However, she sees this work as integrated into the same overarching focus. She says, “All the work I do goes towards the common goal: good care.” Finger is proud of negotiations she has been involved with that have reduced risk for the company. She has been able to take the lead on issues that could have been a concern for the company, including a recent suit brought against Corizon by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Regardless of the challenge, Finger channels the relationships she’s established within the company to drive toward success. “People know me and want to come to me. This increased trust

means I can do a good job,” she says. At every level of her engagement with the company, this focus on relationshipbuilding is core to Finger’s methodology and legal achievements. In fact, it’s a large part of why she transitioned in-house.

While Finger sees Corizon shaping its model around preventative care, she works to create structures within the company that will allow for continued risk prevention. Central to achieving her goals are communication and engagement. “It’s important to have trust, and some faith. Know people and be involved—be a resource,” she says. As she looks forward in her career, she says that she is excited to “continue to work with people and develop trust.” AHL

Littler congratulates Jennifer Finger at Corizon Health for her accomplishments and contributions to the legal profession. We are proud to call her our partner in business. Littler.com

For more than a decade, Ogletree Deakins has partnered with Corizon Health on a full range of matters related to the employment relationship. Jennifer Finger is a crucial member of Corizon’s legal team, and this honor is well deserved. We look forward to continuing our partnership with Corizon in the years to come!

Keeping up with changing laws is a full-time job, and you’ve already got one.

“People know me and want to come to me. This increased trust means I can do a good job.”

By Billy Yost

New Eyes on an Old Challenge

James Quick started CrossFit the same day he became president at SimpliFi, nearly two years ago. He says, “I love challenges, and in the case of CrossFit and SimpliFi, I started two different things that seemed really foreign to me; but, watching them parallel over time and seeing the growth in each has been incredibly rewarding.” Quick admits he knew little about healthcare workforce management before taking over his role at SimpliFi—a healthcare workforce solutions company—but it’s precisely the president’s lack of familiarity with the traditional approach that has allowed him to effectively disrupt his own company’s business model, and better serve his customers’ continuously expanding needs.

While the president recognizes he has spent a relatively short time contemplating healthcare’s staffing challenges, he’s no stranger to expanding highgrowth healthcare businesses, a skill that SimpliFi wanted to leverage. Before SimpliFi, Quick was part of a small team who launched an education services company and grew it to hundreds of employees operating all over the world. “I had a number of different leadership roles in that company but building and running the nursing education business is what got me hooked on the mission of healthcare,” Quick says. “So, when I was offered the SimpliFi position, I saw the similarities between my work in the past ten years and the opportunity to help SimpliFi disrupt and scale.”

James Quick didn’t know the ropes of healthcare workforce management, but he knew he could disrupt SimpliFi’s model to better serve its customers

Since taking on his role, Quick has used his outsider perspective to see the healthcare staffing industry through a completely different lens, transferring this mind-set to his team to tackle problems with new dexterity. “We’re disrupting our much larger competitors,” Quick says. “We have a different approach, and we’re nimble enough to address the challenges healthcare systems are having much more quickly.”

Additionally, thinking on a wider scale has been aided by SimpliFi’s building of an advisory board consisting of

healthcare thought-leaders who have spent decades leading hospitals and health systems. “As we are making this major pivot in the services we provide, we needed a group of experts who knew us, knew our business, and had an intimate understanding of the dynamics of the healthcare workforce from the perspective of our customers,” Quick says. “They help us increase the speed and reduce the execution risk for the innovations we are bringing to the market.”

Early on, Quick realized that managed service providers were still fundamentally operating the way they had been from their genesis more than a decade ago. “The challenges health systems have attracting, retaining, and managing clinical talent have increased significantly, and doing this in an environment of decreasing margins is extremely difficult,” Quick says. “They are asking, ‘How can our MSP bring more value?’” We are responding to that in what we refer to internally as MSP 2.0.”

The answer to that question of value lies in working to become a more holistic service provider, the president says. “As health systems get larger and larger, you have a limited group of executives who need reliable partners to take on more and more responsibility.” SimpliFi’s future success relies on becoming a different type of workplace partner, which means it’s working to help build hospitals’ core nursing staff while managing the flexible staff options when demand calls for it. “There’s higher than a thirty percent turnover rate from nursing grads within their first two years,” Quick says. “We’ve created a new approach where SimpliFi provides the tools and the talent to transition newly graduated registered nurses into practice while decreasing non-productive time of the new grad and the burnout and incivility of tenured staff.”

James Quick President SimpliFi

Cindy Momchilov

That new transition to practice program went into effect in August 2019 with a statewide health system. “In most places, there are plenty of newly graduated nurses,” Quick says. “It’s a matter of turning those newly graduated nurses into competent professionals who remain with a health system.”

When it comes to flexible labor, Quick says SimpliFi serves as the single-pointof-contact for managing the temporary staff health systems rely on for spikes in census, FMLA leaves, EHR conversions, or specialized positions that require a full-time search. The president says, however, that most health systems are using more and more agency labor to simply fill unfilled permanent positions.

Considering SimpliFi is a large provider of this service, it seems that increasing demand would be good to satisfy the company’s bottom line—but that’s not how the president sees it. “We’re trying to transform our own model by working to reduce the long-term reliance on

agency labor,” Quick explains. “We want to help our customers use that service appropriately, while building their fulltime nursing workforce.”

Throughout this progressive disruption, bringing diverse minds together has become a hallmark of SimpliFi, whose application process includes a two-hour psychometric evaluation that Quick describes as “half-SAT, halfMyers-Briggs.” The president says he’s sought out the best minds from healthcare and other companies like Amazon who are known to innovate, no matter how fundamental a “given” may seem. “We are a very hard place to work for because we want people who fit within our culture and are motivated to build something.” With a president who is willing to take on a new sport known for its high intensity on the same day he takes the reigns of the company, it’s no surprise that SimpliFi has bold goals to redefine the industry from the top down. AHL

“I saw the similarities between my work in the past ten years and the opportunity to help SimpliFi disrupt and scale.”

Teaming Together, Rain or Shine

Two-time First Chair winner Laurel Faciane is available literally any time for her team at Galderma

By Billy Yost | Portraits by Gillian Fry

To some, maintaining work/life balance might mean leaving early on a Friday or catching up on some work over the weekend. That balance, however, has always meant something a little different for Laurel Faciane. “My husband surprised me with an anniversary trip to Hawaii and I was answering work texts while we were driving to the Dole pineapple farm,” Faciane admits. “I was working on agreements in our hotel room.”

The senior associate general counsel at Galderma Laboratories tells those she works with to contact her day or night, weekend or holiday. “I’d rather we work through issues even if I’m on vacation rather than waiting until I’m back and have something blow up in the meantime,” Faciane says. The associate GC’s commitment is strong, and in nine years at Galderma, Faciane has helped mitigate huge risk potential and saved money by standing legal ground.

Faciane has spent her entire legal career in healthcare and, prior to law school, worked an additional eight years in the field. The business knowledge has been especially handy for the lawyer, allowing her to be more businessoriented than her legal role might imply. “When someone comes to ask me for my opinion on moving ahead, they typically don’t come thinking the answer is going to be ‘move forward,’” Faciane says. “I realize that, and if the answer is going to be no, I try and find other options that may help solve the problem.”

Laurel Faciane Senior Associate General Counsel Galderma Laboratories LP

Partnering both with the business and other departments starts with Faciane’s open-door policy. “I don’t want anyone here to feel like they can’t come to me and talk through an issue,” Faciane says.

“They all have my cell phone number and I’ve told them to call or text me nights, weekends, whatever they need.” The lawyer’s willingness to be available is second nature to both her and her family. “My husband is a lawyer with his own firm, and our daughter is extremely busy as a student athlete,” Faciane says. “We’re always there for each other and for our daughter and it just seems to work out.”

Faciane hasn’t just been available to manage legal issues; she’s proactively helped to reduce risks that have greatly impacted Galderma’s bottom line. “I think when I came here, there was a bit of a different mind-set on trying to settle employment claims,” Faciane says. Oddly enough, as word got out that Galderma wouldn’t be entertaining unsubstantiated employment claims, those claims started drying up. In fact, Faciane helped reduce EEOC complaints by a staggering 90 percent. “I felt really proud about that,” Faciane admits.

While she had no fleet management experience, Faciane proactively

We congratulate our client and friend, Laurel Faciane, Senior Associate General Counsel, Galderma, for her recognition in American Healthcare Leader.

Austin

Charlotte

Chicago

Dallas

Denver

Fort Worth

Houston

London

Mexico City

New York

Orange County

Palo Alto

Richardson

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Shanghai

The Woodlands

Washington, D.C.

“I’d rather we work through issues even if I’m on vacation rather than waiting until I’m back.”

Haynes and Boone, LLP logo size: 2.5”(width)

Both First Chairs

The First Chair Award is given to “in-house counsel who have, through their hard work and innovation, made significant contributions to the legal community,” and Faciane has received it on two separate occasions. What’s best, she doesn’t know from whom, as the nominating attorneys haven't revealed themselves. “It was probably an outside counsel that I worked with, and that made me feel really good because all of our outside counsel have been practicing for a long time, and if they think I was good enough to even be nominated for the award, that really means something to me,” Faciane says.

petitioned the leadership team at Galderma to oversee operations after noticing a pattern that those actually managing the fleet had failed to identify. “I realized we didn’t have a safe driving program and after instituting it, it drastically reduced the number of fleet-related litigation claims,” Faciane says.

In September of 2018, Faciane found herself facing one of the toughest challenges she’s faced thus far in her legal career. Galderma’s parent company, Nestle, announced that Galderma was being put under strategic review, effectively putting the company up for sale.

“As part of the legal team, we work on due diligence questions from potential buyers,” Faciane says. “I’m potentially working myself out of a job.” In her usual style, Faciane plowed ahead without taking time to process the complexity of the position she found herself in. Whether Faciane’s department is shaken up or left intact, the lawyer will have helped weather a company through difficult legal waters that few have experienced, and that’s a victory in itself.

Faciane is currently working on getting her master’s degree in liberal arts from Texas Christian University. “I love to learn and have been wanting to go back to school for some time now. When I found out TCU had an online degree program, I immediately applied. Juggling work, school, and my family is challenging, but I am loving every minute.” AHL

“Juggling work, school, and my family is challenging, but I am loving every minute.”

By Sara Deeter

Allison Vessels is committed. As director of human resources at Windsor Run, Erickson Living’s new senior living community in Matthews, North Carolina, Vessels has dedicated herself to fostering a culture that makes staff and residents alike feel at home.

When Windsor Run opened in May 2018, it was all hands on deck to make a good first impression on new residents. Staff members helped each other succeed beyond their own official duties. Vessels even served as hostess in the restaurant, striving to ensure that Windsor Run residents experienced the same high-level dining services as were offered at other Erickson communities.

“You can’t just say, ‘It’s not my job,’” Vessels explains. “We work together to achieve a common goal: taking care of our residents. Nothing is beyond me as far as my role goes. I am willing to do what it takes to create an exceptional resident experience, whether it is my area of expertise, HR, or cleaning up a spill. It’s remembering we are here for our residents.”

To Vessels, commitment doesn’t just mean doing odd jobs to make sure things run smoothly. It also means living the Erickson Living company values of respect and caring, diversity, friendliness and enthusiasm, integrity, responsibility, excellence, and teamwork every single day. Whether she’s passing someone in the hallway, leading a team huddle, or coordinating a monthly town hall, Vessels

makes a point of connecting to and getting to know the people around her.

“We live our values one interaction at a time, and anyone can see that from the moment they come to one of our campuses. It’s different from the moment they’re greeted,” Vessels says. “I know that many of our residents choose Erickson Living because of the staff, because of the friendliness. It makes them feel like they’re at home.”

Every month during the community’s town hall meetings, staff and residents are encouraged to share mission moments where the values have been present in key interactions. Those “mission moments” are a chance to hear about the security officer who makes everyone feel safe and happy, the seventy-nine-year-old who felt like he was surrounded by family while

Dr. Allison Vessels Director, Human Resources Windsor Run, Erickson Living

celebrating his birthday, and the housekeeper and mechanic who supported a resident when her washing machine broke and flooded her apartment.

“She was so grateful to everyone who rallied to help fix the washer and save her Oriental rugs,” Vessels remembers about that last resident. “She said it was a small act of kindness—the kind that makes all the difference in someone’s life when they are having a bad day.”

Mission moments also provide an opportunity for reflection. Vessels likes to use them to gauge her and her staff’s success in having a real impact on Windsor Run residents. “Success means you know how your culture is doing. It’s the little things that show people are going above and beyond in their jobs,” she says. “I’ve been in other organizations where the values are pretty strong. But we really hold everyone accountable to our values. And Erickson Living took it one step further; they have partnered with ELI Inc. to offer Civil Treatment programs for both our leaders and our employees.”

According to Vessels, ELI Inc.’s Civil Treatment training is a great complement to Erickson Living’s culture, encouraging Erickson employees to not only talk about their behavior but also to think about the impact of their actions before speaking. Vessels became certified in Civil Treatment during her first few days as director of human resources, and soon afterward, she started hosting Civil Treatment training sessions with her team at Windsor Run.

“Having these classes and putting everyone through them really shows our commitment to our values,” Vessels notes. “As many people have come up and told me, we really do honor and uphold those values.”

“Allison and her team at Erickson have it 100 percent right,” says Stephen M. Paskoff, Esq., founder, president, and CEO of ELI Inc. “They continue to reinforce the Civil Treatment messages after the initial classes are completed through communications, meetings,

and follow-ups, ensuring leaders and employees are more respectful and mindful of their actions and behavior.”

Of course, Civil Treatment sessions aren’t the only way that Vessels encourages and inspires her team to live the Erickson values. “If our employees weren’t engaged,” she says, “they wouldn’t be going above and beyond.” For Vessels, a big part of employee engagement is making sure that Windsor Run serves as a resource to her staff. That means preparing staff for new changes to the Windsor Run community and supporting the career development of staff members by letting them know about new positions opening up.

On a broader scale, Vessels says, it also means caring for the staff’s well-being. Windsor Run offers an on-site employee health and wellness center that partners with staff members to manage their chronic illnesses, speak with staff physicians, receive flu shots, get their annual physicals, and more.

It is because of that dedication to employees’ well-being, Vessels says, that the Charlotte Business Journal recognized Windsor Run as one of the Best Places to Work in 2017, and in 2019 as one of Charlotte’s Healthiest Employers.

As Windsor Run and its other senior living communities grow and expand, Erickson aims to continue helping its

staff and outlining the competencies they need to hold each other accountable through a new initiative called a “oneteam journey.”

