Inside Children's Minnesota's Team Focused on Tracking Policy Change

As policy shifts reshape healthcare, CEO Emily Chapman explains how a dedicated team helps the health system stay proactive in its mission to advance child health.

During a time of constant policy uncertainty, children’s hospitals are under pressure to adapt quickly to changes and do so without diverting focus from patient care.

For Children’s Minnesota, the solution has been structural, with the nonprofit health system relying on a team dedicated solely to tracking, interpreting, and preparing for policy changes before they affect care delivery, new president and CEO Emily Chapman told HealthLeaders.

“What we've found is that it necessitates a team that is looking exclusively at that impact on our organization,” Chapman said. “We have so much that we need to get done day to day, and we have commitments to our community, and we have commitments to what we are building. That has to be the focus of the majority of our organization. They can't get distracted by what just came out that may be a threat to the work that they do.”

That’s why Children’s Minnesota established a work group designed specifically to monitor evolving state and federal policies, interpret their potential effects, and run scenarios for different outcomes.

“As you know, a lot of this is things that we really don't understand the impacts until some things play out,” she said. “So you have to be careful about when you do scenario planning for potential threats to either the way in which we currently fund our healthcare model or threats to the way in which we advance child health in our state or in our country.”

Chapman explained that the group is active and works not only to process new information from the federal government, but also to understand how it filters through the state as it manages its own budget and community health resources.

“That team pulls in experts from across our organization as needed to help interpret that, to understand the impact on our specific care that we deliver at Children's Minnesota, and helps us intentionally prepare for the changes that we will experience associated with that,” Chapman said.

By centralizing this work, she noted, the organization can respond to new information without distracting staff from their clinical and operational responsibilities.

“I've found that ensuring that you know who's attending to which one of those things at any given moment is critically important,” Chapman said. “You don't want your intensive care physician focused on what is the funding for pediatric specialized healthcare or how might our ability to deliver a certain service change? You want them focused on that child at the bedside.”

The balance between vigilance and focus is what makes the approach sustainable. “As a CEO, I find it's very important for me to think through what forum am I addressing? Where do I need their attention to be? And communicate specifically with that in mind,” Chapman said.

While the team’s work centers on monitoring and preparation, the stakes of its analysis are clear. Chapman expressed deep concern about the potential for federal and state policy shifts to weaken healthcare funding and family supports.

“Most concerning to me is the pulling back of funding for our various services that support health,” she said. “Obviously a lot of talk about Medicaid, Medicaid eligibility, the dollars that are available at the federal level and how that impacts our various states and translates into local cuts.”

Cuts to programs like early childhood initiatives and supplemental nutrition programs, Chapman added, also have a cumulative effect on families’ well-being. “It's really the sum total of these that makes us particularly uneasy about the health of the next generation,” she said.

For Chapman, having a dedicated team in place ensures Children’s Minnesota can see those risks coming and act before they hit the bedside. Still, she stresses that advocacy is needed.

“These are hard things for us to hold simply as a handful of caregivers,” she said. “We need the support of our policies, our legislators, our community leaders to help us do that.”