“It started with our chief executive team at corporate, and then it cascaded down to our senior leadership team and executive teams,” Vessels says. “And now we’re rolling it out to all the leadership teams in the communities. It’s a feedback system of competencies, requests, agreements, and behaviors that we commit to as a leader in order to operate with one another and our teams. One Team is the culture by which we lead the organization.” AHL

ELI is a training and consulting company that helps healthcare organizations solve the problem of bad behavior in the workplace. This means more than just preventing discrimination and harassment lawsuits: it’s about addressing the bigger costs of lost productivity, turnover, quality of care, patient outcomes, and brand damage caused by uncivil behavior.

Our award-winning training experiences are based around realistic industry scenarios and are backed by our deep legal expertise and a proactive, high-touch approach. It’s how we’ve helped many of the world’s leading healthcare organizations align their values and culture to reduce risk and improve results.

ELI is proud to partner with Allison Vessels and her team to help make Erickson Living a Civil Treatment workplace.

“If our employees weren’t engaged, they wouldn’t be going above and beyond.”

By Sara Deeter

Refreshing Workplace Habits

According to Paskoff, many organizations today appear to have the technical basics down when it comes to workplace civility. They have aspirational words on their websites, policies written into their employee handbooks, and an array of rules, systems, training programs, and hotlines on hand. Yet employees at many of those organizations still experience discrimination, harassment, abuse, and a variety of behaviors that are neither inclusive nor productive. That disparity between expected and actual conduct is exactly what Paskoff addresses.

“You have to challenge and change the underlying structures of resistance that prevent words, policies, and systems from turning into daily behaviors,” says Paskoff. “It needs to be a cultural change, not a cosmetic change—something you do once and then say, ‘We’re done.’ It has to be embedded in the cultural DNA of the organization.”

Paskoff has always been interested in civil rights, and he’s been talking about Civil Treatment for nearly thirty years. He worked for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) as an investigator while at the University of Pittsburgh Law School and landed a position as trial attorney at the EEOC following his graduation. Investigating

Stephen M. Paskoff is helping revolutionize workplace behavior as founder, president, and CEO of ELI Inc.

Stephen M. Paskoff, Esq., founder, president, and CEO of ELI Inc., is creating cultural change in workplaces all across the country.

discrimination claims for the US government was “incredibly exciting and meaningful,” says Paskoff. “It’s still one of my very best assignments.”

Later in his career, Paskoff was asked by his management law firm to begin conducting supervisory training with clients. To him, it was an opportunity to host highly animated legal discussions by merging his legal expertise with his experience in speech and debate, acting, and radio. But the more Paskoff spoke to the firm’s clients, the more he realized he needed another approach.

“No matter what I did, too many were just looking up at the sky,” Paskoff explains. “So I thought I’d try something different. I started creating short hypotheticals and developing a more interactive approach. I tried to play devil’s advocate and get them to see that while people may kid around about behavioral infractions all the time, that doesn’t mean it’s OK.”

While this approach was more effective in terms of audience engagement, Paskoff soon discovered a much more serious problem—the unfortunate reality that people are often resistant to the mere idea of changing their behavior. “People will say, ‘This is the way I was trained’ or ‘I’ve always done it this way,’” he says.

The issue with that mind-set, Paskoff notes, is that it not only prevents organizations from delivering the best results and recruiting the best people but also creates an environment where people can’t do their best work. And in industries like healthcare, that type of environment can threaten lives, cause complications, and undermine research projects.

“I was asked to conduct a special session for a cardiac surgeon group many years ago,” Paskoff remembers.

Stephen M. Paskoff, Esq. Founder, President, and CEO ELI Inc.

“My colleague and I interviewed surgeons, anesthesiologists, and allied health professionals. Among them were nurses who refused to work for two talented surgeons due to their abusive behavior. One nurse told me she would rather be a combat nurse on the front lines in Iraq than work for one of these doctors. I met anesthesiologists who delayed speaking up immediately about changes in a patient’s vital signs to avoid being screamed at and insulted by the surgeon in charge. They thought it would be better for the patient to wait for the surgeon to notice the changes himself than to risk an outburst, which could have disrupted the team and potentially worsened the situation.”

“Yet when I delivered my report to a senior executive in charge of these subjects, he said, ‘Well, this isn’t race, religion, national origin, or any other legal issue, so I guess we’re OK,’” Paskoff continues. “And it hit me—I knew it already, but it hit me again—that there’s something wrong here. Unfortunately, many organizations have focused just on illegality, forgetting that other behaviors can have a toxic or even fatal effect.”

That mentality, Paskoff points out, is also at the root of the #MeToo movement and other behavioral workplace issues. “#MeToo is saying that we have to have an environment where talent can be realized, to benefit the individuals in question as well as the public they serve,”

Paskoff says. “In healthcare, #MeToo is extraordinarily impactful in terms of who’s going to be moving into key positions, how they’re going to be treated, and what that all means for patients. It’s about saying, ‘Your behavior is interfering with our ability to leverage the best services, research, and results for our patients and members of the public.’”

Today, ELI helps organizations better serve their employees and the public through its wide range of workplace training and consulting services. ELI provides client-tailored learning initiatives that teach leaders and employees alike how to commit to changes in workplace culture, communicate clearly about those changes, establish consistent consequences for misbehaviors, and foster a sense of continuity. The company counts, among its many clients, top healthcare institutions such as Johns Hopkins, the National Institutes of Health, the CDC, the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Veterans Affairs, Washington University School of Medicine, and senior living companies like Erickson Living.

“We are human beings; we make mistakes. That’s to be expected,” Paskoff says. “But I hope that when we fall short of our values, people speak up and take the necessary steps toward real change. In healthcare, where outcomes such as complications, mortalities, talent loss, and burnout are at stake, it’s imperative that they do so.” AHL

When the human body is the biggest data platform, who will capture value?

“It needs to be a cultural change, not a cosmetic change . . . It has to be embedded in the cultural DNA of the organization.”

By KC Esper

Enriching the ‘Generalist’ Toolbox

Corporate Counsel Dan Healey uses his unique journalistic perspective to pursue legal solutions and help global communities

Growing up in a family ingrained in the law field, Dan Healey was born with a naturally legal-inspired brain. Before going to law school, however, Healey took some time to exercise his journalistic muscle. During undergrad at Williams College, he double majored in English and American Studies and founded a political and cultural magazine. He went on to work as a financial editor at a pharmaceutical trade journal, where he worked for two years, and was editorin-chief of the Virginia Law & Business Review at UVA Law.

Unbeknownst to him, the journalism world gave him an entirely new, keen perspective about the legal field. Eventually, he learned how to set the tone and strategy for cases based on what he saw was presented successfully inside a court or on Capitol Hill. So, when it came time for Healey to go to law school, the overlap between his new and old skill sets proved beneficial.

“There are a lot of similarities between being an editor and being an in-house lawyer,” Healey explains. “In both, you’re synthesizing and presenting information. But you also become a generalist. In both roles, you have to have the ability to learn a new subject and be able to apply it to a preexisting skill set to learn it and present it well.”

After working for the pharmaceutical journal, Healey developed an interest and appreciation for the healthcare industry, where there is an “intersection of law, policy, and business.” After law school, he took the information he learned and brought it to Pfizer, where he now serves as in-house counsel. At Pfizer, much like Healey, the legal team excels at being generalists. Healey says, “You need this broad skill set and breadth of experience to be able to do a job well and work for the future of a healthcare company.”

Healey’s team uses this generalist mentality to apply legal approaches to

Dan Healey Corporate Counsel Pfizer

Wendy Barrows

subject matter with which they may not have been previously familiar. At Pfizer, many of the cases that its legal team handles every day are multidimensional: “So, with each of those cases, we have to think about all those different dimensions simultaneously.” Healey says, “Having exposure to all of them at one time or another gives us a frame of reference to think about a more structural way to approach it.”

Whether working with Pfizer’s in-house or outside counsel, approaching novel legal concepts as a generalist has allowed the legal team to not only understand the different phases of litigation as they occur, but it has also sharpened their judgment, problem-solving, and communication skills. For Healey, these steps occur in his embedded journalism perspective, allowing him to look holistically at a case as it unfolds: “It’s interesting to look at the industry as a reporter because you’re dealing with it objectively and seeing how these interlocking pieces in the industry interact.”

Just as his journalism background lent itself to his dynamic, yet objective, problem-solving approach, his other personal experiences have also taught him about how to carry projects through to fruition. After three years in private practice, he and a friend went on a camping trip to visit several national parks. After that,

they made the trip into an annual tradition with the goal of visiting every national park in the United States. At the same time as this goal gave Healey an opportunity to experience places he had never been, it also taught him how to be systematic, deliberate, and goal-oriented in general—skills that drive his professional work every day.

As a member of the legal division’s Pro Bono Steering Committee at Pfizer, Healey channels these skills as he works with his team to create attainable goals in supporting different pro bono opportunities. During the 2018 election, the legal team partnered with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law to staff a hotline that voters could call for election day assistance. Additionally, last year, Healey traveled with several other Pfizer lawyers to teach a legal research and writing course at the University of Zambia in Lusaka, in partnership with DLA Piper. “Our goal was to help a concurrent generation of international lawyers,” Healey explains. “It was a fascinating experience to learn how other legal systems work and meet lawyers in that country.”

Though pro bono work may be difficult to merge into the schedules of in-house lawyers, the legal team at Pfizer encourages and prioritizes these opportunities to use their skills to impact the

world around them. Personally, these opportunities have inspired Healey to be cognizant of the political and social aspects of his work.

“I look for a Washington dimension inside my work,” Healey says. “I want to maintain a sense of involvement in issues where I see different political or policy dimensions come into play. The healthcare and pharmaceutical industry is always going to be relevant and important and interesting; being in the industry certainly gives me an eye for the greater impact our work makes.”

As Healey grows in his career and strives toward his goals, he maintains his acute awareness of how the work he helps Pfizer impacts the communities around him—the world he wishes to experience entirely. With every goal he reaches and every opportunity he takes, Healey adds another skill set to his abundant toolbox, saving them for the next time he can make a difference and help move health forward. AHL

Congratulations to Dan Healey on his well-deserved recognition as an American Healthcare Leader Bradley is proud to partner with Dan and Pfizer in their commitment to funding programs that provide public benefit, advance medical care, and improve patient outcomes. We believe that all people deserve to live healthy lives.

“It’s interesting to look at the industry as a reporter because you’re dealing with it objectively and seeing how these interlocking pieces in the industry interact.”

When

At Bradley, our attorneys understand that legal matters are more than contests of critical thought; they have real-world implications, which is why we prioritize integrity. It is this integrity that inspires all of us to go above and beyond our clients’ expectations by providing innovative solutions, dependable responsiveness and a deep commitment to success.

Bradley congratulates Dan Healey of Pfizer Inc. on being recognized as an American Healthcare Leader

bradley.com

EQUALITY.

For too long, people with intellectual and developmental disabilities have been overlooked by healthcare systems.

Not anymore.

THE TIME IS NOW.

By Billy Yost

ON BEHALF OF ALL PATIENTS.

Marco Damiani has based his career on improving health outcomes for patients with disabilities, adopting a progressive approach routed

in social justice

Marco Damiani is able to immediately recall his defining moment of career clarity: the day he was punched squarely in the face.

Straight out of college, with a bachelor’s in psychology, Damiani began working for a day program that included working with individuals at the infamous Willowbrook State School—an institution whose conditions and practices eventually led to a class-action lawsuit requiring deinstitutionalization of the center for people with developmental disabilities in the mid-1970s. His first week on the job, a man approached Damiani and, anxious at the presence of a new staff member, connected with a solid haymaker shot straight to the face.

After the instance, rather than quitting, Damiani dug in. “I could have easily said, ‘I’m done with this,’ but the people around me really appealed to my better angels and showed me that if I was able

to work with this person, I could help change his behavior and he wouldn’t do this anymore.” Damiani has consequently spent his entire career working on behalf of and with people with developmental disabilities in a variety of capacities, most recently as CEO of AHRC New York City, an organization of five thousand staff that supports more than fifteen thousand people with disabilities a year.

A LIFETIME OF SERVICE

Damiani says every role he has taken on has been grounded in social justice and working to extend the civil rights movement from the 1960s to put those with disabilities back into communities where they belong. Over his career, he has been part of the fundamental shift in perspective that is a beneficiary of efforts like Damiani’s to grant those with disabilities more than the low bar of expectations that has commonly been afforded to them. “Something you hear a lot about AHRC is that we are here to try and give people the lives that they want,” he says. “That’s a very evolved perspective from just trying to get people out of institutions.”

Perhaps Damiani’s most lasting contribution to the health field is the CEO’s talent for building out sustainable models of healthcare for those with disabilities all over New York. Those models have proven to be not only sustainable but also scalable with implications that go far outside of New York’s borders.

Chip Graver, area president at Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., has witnessed Damiani’s inclusive philosophy of care. “It’s clear that Marco has a genuine passion for helping those with developmental disabilities achieve all they can in life,” Graver says. “This passion is evident in everything he does and is reflected in the way that AHRC New York City serves its members.”

Damiani, CEO , A H weNCR ytiCkroY ,

Rick Guidotti

A BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL MODEL OF CARE

In previous roles, Damiani has helped shape a model that he says has proven efficacy but is rarely actually implemented: a healthcare model that supports physical and mental health that is grounded, as best as can be understood, in a patient’s social network within a community. “We can clean their teeth, treat their cold, or help them with rent, but if none of those things intersect, we’re not giving them a better life,” Damiani says. Instead, Damiani has consistently helped foster cross-disciplinary collaboration in the health systems he has helped transform.

At the YAI Network where Damiani spent more than twenty years, he found great success hiring primary care physicians and dentists who were straight out of their training and willing to buy into the idealism of the model while being able to provide real-world results. A cross-disciplinary grand rounds program was created where internal and external clinicians would present on a variety of health topics. A senior dentist, primary care physician, psychiatrist, and psychologist headed up each location, creating local leadership that also rolled up effectively into the enterprise-wide clinical and administrative leadership.

On a more fundamental level, Damiani says purposefully constructing floors to include professionals from multiple disciplines is imperative to the model. “We want clinicians to be able to easily walk down the hall to talk to a colleague, even if they’re in an entirely different field,” Damiani explains. As such, dentists and psychiatrists are not confined to their respective floors, as is common

in more traditional healthcare settings, which helps address the complicated needs cultivated by people with intellectual or developmental disabilities (IDD). A more fluid floor plan offers solutions to problems that had been potentially overlooked. This restructuring, for example, prevents a physician from potentially overmedicating a patient who is repeatedly hitting himself in an instance where a dentist could identify that the problem isn’t behavioral but rather a response to a toothache.

NYU COLLABORATION

Damiani was most recently awarded the Kriser Medal by NYU’s College of Dentistry, its highest honor, for his role in helping establish NYU’s Center for Oral Health for People with Disabilities, a landmark achievement for those working to better serve a population that Damiani believes has too long had to live with poor access to healthcare and a seemingly indifferent system.

“The NYU Oral Health Center for People with Disabilities will promote greatly improved access, but it exceeds basic expectations by enabling access to a welcoming state-of-the art facility, dental treatment services from highly experienced and engaged faculty, and a service

“We can clean their teeth, treat their cold, or help them with rent, but if none of those things intersect, we’re not giving them a better life.”

Keep your organization in good health.

As the healthcare industry transitions from volume to value, you need a partner with access to a wide set of solutions that can be customized to meet your goals.

Our experience across the continuum of care allows us to be creative in building solutions for your human capital and risk management needs. Regardless of how and where you provide care today, or plan to provide care tomorrow, we will help you solve the challenges of operating a sustainable healthcare organization while meeting the needs of your employees and your community.

Start a conversation with Gallagher today. www.ajg.com/healthcare

© 2019 Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. 35610A

OUR GUEST EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE.

Marco Damiani’s name is synonymous with healthcare for individuals with IDD in New York City. Marco led both Premier Health and Metro Community Health Centers as they developed medical and mental health services for people in the five boroughs of New York. He has set the bar for medical and dental services in terms of availability, quality, and effectiveness.

Since the majority of medical and dental schools do not have required courses in special needs populations, it is imperative in clinics that support individuals with those needs to have practitioners that have or desire to acquire the necessary skills. Marco set up systems in his clinics that allow for the growth of the staff and the expectation of excellence.

Marco’s contribution to NYU’s Center for Oral Health for People with Disabilities will have a lasting impact on the healthcare of individuals with disabilities for years to come. Better oral health generally equates to better overall health, and that is the data that Marco will be analyzing as the Center grows.

It is perhaps Marco’s attitude on how people with disabilities should be treated in the healthcare system that moves him to action. As we have discussed many times, it is the need for equality, accessibility, and quality healthcare that motivates Marco into an indomitable force in New York City.

—Susan Constantino

vision that underscores dignity, respect, and coordination of care,” Damiani said in a statement.

The state-of-the-art center features nine rooms fully equipped to serve the variety of needs of those with disabilities, including reclining wheelchair platforms and multisensory stimulation to calm those with sensory processing disorders. Damiani and a colleague had the opportunity to review and contribute to the white paper that ultimately became the proposal for the new center, and Damiani was able to channel his decades of experience working with patients with disabilities to include services that might have otherwise not been addressed.

Being honored by NYU feels counterintuitive to Damiani, who says he’s grateful that a world-class institution is doing its best to bring dignity and respect to a population that hasn’t had been afforded the same expectations as the greater patient population. “People with disabilities have for so long just accepted that they may have to wait six months to have a tooth pulled,” Damiani says. “It’s such an amazing message to people who have been disenfranchised for too long.” AHL

Gallagher values our partnership with Marco Damiani and AHRC New York City. We are honored to support their work in the intellectual and developmental disability community, and are focused on delivering unsurpassed employee benefits and risk management solutions to healthcare organizations throughout the country. To learn more, visit ajg.com/healthcare.

Fox Rothschild proudly supports the AHRC New York City Foundation. A full-service firm with offices in twenty-seven cities, Fox serves individuals and businesses of all sizes in more than sixty practice areas. The attorneys in our health law group have a reputation for providing personalized service and delivering pragmatic solutions.

SUPPLYING UBIQUITOUS SUPPORT.

Matthew Kaufman of StationMD strives to provide the IDD population with practical, skillful care in ERs and health systems everywhere

M a tthew Kaufman , C ,OEDMnoitatS ,

Matthew Kaufman says out of all his stories, there is one that best demonstrates what he’s trying to change about healthcare. The ER doctor previously worked in a hospital that was near two residential facilities for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). A young man with a cough was brought into the ER by his mother and one of the staff members of the facility.

As time progressed, the mother realized it was time for her son’s seizure medication but hadn’t brought it with her. Kaufman said it would be no trouble to write a script for the meds and get them filled in the in-house pharmacy. The process, however, took so long that the young man suffered a seizure while waiting. “We had essentially created another problem on top of the original one, just by virtue of the process this person was forced to go through for a relatively minor cough.”

That story, along with many like it, was what led Kaufman and his partners to found StationMD, a health organization utilizing telehealth capacities to serve vulnerable populations, like those with IDD. Staffed by clinicians trained in best managing care for those with specialized needs, StationMD has harnessed telehealth capabilities to keep patients out of hospitals and in their own communities, avoiding the often unnecessary disruption of vital patient rhythms and routines.

Kaufman says that addressing these needs is just a symptom of a much more challenging issue. “The medical field has done a pretty poor job in educating doctors about people with IDD and the common challenges they face,” the CEO says. “Even in emergency medicine, where you’re trained to treat virtually everything that walks through the door,

IDD wasn’t really represented.” One of StationMD’s baseline commitments is designing a curriculum for its team of specialized doctors who treat those with IDD.

“This is not a very evolved field in terms of the medical education involved, so we’ve sought out experts to help us design a curriculum and guidelines to ensure we’re doing things in the best way possible,” Kaufman says.

The second and perhaps more troubling issue StationMD is working to combat is the fundamental lack of access to healthcare by those with IDD. “Finding a doctor who specializes in and is comfortable treating those within this population is a rare thing,” Kaufman says. “Access is such a simple concept, and that’s why I believe so strongly in working to improve it.” The CEO expresses great pride in the stable of highly trained doctors who are handpicked by the founders prior to receiving more specialized training.

“Access is such a simple concept, and that’s why I believe so strongly in working to improve it.”

StationMD’s telehealth services provide immediate care for patients anywhere.

Courtesy of StationMD

Kaufman, who is also currently the emergency department director in the New York City area, says his ER experience has placed him at the front line of interfacing between the community and the hospital. In many cases, that has offered a bird’s-eye view of the inadequacies of the system. “It’s not about intention or ill will,” Kaufman says. “This is a systems problem with an often heavily regulated population, yet the instruments that are out there to meet those regulations are very limited.”

It means that the ER becomes the de facto leveling ground for many issues that can cause patients more problems related to the trauma of an ER visit.

StationMD’s goal is to take the good and necessary parts of that service and implement them in patient communities, where the likelihood of unnecessary escalation and cascading of issues can be significantly reduced. Kaufman says that doctors unfamiliar with patients with IDD can often order batteries of tests that aren’t necessary, prolonging patients’ wait times and leading to a focus on lab results that have nothing to do with the reason the patient came to the ER in the first place.

Mike Alvaro, executive vice president for affiliate services at Cerebral Palsy Associations of New York State, says his organization’s partnership with StationMD is effective because it empowers caretakers. “Our staff feel empowered that they have a knowledgeable group of clinicians who can support their decisions,” Alvaro says. “It also keeps the staff in the home and avoids the unnecessary expense of hospital visits.”

Patients can speak to a doctor or nurse using videoconferencing or web-based services.

That sentiment is echoed by CP of NYS Vice President of Reimbursement and Regulatory Compliance Deb Williams, who says that while the savings are significant, Kaufman’s team provides so much more. “It’s just better care,” Williams says. “All savings aside, they very much care about the people they’re serving, and it’s evident.”

The burgeoning field of telehealth services may still seem like science fiction to some, but Kaufman says that especially for patient populations who can be best served by not having to be thrown off vital routines, the benefits of care are immeasurable. “We’re not employing fancy robots or technology that seeks to solve every single problem,” the CEO says. “We are vying for high quality to the degree that it is still cost-effective.”

Kaufman says StationMD’s goal of utilizing cost-effective technology to expand its services to every single individual with IDD in the US isn’t an unthinkable goal. “We are doctors who are very fortunate to be around at a time when telehealth technology is very affordable,” Kaufman says. StationMD is a company of doctors providing care by using technology, not a group of tech enthusiasts looking for a problem to fix. And if telehealth means fewer mothers spending hours in a waiting rooms, more empowered facility staff, and less crowded ERs, StationMD will continue to innovate care for those who need it most. AHL

OUR GUEST EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE.

StationMD has been a game changer for many individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities in New York City. Through the use of telehealth, Dr. Matt Kaufman and his colleagues have created opportunities for people to be seen in their homes for nonroutine health issues rather than spending hours in an ER.

For the people who live in the residences operated by Constructive Partnerships Unlimited (formerly CP of NYS), StationMD is available in its 125 homes in the five boroughs, and trips to the ER have been cut in half.

The medical team which comes into people’s homes through StationMD has expertise not only in medical conditions but also in special populations. They work with the nursing staff and the direct support professionals to ensure that proper care is given without the hassle of getting to—and waiting in—an ER. Through a grant with the New York State Department of Health, StationMD will soon be available in residences for individuals with IDD throughout New York State.

—Susan Constantino

FIGHTING FOR WHAT’S RIGHT.

John D. Kemp has seen the Sistine Chapel. He and his wife, Sameta (Sam), have visited Tokyo, Egypt, and Taiwan. Their most recent trip to Paris and Rome was just another in a series of travels for the long-married couple, who are also parents and grandparents. Kemp has made each and every trip without the use of his limbs—a congenital anomaly left him without arms or legs. But through the use of artificial limbs, motorized scooters, and other technologies engineered for individuals with disabilities, the lawyer, partner, advocate, and CEO and president of the New York-based The

Viscardi Center and Henry Viscardi School has pursued more than world travel; Kemp has dedicated his life to raising the standards and expectations for what a life with disabilities can be.

Kemp came to The Viscardi Center, an internationally recognized network of nonprofits dedicated to educating, employing, and empowering people with disabilities, in 2011 at the age of sixty. Kemp’s professional pedigree details a history of fighting for equality and acceptance of people with disabilities that very few can rival. The CEO was the 1960 poster child for Easterseals, an advocacy group for people with disabilities to which Kemp subsequently formed lifelong ties. The organization even asked Kemp to serve on its board of directors at the age of nineteen. “It was work with the Easterseals

John D. Kemp, CEO and president of The Viscardi Center, is a longtime advocate for people with disabilities—

and now he’s making dental care more available to them

“Our

long-term goal is for every local dentist office to be accessible to all people in our communities.”

Courtesy of The Viscardi Center

JohnD. Kemp, CEO and P ehT,tnediser CidracsiVtne e r,

that really started me down the path of working on disability rights issues,” Kemp says. “Being asked to join a board with twenty-five adults was kind of terrifying, but it’s really where I got my start.”

Kemp graduated from Georgetown University and immediately went to law school. During debate concerning the creation of what ultimately became the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Kemp testified before Congress, voicing his support for the legislation outlawing discrimination against those with disabilities. The legislation passed, and Kemp realized his expertise could be put to use. “I knew there would be a great need for information to clear up the confusion about how to implement these rules and regulations,” Kemp says. He and a partner created a consulting company that educated businesses on disability etiquette and disability inclusion best practices in the industry. “We were two twenty-seven-year-olds telling guys twice our age what to do,” Kemp laughs. “We thought we were hot stuff.”

The succeeding years would see Kemp taking on a litany of opportunities and challenges, forcing the young executive to grow up quickly. That wouldn’t be any more evident than when Kemp took on his first CEO role at the United Cerebral Palsy national organization in 1990, the same year the executive was able to help influence the passage of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act. Success aside, Kemp still felt somewhat ill prepared. “I was forty years old, and I remember closing my office door on my first day and wondering what I had gotten myself into,” Kemp admits. “I didn’t know if I could even do the job.” Thirty years later, Kemp thinks it may be safe to say that CEO roles turned out to be a good fit.

Courtesy of The Viscardi Center

Though Kemp admits taking on a new role at the age of sixty wasn’t part of his career plan, the chance to head up The Viscardi Center just made too much sense to pass up. “My introduction to The Viscardi Center was literally Henry Viscardi Jr. himself,” Kemp says. The CEO saw Dr. Viscardi speak at his own introduction as Easterseals’ poster child in 1960.

The disability advisor for eight US presidents and world-renowned advocate for people with disabilities impressed the young future leader, and Viscardi later sent the boy all of his collected writings on disability advocacy. “When I was watching Dr. Viscardi give this fire-and-brimstone speech filled with outrage about the low expectations for people with disabilities, my dad put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘That could be you one day.’”

Kemp’s father looms large in the success of his son. Kemp’s mother passed away when he was an infant, and the thirty-two-year-old federal highway administration official raised three children by himself with a mind-set that is progressive in its approach even seventy years later. “My dad believed that through education, almost anything was possible,” Kemp says. “He was an eternally optimistic and remarkable human being.” The CEO says his father read every single book that Dr. Viscardi sent, always looking to learn new ways in which he might provide more opportunities for his son.

John D. Kemp with two exemplary students of the Henry Viscardi School at The Viscardi Center, Class of 2019.

OUR GUEST EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE.

There are no words to describe the effect that John D. Kemp has had on the disability movement in our country. He is a charismatic leader, a fighter, an advocate, and an amazing mentor and friend. John sees what should be and works to make it happen. In the IDD field, we have known for years that medical and dental services are often not available because doctors and dentists have not had the training in specialized services that are needed. But John decided it was time to do something about the issue, particularly oral health, and set forth bringing in experts and policy people to work on a national agenda. And no one says no to John!

John’s dedication to the causes that are critical to people with disabilities is just extraordinary. But it is perhaps his warmth, humor, intelligence, and caring that set him apart from others. When John speaks to people with disabilities and their families, there is a connection that resonates within them. He understands their issues and has high expectations for what they can achieve. John once used the quote, “If not me, who?” in a speech, and he lives that philosophy every day.

—Susan Constantino

Now Kemp is looking to provide more opportunities for everyone with disabilities, illustrated most recently by Project Accessible Oral Health (PAOH), a Viscardi Center initiative created to eliminate barriers to care such as insufficient education, inadequate reimbursement to providers, and unequal access to care. With dental care cited as the number one unmet healthcare need of the more than fifty-seven million individuals with disabilities, PAOH plays a unique role in connecting stakeholders committed to achieving oral health equity for the disability community. “There is a critical necessity for education around the important contribution good oral health plays in overall health and quality of life,” Kemp says regarding the initiative. “We must elevate and increase the health literacy around this social justice issue that up until now has not been sufficiently addressed or seen significant change.”

Three pillars comprise Project Oral Health: policy; education of professionals, caregivers, and those with disabilities; and marketing and communication to tell the story of the broken system and how to implement solutions. The National Council on Disability has also identified this crisis through its chair, Neil Romano. At the time of speaking, Kemp had just returned from the Project’s second international conference, “Champions for Oral Health in the Disability Community,” which included attendees from across the US and around the world. “Our long-term goal is for every local dentist’s office to be accessible to all people in our communities,” Kemp says. “People with disabilities should be treated by professionals who are culturally competent to address the needs of people with a wide range of disabilities.”

Kemp also believes it is incumbent on people with disabilities to demand better quality of life for themselves. “We need to look for a longer horizon that includes work, family, and a home,” Kemp says. “The cycle of low expectation often begins at home, inadvertently, with parents who don’t know what they can expect of their children, but I feel strongly that these people need to be pushed. We have to be responsible for ourselves first.” AHL

The Business

Healthcare is a constantly evolving industry that demands executives to plan ahead. Often, this means business leaders need to address department- or company-wide issues to remain focused on driving innovation and devising strategies to maintain a high level of care.

130. Joe Bastante

134. Allen Schiff

138. Paula Wittmayer

141. Lee Pierce

144. Will Conaway

148. Cam Hicks

152. Sam Eldessouky

156. Jim Mormann

By Clint Worthington

Evolving Tech by Evolving Teams

Joe

Joe Bastante has built a career out of transforming organizations through technology. As chief technology officer for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina (Blue Cross NC), Bastante is responsible for driving the organization’s comprehensive technology implementation from cloud strategy to artificial intelligence and beyond.

A veteran of Johnson & Johnson, Bell Labs, and a number of Fortune 50 and 500 companies, Bastante has worked on large solutions and critical business applications for a variety of businesses. But for him, the best part of his job is exploring the vast and ever-changing technology landscape and finding

solutions that best serve the organization’s customers and mission.

Bastante’s deep understanding of technology has already born significant fruit at Blue Cross NC. In the past five years, he has led in the creation of a modern hybrid cloud platform and new data centers colocated with top cloud vendors. His team recently won an NC Tech Award for the company’s usage of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

As a highly innovative leader, Bastante has teamed with partners like Accenture in bringing a passion for change via the successful use of technology, data, and automation. This has helped achieve Blue Cross NC’s goals for affordability, quality

Bastante champions technological change at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina by adhering to principles of people leadership, building relationships, and careful execution

and access, exceptional experience, and data-driven insights.

When it comes to transforming organizations through technology, Bastante deems three areas integral to focus on when driving the success of a business: people leadership, building relationships, and executing technology implementation with thoughtfulness and careful direction.

People Leadership

“Many companies have vast and enduring cultures and histories,” says Bastante. Years of working and operating in the same way can leave companies on autopilot. Therefore, transforming healthcare

requires leadership that is unafraid of human change.

In fact, Bastante says that changing the mind-sets of the people who use technology is imperative to successfully changing technology itself. That requires a strong sense of people leadership, which he cites as central to navigating industry change. When engaging in strong, people-centered leadership, Bastante believes it’s vital to show workers that their ideas are welcome, making it safe for them to break out of their normal ways of working. “You need to inspire and create a culture where people feel trusted to experiment,” he explains.

Joe Bastante Chief Technology Officer Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina

James Walters

He believes that good leaders have a fundamental desire to drive change for their workers and help release them from the routines that no longer serve them well. “We all need to capture the hearts, minds, and energy of the people who work for us,” Bastante says.

Building Relationships

Along with strong people leadership, leaders also need to have a strategy for managing relationships and an effective means to implement it. Bastante first cultivated this principle after reading Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits for Highly Effective People . The book taught him about the concept of an “emotional bank account”—making "deposits" of trust and goodwill by serving others and occasionally withdrawing when needed. “We need to be thoughtful about building and adding to that bank account,” says Bastante, “but also recognize situations that call for withdrawals and relationship strain in pursuit of essential change.”

At Blue Cross NC, Bastante encourages his team to proactively build relationships and be advocates for their client base. “How do we become the best at building relationships and growing that bank account?” he asks himself and his team on a regular basis.

Not everyone was on board with this approach at first, Bastante admits, as not everyone instinctively supports this kind of thinking. But he stresses the need to demonstrate that Blue Cross NC employees care about their colleagues, customers, and partners, noting “when others know you’ve got their back, they’ll be open to the change you bring.” Building successful relationships, he says, is central to cultivating the credibility and history you need to be trusted in the industry.

Discipline in Execution

Once good leadership principles and strong relationships are in place, a

company has to be disciplined in proactively implementing tech solutions. “We absolutely need technologists who understand tech to be given a voice in organizational transformation,” stresses Bastante.

The hardest part of technological change, Bastante notes, is moving from the incubation phase, “when you come up with a good idea,” into the adoption phase. Blue Cross NC’s Innovation Garage, a small team of dedicated experts and engineers who act as the company’s tech accelerator, is an incubator for many of these great ideas. Bastante makes sure that the innovators and great executors are brought together to bring an idea to market. We’ve also learned the importance of asking for help from others in the organization, creating diversity in skills and experiences.

Bastante points out that introducing new concepts can result in slow delivery speed as a result of formal and heavy processes: “Organizations often add process formality and controls to prevent all the errors of the past, but too much process clogs the arteries of progress. A balance is needed.”

“Changes don’t always go smoothly,” Bastante notes, which is why the principles of people leadership, building relationships, and discipline in execution are so imperative. At Blue Cross NC, he takes pride in his team for the passion they have in transforming healthcare technology, and CEO Patrick Conway for understanding the need for innovation and transformation. Bastante says, “All these ideas fuel our passion, our greater calling, for transforming the healthcare system.” AHL

“When others know you've got their back, they'll be open to the change you bring.”

By Billy Yost

Aruba, Dentistry, and the Baltimore Ravens

The key to Allen Schiff’s financial planning and leadership is all about gratitude and people

Allen Schiff could spend hours talking about his trips to Aruba. He recently returned from one of his many yearly trips with his wife to what's been their favorite destination for the last twenty-plus years. The time-shares Schiff and his wife enjoy are maybe the only unsound investments the president of Schiff & Associates—an accounting firm featuring Schiff’s own specific dental industry business planning—has made in an otherwise hugely successful career helping dentists plan for their futures and eventual retirements. Wise investment or not, Schiff says sometimes success just needs to be celebrated. In fact, it is this mentality that has kept so many Schiff & Associates employees at the firm. Likewise, this focus on celebrating successes comprises a fundamental component of the team mentality that has helped build a company culture of community and support.

Schiff’s commitment to teamwork runs deep in his Baltimore heart. The NFL’s Baltimore Colts (who would later move to Indianapolis under cloak and dagger, one of the most controversial moves in US sports history) of the ’60s and ’70s embodied the working-class spirit of the city not just to a young Schiff, but the community at large. The players were known to live alongside city residents and participate as active members of the community. When the team left in 1984, Schiff says he and the city felt a huge, Sunday-sized hole in their hearts. But that void was also the key to a role in the future president’s

own personal development. “When the team came back as the Baltimore Ravens thirteen years later, the community really reunited again, and the leadership of the team did such a great job of reinvesting in the team to make it consistently competitive as well as integrating itself within the community.”

When Schiff himself left his longtime firm, where he had become one of forty-nine partners and six-hundredand-fifty employees located in eleven different cities, he wanted to instill the same pride and ownership in an organization that he’d seen with the Colts, and later the Baltimore Ravens. “The culture here is much different than the firms I’ve worked at in this past,” Schiff says. “If one team member is burdened, another will step

Allen Schiff CEO and President Schiff & Associates

in to help; there is no internal competition here that can spur such negativity at larger firms. We have an amazing culture supported by teamwork.”

Schiff is able to help drive culture from a single seat, without having to consult partners or other parties when, for instance, he elected to give the office the day after the Fourth of July off, granting everyone a four-day weekend. “I want to spread my gratitude to all of these people,” Schiff says. “We all have families, and what we were working on could wait until Monday.”

The president’s relaxed hand is certainly no indication of how hard he worked to get where he is. After making partner at his former firm, the CPA realized that working with dentists to grow

their wealth and plan for their futures was the ideal niche to operate within. “I’ve always found that compassion seems most prevalent in density,” Schiff says. “There was always more of a team concept that spoke to me, as opposed to one individual out to make himself successful at the cost of those around them.” His big break came when after convincing his other partners to set up a booth at a dental conference trade show, Schiff was ultimately asked to speak to the D4 class at the University of Maryland’s dental school. It’s an obligation he’s honored for thirty-three years and has ultimately led to sound financial planning for many a dentist.

There was a recent study done concluding that only 6 percent of dentists

Since 2012, Allen Schiff has won six Baltimore SmartCEO awards, which honors the region’s top enterprising accountants and attorneys.

Rachel Smith Photography

today can afford to retire,” Schiff says. “These people need to surround themselves with competent professionals who can help guide them and understand how to accumulate wealth and build their businesses.” Schiff’s goal is to help his clients retire at an earlier age, and certainly not be beholden to continuing their work because it’s the only way they can afford to live. “As soon as I begin working with a client, I’m already working on an exit strategy for them. You just have to maintain that kind of scope if you want to be effective in your role.”

In 2001, right after September 11, Schiff also founded a group of dental CPAs in Scottsdale, Arizona, which would ultimately become the Academy of Dental CPAs (ADCPA), a network and intellectual property goldmine of CPAs willing to share their expertise and advice with professionals in twenty-four states. “This organization builds a lot of confidence because it provides a competitive advantage for its members that simply cannot be matched,” Schiff says. “If I encounter a complex problem that I haven’t seen before, I can have six to seven ideas on how to solve it in fifteen minutes flat.”

Having successfully built his own firm and a wide network of professionals, Schiff says he’s continually motivated to help his team succeed and watch their growth both professionally and personally. “I think it’s imperative to surround yourself with really good people in all areas of discipline,” Schiff says—perhaps a comment on his own success as much as the advice that he gives young dentists just setting out on their career journeys. AHL

At PNC , our team of dedicated healthcare business bankers understands your business challenges and the important role that cash flow plays in your success. Learn more at pnc.com/hcprofessionals or by calling 877-566-1355.

©2019 The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. All rights reserved. PNC Bank, National Association. Member FDIC

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At PNC, we’re proud to congratulate our longtime client and friend, Allen Schiff of Schiff & Associates, on his welldeserved recognition as an American Healthcare Leader. Thank you, Allen, and the Academy of Dental CPAs, for your genuine commitment to the places we call home.

pnc.com/hcprofessionals

©2019 The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. All rights reserved. BB PDF 0519-0142-1256902

Every day, you lead the way to a healthier community.

By Billy Yost

The executive director and executive counsel for intellectual property at the biopharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim has spent the past thirteen years working to protect her company’s most valuable assets: its ideas.

“Ideas don’t come from a vacuum. They come from people who are in an environment that allows them to think, experiment, and learn from their mistakes,” Paula Wittmayer says.

Paula Wittmayer Executive Director and Executive Counsel for Intellectual Property Boehringer Ingelheim

The lawyer, who also happens to have a PhD in biochemistry, says the law ultimately proved to be the right fit for her science background, something she realized even while in the middle of her PhD. “The law seemed to be a very important lever for influencing research and how it gets done,” Wittmayer says. While collaborating with a local biotech business in conjunction with her doctoral work, Wittmayer became involved in ongoing patent litigation concerning the use of a popular enzyme. “I became curious and wanted to learn more, and that path ultimately led me to a legal career.”

While jumping from science to law may be a head-scratcher for some, Wittmayer says the two fields have far more in common than most might believe. “Both fields have a strong analytical component, require the studying of trends, and necessitate managing ambiguity, especially when working in areas

that are at the forefront of discovery,” Wittmayer explains. “They both require you to develop an overall strategy to solve problems and find solutions.”

At Boehringer Ingelheim, Wittmayer’s team is responsible for the global protection of the company’s intellectual property (IP). “These intangible assets are critical for this company’s success and ability to continue to fund future research in healthcare,” Wittmayer says. “The investment profile with this extensive research and lengthy development timeline demand that we have solid protection of these investments.”

Most important, Wittmayer underlines, is that the work her team is doing today must last the test of time: “We have to be acutely mindful of legal trends that may not fully develop for ten or more years. We have to really have an eye as to where the law is going and plan for what it might look like years from now; that’s a skill that takes a lot of focus.”

Moshe Zusman

A brilliant legal mind

Conserving the Cutting Edge

When it comes to the kinds of drugs Boehringer Ingelheim develops, the cause for care is evident. Cancer immunology is an area of therapeutic focus. “We’re invested in finding new medicines that harness the power of the body’s own immune system to attack and destroy cancer as opposed to nontargeted killing of cells that occur in chemotherapy or radiation treatment,” Wittmayer says. “In legal, we think about the way our research teams and medical teams think about how they can treat disease, which helps us focus our energies on areas with the greatest value.” Capturing those new approaches with appropriate and sustainable IP protections allows the company to move new solutions forward for patient care.

“In all of this, it’s so important not to lose sight of the importance of innovation,” Wittmayer says. “The current climate has been particularly challenging with political discord and uncertainty, and we need to ensure that we have a balanced approach that appropriately incentivizes and continues the investment in innovation.” Wittmayer says that it’s essential to work with the company’s government affairs group to work to shape law and regulations that help propel innovation.

Molding the Makers

Within her own team, Wittmayer says she derives a tremendous amount of

satisfaction in personal development and matching skill sets to problems. “Each person’s aspirations and goals are different, and I focus on finding opportunities to match that talent and aspiration so that it can help support the business and advance those priorities,” Wittmayer says. “I encourage people to take on new challenges and operate outside of their comfort zones.”

The lawyer says similar encouragement was given to her early on in her in-house career, and that as a young lawyer, she was tasked with speaking with the CEO regularly and operating on a global scale in assignments where she had little expertise. The trust placed in the young lawyer motivated her to grow and develop at a rapid pace. “When I see people with talent, I like to take that extra step and give them the nudge they need,” Wittmayer says.

When it comes to her work at Boehringer Ingelheim, Wittmayer says there’s a very simple idea that drives her forward. “I am mindful that whatever we’re working on today could be the medicine that either me or my loved ones need fifteen years from now,” Wittmayer says. After her husband experienced a health scare of his own, Wittmayer said it made her mission all the more compelling, and she realized that the right people being in the right place at the right time can make all the difference.

“I challenge myself and use that to drive us toward fulfilling our core priority: bringing medicine to market.” AHL

“It’s so important not to lose sight of the importance of innovation.”

A trusted and collaborative colleague

A true asset to her field

Executive Director and Executive Group Counsel of Intellectual Property

Boehringer Ingelheim

By Billy Yost

The Trusted Partner

Lee Pierce says that , during a career of over twenty years at Intermountain Healthcare, he “professionally grew up” under the tutelage of many influential leaders including Dr. Brent James, a well-known champion for clinical quality improvement as well as a recipient of the John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Award. Pierce says that having the opportunity to mature with James and others as mentors and colleagues helped shape his own mission to help support and improve healthcare processes in the same manner that engineer W. Edward Deming was able to improve and standardize manufacturing processes—using data and analytics.

That is not to say that Pierce is driven by delivering standardized and cookie-cutter approaches—far from it. The now healthcare chief data officer at Sirius Computer Solutions is driven to become a trusted partner by his clients, using data and analytics advances to improve practices not only across healthcare but for any industry where Sirius is able provide solutions to challenging problems.

The $3.6 billion technology infrastructure company’s agnostic approach and ability to integrate solutions and other partners sets it apart from the industry as it assesses shifts in care delivery, patient and customer engagement, satisfaction trends, and the impact technology has on physician and nurse efficiency and satisfaction. With this mission in mind, Sirius has even created two labs with leading healthcare organizations, both designed to develop innovative ways to address pressing problems within healthcare.

Lee Pierce wants Sirius to be known as more than a reseller and systems integrator, but rather as a trusted technology ally aimed at delivering measurable business value

Pierce joined Sirius during one of the more poignant moments of its evolving business focus. “While Sirius has been around for over thirty years, it was widely known as an infrastructure systems integrator,” Pierce says. “In the last seven years, they’ve really shifted their focus to other value-added services and solutions in cloud, data, digital, and security.” The 2014 acquisition of Brightlight Consulting allowed for

Lee Pierce Chief Data Officer Sirius Computer Solutions

Sirius to widen its scope tremendously by harnessing Brightlight’s expertise in data, analytics, and consulting across myriad industries. Pierce was charged with building, growing, and leading the healthcare data analytics practice.

“What that really meant for my own personal mission was that I had the opportunity to help healthcare organizations across the country be able to manage and leverage their data better,” Pierce says. The role, perched right at the intersection of data analytics and healthcare, is one where Pierce has been able to make significant impact, though only a year into his new CDO position. Pierce had already built out significant data and analytics capabilities at the large and respected Intermountain Healthcare. Pierce also brought a data governance expertise that extends across industries and is especially beneficial in helping engage executives in D&A-related issues.

Pierce says he was surprised at how much of the practical experience of building a data governance program he was able to leverage despite the work not accounting for significant portions of his time at Intermountain. “The foundation that I was able to build has been incredibly helpful in applying to both other healthcare and non-healthcare organizations.”

It’s in working with Sirius’s clients that both the company and Pierce’s own expertise becomes evident. “One of the reasons I joined Sirius is because I don’t believe that there is just one solution or solution vendor to offer clients that will meet their needs,” Pierce says. “I want to be able to be a trusted advisor and provide the right solutions based on our clients’ particular situations and needs.

“Building relationships with healthcare leaders who understand the complexities of healthcare . . . and delivering measurable value with data and analytics solutions is what my job is all about.”

Veneatra Reid

That just feels like the right thing to do, and Sirius has a business model that allows that to happen.”

That model, Pierce says, includes an agnostic vendor approach. “We don’t lead with a specific vendor’s software or hardware solution,” the CDO says. “We focus on the problem we’re trying to solve and use our expertise and partnerships that we have to recommend and bring the right tools and solutions to the table.”

Pierce says Sirius is particularly effective because it doesn’t simply resell software or hardware, it provides comprehensive services to help implement and support customer success. “We’re not just a hammer looking for a nail,” Pierce adds.

As the CDO moves forward in his role, he says Sirius is heavily focused on cloud, security, and digital, along with the continuing data and analytics focus. “All of these technical disciplines are so intertwined and will continue to be that way in the future,” the CDO says. “We’re moving away from that on-premises infrastructure and helping companies continue their transition to more cloud-hosted and software-as-service environments.”

The difference, Pierce believes, is Sirius’ capabilities not just as a provider of service, but a solution-focused partner that is willingness to understand the intricacies of its clients’ specific business needs and tailor solutions that will deliver real, measurable business value.

As a data and analytics professional with technology as a foundation, Pierce expresses a unique satisfaction in his client-facing duties that make him a strong value-add in a CDO role. “Building relationships with healthcare leaders who understand the complexities of healthcare, from the executives down to individual data practitioners, and delivering measurable value with data and analytics solutions is what my job is all about,” Pierce says. “I’m not someone who judges success just by percentages of business growth. I care about happy clients and the measurable value they receive through better data and analytics capabilities and practices.” AHL

“I want to be able to be a trusted advisor and provide the right solutions based on our clients’ particular situations and needs. That just feels like the right thing to do, and Sirius has a business model that allows that to happen.”

Reflecting on the Past

Will Conaway discusses the ways Prime Healthcare’s IT department remains an integral piece of the organization’s whole

By Billy Yost

to Move Toward the Present

Adaptability is a hallmark of great leaders, and for Will Conaway, chief information officer and vice president of technology at Prime Healthcare, that has meant culling all he learned from ten years in the automotive industry and finding ways to adapt its ahead-of-the-curve technical capabilities and sophisticated performance tracking tools for the healthcare sphere.

The CIO, who also teaches at Cornell University’s ILR School working with masters-level students in leadership, psychology of leadership, and negotiations, says regardless of the experience, he has found a way to incorporate seemingly disparate experiences into effective solutions in his role. Conaway spoke with American Healthcare Leader to reveal his key tactics on building culture, setting tone, and enabling success in the IT space.

Will Conaway Chief Information Officer Prime Healthcare

What strategies do you find especially important for building effective IT departments? What has that looked like for you at Prime Healthcare?

I don’t like to use the word effective. I see the word as setting the wrong tone. Effective should be the minimum baseline for any IT department. If your IT department is not effective, close the doors, turn off the lights, and outsource starting tomorrow morning.

With that said, when I joined Prime Healthcare IT, our first order of business was to uphold the concept of becoming a world-class IT department. This is an arduous task and can be counterintuitive, as your first step is often a step backward. Whenever you slow things down to perform analysis and are perceived as taking a step back, you risk losing the resolve of your people at the very time you need to be gaining their trust. Getting by this requires the courage to reevaluate the past. You need a return to the basics: define the current state and desired future state.

Once done, everything must be aligned with the values, goals, and mission of the organization as a

whole. This type of work for a leader requires rolling up your sleeves and getting involved with your people. It’s time-intensive and takes constant, consistent communication to spur improvements and monitoring, so you don’t fall back to bad habits.

What components have gone into building culture at Prime?

Before I started my role as CIO and vice president of information technology, I had put together a onehundred-day plan and pillars depicting what the IT department should be doing operationally, culturally, and what it should measure to track progress.

When I talk with many technology leaders, I don’t always hear talk about culture with a sense of urgency or importance. When you consider the number of items that IT touches in healthcare, you realize that IT has a massive cultural component and influence on an organization’s culture. To be a top IT leader, you must have a good understanding of what your and your team’s actions mean to the organization as a whole.

To address culture, I have leaned heavily on my background as a teacher of the psychology of leadership, negotiations, healthcare strategies, VUCA, and other academic foci. From teaching top leaders and high-potential employees at many large organizations— including J.P. Morgan, Amazon, and ACCOR through eCornel—and teaching many outstanding students in varied industries at Cornell University, I’ve developed many questions to ask about organizational culture.

For example, what is the age of your organization in cultural terms? What characteristics does your organization display? When is the organization capable of cultural changes? Are there subcultures that need to be considered? Pillars allow your people to see the building blocks of the department and how things fit together.

Tell us about some of IT space successes that you’re especially proud of.

There has been much success with Prime Healthcare’s IT department; however, the achievement isn’t mine, but mine to share since it came from every member of the team and from the unwavering support that we receive from all leadership throughout the company.

The team has worked very hard, and it’s understood that success isn’t built in a day; it is built every day. We’re all very proud of the paradigm shift that has occurred within Prime Healthcare’s IT department. The building blocks were already there; they just needed to be set in place.

The foundational team that greeted me upon my arrival at Prime Healthcare included CTO Raghu Chennareddy, the brightest technical mind with whom I’ve ever worked; Vik Mahan, senior director of hospital operations, an experienced operations leader with in-depth knowledge of Prime Healthcare’s hospitals and facilities; and Red Clemens, enterprise program director, who had detailed plans and concepts of how to run an EHR program. Since then we’ve expanded our leadership team with even more top talent: Joe Wood, leading our project management office/M&A corporate, who is already familiar with Prime Healthcare culture and operations; and Betsy Grossman, director of epic revenue, who brings years of healthcare and financial systems experience. Additionally, we have teamed with Prime Healthcare HR and have been hiring the best talent in the industry for all our IT jobs.

It is extraordinary what can happen when everyone is working toward common goals. As a group, IT is helping to create a safe, impactful, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable environment. AHL

By Charlotte Foer

Thriving Through Change

Cam Hicks gathers and connects high-level talent to mirror Teleflex’s new, prosperous identity

Teleflex is what vice president of global human resources Cam Hicks calls “a seventy-six-year-old start-up.” For most of the company’s history, it served within the medical, aerospace, and industrial markets. But twenty years ago, it recognized the fruitful future of the medical technology industry and decided to fully invest in the domain. Soon enough, growth within the field expanded exponentially, putting Teleflex in a position where it had to restructure its identity to parallel its new ambitions. Hicks was ready to take on the task of building a new brand. When he joined the company six years ago, Teleflex’s movement toward the

medical device industry was in full force. He saw the need for the company to adjust its old practices and focus on building a new reputation. Though this is no small task, Hicks wanted the opportunity to build the company into something great. Luckily, Hicks is no stranger to the medical resource space. Prior to coming into Teleflex, Hicks moved from Toronto, Canada, to Lincoln, Nebraska, to assume a human resources role in the pharmacy space, then on to Indianapolis, Indiana, to stand as executive vice president of human resources for a 24/7 laboratory. Not only did he learn the personal value of courage through these moves, but he

Ed

also learned how to channel this courage into business endeavors, using data as a way to quantify advantageous risk in a company.

Within these roles, he became acquainted with the quantifiable measures of business, using growth statistics to determine the success of the company based on talent management factors and profit. More importantly, he realized the merit of building a team that enables a company to prosper. “Everything begins and ends with talent,” he says. “It’s important to introduce the right talent and let them do what they are gifted to do within a company, so both parties thrive.”

Within Teleflex, Hicks stands as the company’s vice president of global human resources and employee communications. His knack for building a team that works to bolster the success of the company helped move Teleflex toward its new endeavors. Hicks believes that attracting the right talent starts with the right leaders. “Leaders cast long shadows,” he explains. “Employees are shaped by the constituents handed to them by their role models. So we must develop our leaders to model the behaviors we want to see.”

Hicks and his team use a thoughtful talent acquisition process to support this idea—one that is based strongly on an alignment of core values between the company and the contender. After reevaluating Teleflex’s core values based on its new identity, the company has taken great strides to weave these new beliefs into its fabric. “Teleflex has become much better known as an investment and company, rather than just a ‘house of brands.’ We

revised our core values to reflect the values of our investors globally and use them to carry forth everything we do.”

In addition to ensuring the right talent is in place, Hicks has made an effort to establish a platform that unites Teleflex’s network of employees across the globe by creating a digital, global HR system. His “Teleflex Connect” digitalizes the administrative function and allows its widespread employees to access information easily. “Teleflex Connect is a cloud-based system that unites our fifty thousand employees around the world,” Hicks illustrates. “The goal is to heighten the employee experience by making

information more available and even matching employee interests with different opportunities within the company.”

As the program goes live, Hicks hopes that this resource strengthens Teleflex’s global brand even more. The second phase of the Teleflex Connect initiative aims to heighten talent retention and attraction while keeping valuable players anchored in the mission of the company.

As Hicks and his team work to improve the system, they also plan to use the HR function to improve benefits packages, strengthen the executive team, and use its diverse community to develop talent from within.

Cam Hicks Vice President, Global Human Resources Teleflex Incorporated

Wheeler Photography

The Humphrey Group’s mission is to help you do just that. We are a global leadership communication firm solely focused on helping our clients communicate information and ideas in a way that inspires.

We believe every person, regardless of their role, can communicate with clarity and confidence. We strive to make that vision a reality every day and in every program we deliver.

Already, the company has witnessed immense growth since transitioning to its new arena. Hicks says, “Before moving into the medical device realm, the growth of the company was relatively flat.” But since making the transition, the company has become a “high-growth company”—increasing its margin between 6 and 7 percent. Hicks believes that his contribution to the success of Teleflex comes from an innate desire to “build a great company” as much as he wants to work at a great company. He works across the globe to ensure that Teleflex’s partners receive the same respect and attention that those at home do, staying conscious of simple details like the time he schedules conference calls and constantly making an effort to “be visible as much as reasonable” by leaving his office to see how other parts of the world work. In all, Hicks serves as an example of the success that occurs when we have the courage to step outside comfortability and welcome the change that comes. AHL

For more information on our programs or how we can support leadership development in your organization, please visit our website www.thehumphreygroup.com or contact Patricio Larrea plarrea@thehumphreygroup.com

We congratulate our friend Cam Hicks for his outstanding contributions to building organizational excellence at Teleflex. We are honored to partner with Cam on his innovative people and talent strategies and look forward to many more years of collaboration and success.

The Humphrey Group Inc. www.thehumphreygroup.com

Imagine if you could communicate ideas that inspire action.

“It’s important to introduce the right talent and let them do what they are gifted to do within a company, so both parties thrive.”

By Caroline Pejcinovich

Triumphing Transformation

Post Bausch Health Companies' rebranding, Sam Eldessouky strives to carry forth its new face of innovation

Working as senior vice president and controller and chief accounting officer for Bausch Health isn’t Sam Eldessouky’s first rodeo. In fact, he’s been in the business for over twenty years. Throughout his tenure, he’s become comfortable with transformation, coming up with solutions to update health systems at the same pace as they change—just ask Tyco International. His onboarding at Bausch Health created the perfect transition for Eldessouky, and subsequently for the company.

Eldessouky joined Bausch Health, formerly known as Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, in May 2016. Onboarded as the senior vice president and corporate controller, Eldessouky directs global accounting and financial reporting activities. He also leads global accounting function to enhance the monthly closes, consolidations, controls, and reporting processes, as well as handles various finance functions.

“Sam is an experienced professional with a proven track record of delivering results in a complex, global public company, and we’re pleased to have him lead Valeant’s financial reporting efforts going forward,” said Robert Rosiello, former executive vice president and chief financial officer at Bausch Health.

In addition to his knack for thriving in change, his more than twenty years of experience has lent Eldessouky skills that have enhanced his leadership methods immensely, namely his ability to tackle any problem posed to him by homing in on his breadth of experience in several departments and specialties.

Before coming to Tyco International, Eldessouky devoted ten years to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) where he provided support on complex accounting issues. Then, in 2004, following the resignation of Tyco International's CEO, Eldessouky joined the company as vice president and assistant controller where he oversaw various financial reports and accounts. Hired by Tyco to lead the accounting research and policy group, he also played a prominent role in designing and executing the vision of the accounting research function and policy and training structure.

Hungry for more responsibility, Eldessouky was eventually appointed senior vice president controller and chief accounting officer at Tyco International. While maintaining this position, he led transformation efforts to redesign the controller’s organization and implemented the enterprise performance management framework. During his time at Tyco, the company went on to receive the Shared Services and Outsourcing Network 2014 Value Creation Excellence Award, which recognized various transformation achievements.

“Sam is a true change agent, a thought leader and an innovator—the consummate finance professional,” says Neri Bukspan, Americas accounting, reporting, and governance leader of financial accounting advisory services at EY. “I’ve had the privilege to work closely with Sam during good times as well as some more challenging ones. His ability to navigate both waters calmly and proactively energize his teams and catalyze change in his organizations during the times it was most needed.

“Sam is a true change agent, a thought leader and an innovator—the consummate finance professional.”

“What is most notable about Sam, he is first and foremost a family and people person, a coach and a mentor to his team and to his professional relationships—many of whom in turn are inspired to follow him as his career progresses,” Bukspan continues.

When Eldessouky joined Bausch Health, he followed his past trends of appointment, following the resignation of an executive vice president. During his time of hire, Bausch Health had admitted improper conduct by two employees after a string of controversies. As such, Eldessouky had not only been onboarded as vice president but also as a new hope and vision for the future of the health system.

“Financial reporting remains a key area of focus for us, and we look forward to Sam’s contributions as we enhance and bolster our reporting structure and policies, and rebuild trust among investors,” said Joseph C. Papa, chairman and CEO at Bausch Health, in a press release when Eldessouky was hired.

Following the hiring of Eldessouky, Valeant Pharmaceuticals International changed its name in

2018 to Bausch Health Companies to start anew despite previous controversies and to parallel their well-known and respected subsidiary eye company, Bausch + Lomb. Since the rebranding, Bausch Health Companies also trades under the name BHC, with a new logo and website that highlights its dedication to healing and innovation inside and outside its community.

After its rebranding, Bausch Health has reported a total revenue increase for the first quarter of 2019 at $2.016 billion, compared to the first quarter of 2018 at $1.995 billion, recently earning it a number-two rating on the Zacks Investment Research Rank system of winning stocks with regard to both earning estimates and estimate revisions.

“With nearly 60 percent of our revenues coming from a diversified mix of medical devices, OTC products, and prescription and branded generic products that are not exposed to the US-branded prescription drug pricing environment, we believe that Bausch Health is uniquely positioned to grow in healthcare,” says Papa in a Bausch Health news statement. AHL

“What is most notable about Sam, he is first and foremost a family and people person, a coach and a mentor to his team and to his professional relationships.”

By Billy Yost

Tomorrow Never Knows

OSF HealthCare’s Jim Mormann on building a new culture of accountability and future-minded growth

Jim Mormann has spent thirty years in or around the healthcare sphere, and he says that for what he’s trying to accomplish, his tenure may be part of the problem.

At OSF HealthCare—an organization owned and operated by the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis and headquartered in Peoria, Illinois—Mormann, the CEO of integrated solutions and CIO, has helped initiate a reexamination of what “integrated solutions” actually means at OSF and for its other clients, starting with leadership. Since initiating this approach, Mormann has compelled those in leadership positions, particularly those with decades of experience like himself, to attempt to recalibrate their approach when it comes to unifying services and

addressing what the company calls “tomorrow’s solutions.”

“There’s a reason not a lot of people go down this avenue: it’s hard to do,” Mormann says. “But we won’t be able to handle tomorrow’s supply costs and capital expenditures unless we completely rethink our business model.” The organization is in the early stages of a true integrated services evolution, but OSF is already reaping the early rewards of working for tomorrow today.

Though Mormann came to OSF in 2010, it’s in the past two years that he’s been able to put his title of CEO of integrated solutions to work. “The best way to describe what we’re trying to do is that we’re taking some of the largest areas of healthcare operations and bringing them together

differently than what many people have done in the past,” Mormann says. “We are consolidating IT services, construction, facilities management, supply chain, and clinical engineering under one umbrella and are really focusing on truly integrating these areas in a new way.”

Employing new thinking about how to integrate these different departments can be especially challenging for those who seemingly hold all of the knowledge about how their departments operate, Mormann says. “We have people who have been here for thirty years and understand the most efficient way to run their departments,” the CEO says. “What we’re most challenged with is trying to

get them to think about a new paradigm.”

And Mormann says he understands why.

“If someone from the outside came to me and told me that they appreciated what I was doing but I needed to run IT differently, I think I would look at them a little bit funny,” he explains. “But this is a key component of transition leadership: how do we disrupt this environment and think differently about innovating new business practices?”

Silos, and their frequency, are key pain points that Mormann is working to address. He believes that breaking from the mentality of disjointed work is the first step in completely rethinking the business model. “We’re really talking

Jim Mormann CEO, Integrated Solutions and CIO OSF HealthCare

Michael Vujovich

about customer service here, and if we’re delivering disjointed service, it doesn’t really matter whether or not I think I’m doing a good job,” Mormann says. “Truly integrating services means taking responsibility and not passing it off to the next silo. If we’re going to get any more operational efficiency, we have to redefine the model.”

The transition revolution is early on at OSF, but it’s happening. With eleven major transformational initiatives underway, most are prepared for execution with a couple already instated. Each departmental leader at OSF is entrusted with two initiatives requiring interdepartmental cooperation and collaboration. “They have to get comfortable enough with their peers in areas that they may know nothing about,” Mormann says. “We’re completely changing the paradigm on them, and that requires a great deal of trust, accountability, and transparency on their part.”

OSF isn’t taking infrastructure building lightly. As Mormann explains, “Transformation of this type takes time. Establishing business infrastructure foundations like we’re doing needs to be at least two years ahead of the business market, that way if the business moves on you, you don’t have to wait for that infrastructure to change.” Alternatively, and speaking from experience, Mormann believes that companies who are required to change and don’t have the proper infrastructure to handle that kind of shift will be outplayed by more flexible competitors and, ultimately, fail.

Daniel Adamany, the CEO of AHEAD, has worked with Mormann for years to help accomplish OSF’s digital transformation, and as such has witnessed his commitment to working with and for his people and patients. Adamany says, “Having worked closely with Jim for the last decade, one of his characteristics has consistently stood out—a

commitment to purpose. Whether his team is modernizing legacy systems and improving data security, or charting the broader digital transformation of OSF, they always keep patient value front and center. Not all leaders are able to maintain that mission mindedness.”

The breadth of perspectives Mormann has been responsible for maintaining throughout his career offers him valuable insight into learning how to better serve both internal and external customers. “We all use the phrase often: we love change when we deploy it somewhere else, we don’t like it when it comes to changing ourselves,” Mormann says. “What we’re doing really requires a whole new level of discipline and changing a lot of belief bias.”

In implementing a transition culture, Mormann is certain that it’s the ideal way for OSF HealthCare to be prepared for anything, to truly be prepared for tomorrow. AHL

“What we’re most challenged with is trying to get them to think about a new paradigm.”

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 catered to different communities’ needs—all aimed at motivating them to stay engaged with their health and empowering them to be their best, at home or at work.

160. Lynn Gordon

168. Deanna Wise

172. Heather Nigro

176. Irina Konstantinovsky

180. Tracy Berry

186. Terry Webb

Lynn Gordon found the team and the impact she was looking for in her role as chief legal officer at New Hanover Regional Medical Center

BY SARA DEETER | PORTRAITS BY GILLIAN FRY

Finding a Community

Gordon had good reason to be selective. Raised in a household of academic medical professionals, she spent her childhood working in clinical research labs, volunteering at hospitals, and discussing the latest spinal meningitis cases or fetal alcohol syndrome and cocaine addiction research over dinner.

“Watching and being a part of that research, in particular, really opened my eyes to what healthcare means,” Gordon explains. “But it also showed me what was lacking and what changes would be coming next. That kind of appreciation for healthcare as it relates to addiction and other societal issues is one that many people think they have, but it’s so different when you live it and feel it.”

Initially, Gordon had no intention of following her parents into the healthcare sector. She had secured bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and was pursuing a PhD in English at Michigan State University when she decided to make a change.

“I loved writing, communication, and teaching, but I knew that I was never going to be a writer or a professor,” Gordon says. “I started to ask myself, ‘How do you practically apply those skills in a career that’s meaningful?’ That’s when I discovered there was a health law discipline that focused entirely on healthcare, on how clinical research, hospitals, and providers are regulated.”

Lynn Gordon did her due diligence before accepting the position of chief legal officer at New Hanover Regional Medical Center.

“I did a ridiculous amount of research,” Gordon says. “I read about the history of the original hospital and the community. I read anything and everything I could lay my hands on regarding the current health system, and when I came in for interviews, I went out afterwards into the neighborhood and sat at a local restaurant just talking to people. And it turned out to be exactly the organization I’d hoped it would be.”

As Gordon began working in the legal sector, she quickly recognized that her expertise in English, and related teaching experiences, were assets to her work with healthcare leaders. “My English background has been most helpful in researching and communicating about such a complicated area of law. When you’re in a situation where you have to work with a CEO in a complex area, you have to be able to break the material down, teach it, communicate it, and be practical about it,” Gordon notes.

But even as Gordon flourished as an equity partner and the Chicago healthcare department chair at Nixon Peabody LLP, she began to understand that she was still missing the sense of impact she remembered from her childhood.

“I realized that I found my greatest joy when I was with providers and other healthcare leaders, with my clients in their boardrooms or C-suites, or sitting and strategizing with a critical access hospital that was just about to lose its Medicare certification because the team didn’t understand or follow through on a particular survey,” Gordon remembers of her decision to focus on nonprofit healthcare. “Being able to be out there and make that difference and work with the folks who really have such an important role in our society, that was the point where I knew that I had found my sweet spot. I like more than anything to be in a healthcare system, not in a law firm or a remote office, but sitting there with CEOs, CFOs, physicians, and chief nurse executives figuring out problems and solutions.”

Lynn Gordon / Chief Legal Officer / New Hanover Regional Medical Center

The True Meaning of Community Health

As Lynn Gordon sees it, it is impossible to work toward community health without creating measures to include everyone in that community. “We support a diverse community, a diverse staff, and a diverse patient population,” Gordon says. “It’s one thing to say we’re open and diverse and another to really strive to be that. We’re really doing it, though. As an employer, for example, our health plan covers transgender surgery. While certain laws require nondiscriminatory coverage, our plan is both comprehensive and affordable as it relates to transgender care, which is pretty rare. Both from an employee and consumer perspective, we want everybody to feel welcome and included.”

According to Gordon, New Hanover is also working on an initiative that allows individuals to provide their gender identification during the patient admitting process. “We’re really trying to make sure everyone has a voice, everyone feels comfortable, and everyone feels supported,” Gordon affirms.

“Lynn recognizes the value and importance of relationships,” remarks Ken Roorda, a principal with ECG Management Consultants. “She knows how to distill complicated organizational and legal frameworks into simple concepts that build connectivity around common goals.”

New Hanover’s network of hospitals, emergency services, and ambulatory care centers drew Gordon’s attention because of the challenge presented by its surrounding environment. Serving seven different counties and a high percentage of indigent and uninsured individuals, New Hanover is situated in both urban and more rural areas marked by a high incidence of obesity, diabetes, opioid addiction, and heart disease.

“But I think that what we’re doing to rise to the occasion is phenomenal,” Gordon says. “We are very passionate about health equity. We’re out there talking with community leaders, getting out there in barbershops, churches, and community treatment centers and asking, ‘What’s lacking? What’s missing? What are the pieces that we’re not all working together on?’ And that’s critical and very special.”

According to Gordon, New Hanover does not worry about filling its beds—indeed, she says that the main medical center is over its bed count almost every day in its daily census. That overflow, in part, has motivated New Hanover to take an approach centered on community health.

“I’m on a team that is looking through the lens of keeping a community healthy and out of the hospital,” Gordon says. “A lot of North Carolina is rural. The people we serve sometimes live an hour away and can’t

“I’m on a team that is looking through the lens of keeping a community healthy and out of the hospital.”

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A New Family Focus

Lynn Gordon was the first woman on the executive team of the law firm she worked at in the 1990s, but she wouldn’t say that her time as a female attorney was entirely easy. She waited quite a while before having children, partly because of industry pressures and partly because of her own insecurities in not knowing what to expect with no maternity leave policy in place and some hesitation around open and candid conversations at the time.

“If you have a baby, you physically can’t be in the office the next day like a man can,” Gordon says. “So the pressures aren’t always terribly nefarious but rather a part of our practical reality.”

Nonetheless, Gordon is gratified to see the progress made in recent years. “We’ve done a much better job in the last decade in recognizing that parents— not just women, but men as well—need support around family leaves,” she says. “They need to know that the support is there, that you can come back to work strong, and often even stronger.”

come to our main campus for care. We also have a lot of poverty-associated food deserts that make it hard for people to get the nutrition they need and a shortage of low-income housing that adds to our homeless population. We really try to look beyond the straightforward ideas of, ‘You’re sick; let us treat you.’ There’s so much more to it when you talk about community health.”

Gordon is what outside counsel like to see in a chief legal counsel. “She has extensive knowledge of healthcare law, regulations, and case law,” says Britt Blackerby, partner at Harris, Creech, Ward & Blackerby. “She quickly sees all sides of an issue and is very analytical and passionate about patient safety.”

Through her team’s work at New Hanover, Gordon has found the sense of impact and meaning she was looking for. “I am working with people who are smart and passionate about what they do; they really care about the community and healthcare,” she says. “It’s something I picked up on from the moment I walked in the door.” AHL

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Harris, Creech, Ward and Blackerby, P.A. is a nationally recognized law firm located in historic New Bern, representing clients throughout the state of North Carolina. Founded in 1990, with a focus on representation of healthcare providers and other professionals, our primary goal is to put our clients’ needs first. That philosophy has guided us since, as the firm has grown and evolved. We exist to support and serve each and every client in an aggressive, thorough, and proactive manner, with a commitment to efficient expenditures of both time and resources.

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Harris, Creech, Ward and Blackerby, P.A. wishes to extend heartfelt congratulations to Lynn Gordon on her feature in American Healthcare Leader.

By Lior Phillips

Reaching Higher Together

CIO Deanna Wise credits her triumph as one of the most powerful women in technology to the support and ambition of her team

In recent years , Banner Health CIO Deanna Wise has been amassing some impressive recognition and awards. Most prominently, she was recently named one of 2019’s 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology and was inducted into ComputerWorld’s CIO Hall of Fame, thanks in large part to her innovative work with predictive analytics. But when discussing those achievements, Wise is quick to reflect that attention onto her talented team—a humble, team-first mentality that accentuates her deep technical talent to great effect. And more to the point, all of that recognition proves to Wise that she’s been contributing to the best possible care for as many people as possible.

While she didn’t know where her undergraduate program might lead, a counselor pointed out that Wise had been doing well in her programming classes. Once Wise realized that door could be open to her, she followed her heart and chose to specialize in the healthcare technology field. “Healthcare appealed to me because I knew it would be a great place to take my skills and make a real difference,” she says. “I could touch so many

lives.” To make that impact, Wise moved from college to a project management certification to make an impact on the industry right away.

That compassion that drove her interest in healthcare as a field has similarly influenced Wise’s leadership style. Early in her career, Wise swore that when she had her leadership opportunity, she would give credit where it was due and help raise people up. “In order to make a difference, I knew I needed to take chances and to bet on myself,” Wise says. “But you can’t step on others as you take those opportunities.” An early business mentor emphasized the need to surround yourself with people who make you your best self, something that Wise took to heart—and for the last twenty-six years, she maintains a special relationship with that mentor. “Funny enough, he’s my husband,” she says.

Wise’s first prominent role came at Indianapolis’s St. Vincent Hospital, where she eventually rose to the position of director of applications. There, she first learned to apply her strong Midwestern work ethic and to lead by example. But at the same time, Wise learned

the importance of communication and showcasing her achievements. “Growing up in the Midwest, I always thought that if you work hard, people will just see it— but it’s not true,” she says. “I realized that, to be a good leader, you have to do the marketing and talking about what your team is doing.” Part of becoming an expert in her field, she learned, was that inherently, other people might not even be aware of what you’re capable of. Learning how to tell the story of her work, then, became a way to further influence the health outcomes of the organization.

But to tell the story, Wise has to first ensure that the right team is there to build the results. That simply comes down to building relationships and creating circles of the best and brightest people around her, she explains. While some might be intimidated, Wise puts her ego aside. “You can’t be afraid of those people outshining you,” she says. “You have to remove the barriers from them and unite everyone on a common goal.” By doing that, not only can Wise lead toward the common good of the company, she can help each of those

individuals reach the heights that their talent deserves. That worldview, in turn, pays dividends when hurdles do arise. “When times are tough, you have to fall back on those relationships and that trust,” Wise says. “Being willing to be honest and have those conversations will improve things now and in the future.”

Jerry Chamberlain, vice president and alignment executive for Cerner Corporation, has admired Wise’s methodology. He says, “I’ve been impressed with Deanna’s approach, including joint on-site visits to our clinics and hospitals, to ensure that the technology and solutions we are deploying together are meeting the needs of the providers and the patients.”

The combination of her deep skill set, voluminous experience, and collaborative leadership style has led Wise to plenty of accolades, including most recently being named one of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology by the National Diversity and Leadership Conference. But even in that award, Wise sees an opportunity to highlight her team. “It really is recognition for the people I work with—and people that have worked with me in the past. These awards are amazing, but as a CIO, I can’t do anything on my own,” she says. “It really is about the team, so if I have any gift or talent that goes into this, it’s the ability to recognize talented people and create an environment where they want to work and where they want to thrive.”

Though she only started at Banner Health at the beginning of 2019, Wise has already made great strides in using that background to create a positive impact for the organization. As the largest private employer in the state of Arizona—comprising twenty-eight acute care and critical access facilities spread across six western states—Banner offers Wise the opportunity to affect outcomes for a vast number of patients. “The opportunity to influence health at a community-based level, including rural areas similar to the one where I grew up, is really important to me,” she says. “As we grow and get more advanced technology, being able to have that consumer-focused care, where a patient can decide when and where to go for care, we want to be the place where we can get you results and that next step of referral and care faster than anyone else in the industry.”

Thiru Thangarathinam, founder and CEO of MST Solutions, a close partner of Banner Health, has witnessed the value Wise has brought to Banner since her arrival. “Deanna is one of the most forward-thinking

Michael Paulson

Deanna Wise Chief Information Officer Banner Health

EXPERIENCE IS EVERYTHING.

leaders in healthcare today who understands the value of placing the patient and provider stakeholders at the center of Banner’s digital transformation,” he says. In fact, this focus shapes Banner’s entire IT strategy.

At a past career stop, Wise focused on building out a central predictive analytics process—and is now exploring the opportunity to create a business governance system that will ensure that unified approach based on predictive analytics for Banner. As all healthcare organizations need to focus on reducing costs and streamlining efficiencies to make it easier for clinicians, Wise sees her work as key to taking that next step. “The information technology department contributes to so many processes, and it’s really about how we make sure we’re doing the right opportunities for the business—and creating that governance model can make sure that we are focused on the right thing,” she says. “Because we have our own partner on a health plan, we are at a perfect place to really influence and help improve that population’s health. But to get that done, it comes down to creating a culture where the entire team can make

And that difference can be massive. Wise recently met with a team that is making remarkable progress toward finding new treatments to combat devastating diseases. “The organization’s research program is working in consortium internationally to figure out how we can prevent Alzheimer’s. We’re looking at an amazing breakthrough that we will probably all see within the next ten years,” she says. “I’m looking forward to that being the next chapter in my journey—being part of that group that helps prevent Alzheimer’s. Anything I can do to influence that mstsolutions.com | 855-350-6787

EXPERTISE SPOTLIGHT

Organizations have to make massive transformations in the way they approach digital if they are to survive the next era of healthcare. It’s no longer enough to deliver a positive patient-customer experience—that is now considered table stakes. Now, healthcare organizations have to be proactive and intentional not just in engaging patients but in orchestrating their care journeys while also improving health outcomes and driving real business results.

Though much of the focus has been placed solely on the patient experience, the fact of the matter is that experience should be approached holistically across the entire organization, taking into account every stakeholder: providers, prospective and current employees, vendors, and partners. This is one area in which the team at Banner has excelled— putting those stakeholders at the center of every digital initiative to truly transform the experiences they provide.

MST Solutions has been proud to partner with Banner to strategically architect and integrate advanced technology solutions to proactively engage stakeholders, intentionally orchestrate the experience, and automate core processes. This approach has positioned the organization to deliver better outcomes for all and gain a major strategic advantage in the process.

Relentlessly seeking breakthrough innovation that will shape health care of tomorrow.

Cerner provides leading-edge health information technology to connect people and systems worldwide. The solutions we offer support the clinical, financial and operational needs of organizations of every size.

Cerner proudly celebrates the career and achievements of Deanna Wise, a true pioneer and innovator in Health Care IT.

By KC Esper

Breaking the Barriers of Bronchitis

Heather Nigro and her team at CSA Medical Inc. are working to create a cure for chronic bronchitis that breathes life into COPD patients

Growing up, Heather Nigro was passionate about two things: nursing and boats. With a mother working as a critical care nurse, she aspired to follow in her footsteps, but unfortunately, the abundance of nursing jobs she hoped for out of high school didn’t exist. Swiftly, she transitioned her aspirations toward her second passion for the sea and attended the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, where she majored in marine safety. After graduating from the Academy, Nigro pushed full steam ahead to start a career and family.

Luckily, Nigro was able to revisit her passion for nursing as she worked in various hospital environments, inspiring her to earn her master’s degree in

health and safety and begin a twentyyear tenure working in the regulatory field. Throughout her career, Nigro has commended the Maritime Academy for equipping her with sharp problem-solving skills.

“There was a get-it-done attitude,” she explains. “There’s always a sense of urgency instilled in the cadets, and one learns to recognize the value of good problem-solving, coupled with rapid action to move things forward.”

Nigro’s eager attitude drove her initiative to take her regulatory affairs certification exam in 2002 and spearhead strategic global regulatory efforts for Class II and III medical devices. She was later nominated to the Aspire program at

Covidien—a highly competitive leadership training program that propelled her career to the next level.

At Covidien, Nigro earned the senior director title, overseeing regulatory affairs and strategy for minimally invasive therapies. She carried that position with her into the megamerged Medtronic-Covidien for about two years, after which she was offered her first vice president of regulatory affairs job. At the time, the hiring manager for that VP role was Todd Snell, NxStage Medical’s senior vice president of quality, regulatory, and clinical affairs. Snell recalls that Nigro

was selected over other strong candidates not only because of her technical regulatory prowess and management skills, but for her “can-do attitude,” which he knew would influence the business in positive ways.

When Nigro arrived at CSA Medical Inc. three years later as their senior vice president of regulatory, quality, and clinical affairs, she channeled her passion for progress toward a pulmonary therapy technology so cutting-edge that it received a breakthrough device designation by the US Food and Drug Administration.

Heather Nigro SVP, Regulatory, Quality, & Clinical Affairs CSA Medical Inc.

“Our company is addressing a huge, unmet clinical need,” Nigro says. “From a regulatory strategy perspective, there are many benefits to obtaining the breakthrough device designation, and, therefore, my first task at CSA Medical was to create a strong rationale for why this rejuvenating product that we’re clinically investigating supports this unmet need and qualifies for this designation.”

Currently, chronic bronchitis treatments are limited to pharmaceuticals that address the symptoms of the disease rather than offering an actual cure. She is hopeful that CSA’s product will change that. For a healthy person, goblet cells in the airways produce normal levels of mucus, which is then moved to the top of the airway by cilia and coughed out. In chronic bronchitis patients, however, these goblet cells overproduce mucus, which drowns the cilia and prevents them from working.

“It’s a vicious cycle,” Nigro explains. “Many medications treat the symptoms of chronic productive cough, but with our new device, we are able to go in and spray liquid nitrogen into the airways at a temperature of negative 196 degrees Celsius, which basically kills all of the damaged cells on the top layer but leaves the extracellular structure in place. So you’re essentially repaving the airway, allowing the goblet cells and cilia to regenerate and return to normal working levels.”

Early data is showing that within fourteen days, patients suffering from long-term COPD with chronic bronchitis can “reset” their airways and breathe new life into their lungs. As Nigro’s team works to get their product on the market as quickly as possible, Nigro is excited for the opportunity to change the way

Sue Bruce Photography

the medical space thinks about treating chronic bronchitis.

Cryotherapy can also be used to combat other complex diseases. Nigro says the truFreeze System is available commercially for the gastroenterology space for patients with Barrett’s esophagus and esophageal cancer and has witnessed its success in keeping patients cancer-free years after treatment.

Nigro says her professional shortterm goal is to continue running this chronic bronchitis study (SPRAY-CB study) until the therapy is completely integrated into Western medicine. Long-term, however, she sees herself continuing to serve as an advocate and mentor for other women in the medical device industry. In previous positions, Nigro was a member of various women’s leadership teams, which inspires her to continue these efforts of empowering women in the workplace. “The

proverbial ‘glass ceiling’ was broken a long time ago,” says Nigro. “If you have a particular career goal, go after it and don’t let anyone stop you.”

Devoting her life to the medical device space has allowed Nigro to feed into her passion of working with and for people. Though she is behind the scenes, she believes that witnessing the impact of the work she does is the most rewarding aspect of her career.

“The little things you do make the biggest difference in people’s lives,” Nigro says. “In my role, the patients will likely never know of me. But personally, I will know that I’ve worked hard to develop the most expeditious regulatory and clinical pathway to provide access to this therapy for patients with chronic bronchitis. It is this mission that inspires me.” AHL

John Compton of Agile Search Inc. contributed to this feature.

“The little things you do make the biggest difference in people’s lives.”

By KC Esper

The Healing Magic at Horizon Therapeutics

Chief Human Resources Officer Irina Konstantinovsky taps into Horizon’s culture to strengthen its HR practices and procedures

At Horizon, success isn’t quantified by money or products. Instead, success is determined by another, more righteous factor: the number of lives it saves. Horizon has grown exponentially over the past eleven years as it continuously refines and develops medicines aimed at treating rare and rheumatic conditions. While the company has grown to produce eleven groundbreaking medications with the help of more than one thousand employees, the company culture has never changed— it’s only become stronger.

Irina Konstantinovsky, Horizon’s executive vice president and chief human resources officer, witnessed the company’s caring, humanistic culture

immediately and integrates it into her work every day. “There’s a real magic at Horizon that is fueled by the vision that we go to incredible lengths to impact incredible lives,” she says. “We define success by a different set of numbers— by the number of lives we save and the number of lives we change.”

Konstantinovsky originally came to the United States from Argentina to earn a master’s degree in adult education. By happenstance, she discovered the doors that a simultaneous degree in human resource management opened for her. Konstantinovsky says that her two degrees worked together to help her sharpen her intercommunication skills in various situations, using these competencies to become a consultant for Towers Watson, where she worked for fifteen years. “My consulting experience taught me how to impact people in different ways,” she notes. “I learned how people grow and develop as well as how to manage change and adapt talent management solutions to drive business success.”

In her position at Horizon, Konstantinovsky drives the company’s mission as she embraces the industry’s dynamic nature and leads her team in achieving strategic objectives while also maintaining the company’s magic culture of purpose. Amid the fast-paced growth of Horizon, she seamlessly creates an environment that drives people to collaborate and make a positive impact on the patients they serve. “We invest in the workforce, the culture, and our people,” she explains. “We’re a fast-growing company with a strong sense of purpose. Everything we do has to foster the sense of agility and an entrepreneurial spirit that we have in the company today. To do so, we go above and beyond the industry’s best practices.”

Irina Konstantinovsky EVP and CHRO Horizon Therapeutics

Over the past year, Konstantinovsky has worked to restructure the HR department to further enforce the people-centric mentality that ripples throughout Horizon. She implemented new processes to strengthen communication and feedback between managers and their team members. Rather than recapping performance at the end of each year, managers are encouraged to provide feedback on a more frequent basis.

“We’re implementing the use of a monthly check-in, which offers an opportunity for the manager and the employee to connect on a regular basis and talk about what is going well and what needs improvement,” Konstantinovsky says. “We use this time to establish robust development plans for our employees. The team has also conducted extensive surveying of the workforce, where 95 percent of Horizon employees shared their opinions and made their voices heard. We then compare our results against top company benchmarks, where we scored significantly higher than other

top-quartile companies in every category. With this feedback, we determine which areas we will invest in to continue to create our fantastic work environment.”

Konstantinovsky’s team has also developed the company’s talent acquisition process, carefully catering its practices to center on inclusion of outside members who support Horizon’s diversity while concurrently developing established employees. At Horizon, inclusion and diversity efforts are of the highest caliber and constantly serve among the many catalysts that help sustain the company’s admirable culture. Konstantinovsky says that initiatives like these allows Horizon to grow and maintain the magic that makes the corporation special.

In addition to bolstering the company’s altruistic, cooperative energy inside the office, Horizon’s employees also make great efforts to strengthen personal connections with the community. Working with other leadership executives, Konstantinovsky advocates for every team member to take part in “make it personal”

days. These days are opportunities for employees to volunteer in the community or raise funds for a cause of their choosing, such as a marathon they’re running or a charity they hold dear.

Employees are even granted a “make it personal” account that holds allotted funds they can use to get reimbursed for wellness, educational programs, or donations to their charities of choice.

Konstantinovsky spends her “make it personal” days volunteering at her daughters’ school, where she puts together presentations on career development to help grow and empower teenage girls before they enter the workforce. Konstantinovsky believes that creating links between Horizon’s employees and the community helps illuminate the importance of the work that the company does.

“The passion we have for improving the lives of those living with challenging health conditions shapes everything we do, and it’s really the identity of who we are,” she says. “We know the impact we have on our patients, and we unite under the common goal of discovering the best solutions for them.” AHL

JMG Financial Group is an employee-owned wealth management firm founded in 1984. JMG’s expertise is in working with corporate executives, helping them navigate their complex benefit decisions and advising on strategies to mitigate personal income tax costs in coordination with the executive’s long-term financial goals.

Korn Ferry values our partnership with Irina and Horizon and our shared purpose of enabling people and organizations to exceed their potential. Irina has made a meaningful difference through her HR leadership on countless employees and a personal impact on those she has mentored and developed throughout her career.

executives who remain focused on their roles rather than on benefit decisions.

Anthony D. Cecchini, CFP ®, JD Chief Executive O cer

By Lori Fredrickson

No Denying the Patient Experience

Tracy Berry considers all aspects of healthcare management an opportunity to improve the lives of patients. And as the vice president and chief revenue officer at BJC HealthCare, she’s made it a priority for her work to affect patients in the most positive way possible, starting from when they arrive at the hospital for treatment. “We want to have a conversation with a patient so that we can say what a test is going to cost and understand in advance what their out-of-pocket expenses will be,” Berry explains. “By improving our prearrival process, we can provide better service to our patients.”

The chance to enhance the patient experience is what drew her to BJC in 2010, after having worked for nearly twenty years in revenue cycle and financial service roles at companies such as CSC Healthcare Group, Tenet Healthcare, and Centura Health. When BJC contacted her with the opportunity to come in as a leader to consolidate its then-decentralized revenue cycle, Berry was immediately in—and ready to move with her family, dog, and horse from Denver to St. Louis for the role. “It was an opportunity to build a department from the ground up for a health system with a wonderful reputation for world-class

At BJC, Tracy Berry has built a cohesive, centralized team for tackling denial management from the moment a patient arrives

care,” Berry says. “It seemed like a once-ina-lifetime experience.”

When she started in the position, BJC’s hospitals used four different revenue cycle systems. Because of Berry’s earlier experience with large-scale project management, particularly her experience implementing Meditech information systems for Centura, it was a task that she was ready to take on for BJC. Since starting the project, her team has implemented standard technology across its hospitals.

When that project was finalized in 2016, it brought Berry to her most recent initiative: improving denial management. “Like most health systems, we were not collecting the total expected payments from insurers,” Berry says. “While it’s a small percentage of our net revenue, that adds up to be a lot of money.” One of the biggest areas, she explains, was ensuring timely processing of all work, from securing an authorization to billing to timely appeals of denials.

In her early stages of researching how to address those issues, Berry’s biggest focus was on communication. “We first had to better understand what was driving the denials in order to focus on the root causes and engage stakeholders across BJC to make changes,” she explains. “Collaboration between the financial leaders at these individual hospitals and my team was key, especially in thinking through change management.”

As she worked to collect information and understand the root issues that could be addressed for financial improvement, Berry was able to pinpoint four major areas: creating more timely workflow processes, building a centralized clinical denials team, expanding prearrivals teams, and bringing in more help for areas where BJC didn’t have the resources or expertise. For the first, she

Tracy Berry VP and Chief Revenue Officer BJC HealthCare

began revisiting BJC’s revenue cycle technology to improve and streamline work queue management. These queues make sure that each account is being sequenced into the correct work list as soon as it arrives to take immediate action and get denials overturned.

“Tracy’s vast knowledge and experience of the hospital revenue cycle, more specifically the importance of charge strategy in a complex healthcare system, are unparalleled,” says Denise Buonopane, managing member and president of the Buonopane Group. “Her quick decision-making skills and strong leadership have contributed greatly to the success of our projects at BJC over the past seven years.”

When she also identified that BJC’s previous process of sending denials to clinical teams at individual hospitals was creating delays, she focused next on creating a specialized clinical denials team by hiring nurses and other specialists to handle those appeals directly. Then, she began working to expand the prearrivals team. “For most scheduled outpatient appointments, the team makes sure we have everything we need, including a physician order, insurance authorization, and verification of the patient’s insurance,” Berry says. “We strive to

provide an estimate so that the patient is aware of their out-of-pocket cost and we can discuss payment options.”

Last, she began looking into other areas where BJC needed to bring in more outside help. One of the key issues she noticed was in working small balances. While her team was rightly prioritizing the more expensive claims that came in, many of the small claims were getting lost in the shuffle. In addition to hiring a firm to help with those small balances, she also hired firms to help in other specialized areas, such as worker’s compensation and clinical appeals.

“We are proud to partner with Tracy to create a seamless process, influencing financial viability and acting as an extension of her team to ensure there are no gaps in the patient experience,” says Shannon Dauchot, CEO of the revenue cycle point solutions division at Parallon. “Every patient call, every transaction, and every decision we make on our end has a trickle-down impact to BJC HealthCare’s patients, and because Tracy instills that patient-focused mind-set in the forefront of everything she does, she without a doubt will continue to establish standards of excellence as a healthcare leader.”

“We first had to better understand what was driving the denials in order to focus on the root causes and engage stakeholders across BJC to make changes.”

Leadership noun [lē-dər-ship]

It’s not a skillset. It’s a mindset.

We are proud to support Tracy Berry, Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer of BJC HealthCare, as she consolidates Patient Access and HIM under her expanded leadership.

Tracy instills her trust in Parallon for outsourced revenue cycle solutions so she can focus on strategic growth initiatives like aligning front-end and back-end operations.

It is an honor to work alongside one of the brightest minds in healthcare. Together, anything is possible through the power of partnership.

YOUR REV CYCLE

In an evolving healthcare landscape, you need to find more revenue without burdening your team or adding costs. Look to Waystar’s industryleading, user-friendly technology to help you collect more across the entire revenue cycle.

Berry implemented most of the changes between mid-2017 through 2018. In its first year, the initiative had already had a major financial impact, with a $13 million improvement from the previous year. BJC is now on track to have an additional $15 million improvement in 2019 as the changes take hold.

And it’s had other benefits, some of which Berry is most personally proud of. “It’s a great patient benefit to understand in advance what their out-of-pocket expenses will be,” Berry points out. “If we know that we have the right information before a procedure is scheduled, the patient isn’t brought into the middle of a very confusing billing process.”

It’s also had a positive impact in showing the value of centralization. Berry has since turned her attention to other areas, such as creating revenue cycle liaison roles to improve the collaboration between the revenue cycle and hospital operations, and will next be working to further consolidate revenue cycle functions of BJC to bring patient access and health information management solutions under one umbrella, beginning later this year.

She takes personal pride in knowing that part of the initiative’s success has been the team that is running it. “By creating this cohesive team that works well together, we’ve also raised our level of employee engagement,” Berry says, noting that its scores in that area have been at some of their highest levels in this past year.

“I love making a difference,” she adds, “and I love being able to have an impact on its delivery of care by the work we do in the revenue cycle.” AHL

“It’s a great patient benefit to understand in advance what their out-of-pocket expenses will be. If we know that we have the right information before a procedure is scheduled, the patient isn’t brought into the middle of a very confusing billing process.”

The UONOPANEBGHealth Care Consultancy ROUP

The Buonopane Group, LLC (TBG) is a premier healthcare consulting firm that provides strategic consulting services to healthcare providers throughout the United States. We partner with large integrated healthcare systems, academic medical centers, tertiary hospitals, community hospitals and large physician groups to deliver uniquely tailored charge solutions for improved financial performance. We have generated significant results for our clients that are unmatched by any other firm in the industry.

TBG provides strategic consulting services to develop rational, defensible and transparent charge strategy. Working in partnership with our healthcare provider clients, we create solutions that result in a clean chargemaster and competitive pricing. As a result, TBG solutions help clients meet budgetary requirements and achieve the overall financial and strategic goals of the organization.

TBG was founded in 2004 by Denise Buonopane. Denise has over 35 years of healthcare industry experience. Denise, along with her team of charge strategy experts, are committed to providing exceptional client service and delivering transparent measurable results.

By Russ Klettke

The Advent of Medicine Delivery

Terry Webb, the head of pharmacy services at Adventist Health, leverages the organization’s rural locations to adopt smarter ways to manage Rx delivery, regardless of distance

Naturally, as is the case in all faith-based hospital systems, there are no religious requirements placed on physicians, other staff, or patients to work in or receive treatment in their hospitals. Illness and caregiving are nondenominational.

Yet Roseville, California–based Adventist Health, created in the culture of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, occupies a special place because adherents to the faith have very specific, highly beneficial health practices. Most followers abstain from tobacco and alcohol, subscribe to plant-based diets, engage in exercise at all ages, and are encouraged to live purposefully. They recognize the importance of spiritual and emotional well-being along with their physical health. In fact, Loma Linda, California, where about a third of

residents are Adventists, was named among the regions of the world where longevity is statistically significant by Dan Buettner, author of The Blue Zones. In Loma Linda, centenarians are common.

Centered on Community

Terry Webb, vice president of pharmacy services for Adventist Health’s twenty-one-hospital system, greatly respects and values the ethos of this faith-based organization, recognizing its successful application throughout the entire system as smart, caring, future-oriented healthcare that is truly focused on the patient.

“I’ve worked for other organizations that talk about whole health of the patient,” says Webb, who has also worked in several areas of pharmaceutical research.

Terry Webb Vice President of Pharmacy Services Adventist Health

Denise Herdemann

“But this organization really lives it. We make sure patients are kept well and whole.”

The four states that Adventist Health covers— California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii—reap the benefits of an organization closely grounded in its community not only through better access to medicine but also the convenience of a wide network of primary care and specialty clinics. An integrated delivery network (IDN), Adventist Health is not just a “federation of facilities” operating under a common banner; they are “ONE Adventist Health.” This type of alignment of different healthcare providers and locations enables a more seamless approach to patient disease management.

Another manifestation of Adventist Health’s whole-community approach stems from its number of facilities based in rural communities, including Paradise, California, the community nestled in the Sierra Nevada that was almost completely consumed in the 2018 Camp Fire wildfire. Understandably, the expansive Adventist Health Feather River Hospital located

there was closed by the fire. But as a result, clinics in Paradise, nearby Chico, and Corning now provide acute care for a two-county region in the aftermath. The recovery plan has even garnered national attention, inspiring the National Rural Health Association to study Paradise to see if it can be a model for telemedicine and other technologies to serve rural populations.

Bringing Care Closer

Webb is ahead of the game with telepharmacy, a subset of telemedicine. It makes medicine delivery and management accessible to rural patients and homebound or homeless citizen alike. “This is part of the faith-based nature of the organization,” he says. “In community health, we work to find and help those who can’t necessarily come to our doors.”

Telepharmacy can assume several forms with different definitions. In rural communities where maintaining a full pharmacy and staff pharmacists is too costly, for instance, a technician will work alone on-site

“In community health, we work to find and help those who can’t come to our doors.”

while a pharmacist elsewhere reviews patient records and prescriptions, providing counseling via telephone or video services. Another version, already in widespread use, applies to prescription validation for hospitalized patients, which can be done from a centralized location as the licensed pharmacist reviews the computerized physician order entry (CPOE) to determine if the medication is right for the patient. Many rural hospitals that do not constantly keep pharmacists on staff 24/7 already employ this.

Pharmacists working in these centralized locations have to be licensed in all states where they provide care. Webb shares that laws vary from state to state, which pharmacists have to know to pass licensing exams in each region. Overall, modernizing remote services might be the key to allowing rural hospitals to stay in business. “Telepharmacy allows local pharmacists to decouple from the computer and spend moree time at the patient bedside providing direct patient care,” Webb says. It can also mean making medication specialists, such as those who are skilled in pain management or psychiatry, available to more communities.

So far, telepharmacy has proven to work efficiently and effectively. Webb says the future goal is for 70 to 80 percent of medication order validations to be made off-site. Moreover, telemedicine and Telepharmacy will be important tools for all healthcare delivery, urban and rural. Webb is confident that artificial intelligence will factor into this practice as well. “It starts with data,” he says. “There are key patient variables and lagging indicators tied to their medical histories that can be analyzed using AI to drive better decisions through actionable data.” Additionally, care coordination via different types of partnerships with other, large healthcare systems will make them collaborators instead of competitors, “referring patients to each other where each of their strengths lie.”

With respect to bringing care to every community, these tools prove to be valuable resources to fight declining revenues and rising delivery costs that currently put many hospitals out of business. At Adventist Health, Webb’s faith in the hospital system and advanced care methods guide the organization in ensuring fair, equitable healthcare delivery, regardless of location. AHL

Since 2011, Kit Check has helped more than 400 hospitals decrease spending, maximize inventory, and free up staff to focus on clinical care. We’ve tracked over 50 million medications, saved thousands of FTE hours, and helped keep the focus where it should be— on patient care.

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