The Exec: Sentara CMO Shares Successful Strategies for Improving Care Access

Artificial intelligence tools, telehealth, and redesigning care models are among the effective approaches to boosting access, this CMO says.

The new CMO of Sentara Health has been involved in efforts such as redesigning care models to improve access to care.

Michael Hooper, MD, MSc, became senior vice president and CMO of Sentara Health in March. He retained his prior role as chief academic officer. His previous experience includes serving as CMO of Sentara Norfolk General Hospital.

Hooper is helping Sentara to redesign care models and use artificial intelligence tools, telehealth, advanced practice providers, nurses, social workers, and care managers to increase access to care.

"We have a process in place for care model redesign to look at our workflows and the way we interact with patients," Hooper says. "We want to match the needs of our patients with the most appropriate communication methodology and personnel to give them advice, make diagnoses, and come up with treatment plans."

Regarding advanced practice providers, nurses, social workers, and care managers, Sentara is actively looking at how the health system can maximize the use of those staff members in the ambulatory setting and hospital setting in more robust healthcare professional teams.

"This will allow us to take care of more patients and improve access to care while still maintaining or improving the quality of care that we provide," Hooper says.

Like many other healthcare organizations, Sentara has seen an explosion of telehealth capabilities since the coronavirus pandemic.

"We continue to use telehealth in hospital-based care, emergency medicine, and ambulatory care to increase access to care and make interactions with patients more convenient and efficient," Hooper says.

Embedding artificial intelligence tools in clinical workflows is helping Sentara to see more patients without straining the health system's workforce.

"Notable examples of AI tools we are using include a telenursing capability that we have inserted into many of our hospitals," Hooper says. "This use of AI is a way for us to take some of the routine nursing care that does not require hands-on effort and use a virtual nurse to do tasks such as medication reconciliation and patient education at discharge."

Stroke services, where timely care is essential for positive clinical outcomes, is another example of where AI is improving access to care at Sentara.

"When potential stroke patients come into our emergency rooms, they get rapid access to CT scans and stroke neurologists combined with an AI tool that reads their scan faster than a radiologist could," Hooper says.

Michael Hooper, MD, MSc, is senior vice president as well as chief medical and academic officer at Sentara Health. Photo courtesy of Sentara Health.

Effort to double number of residents

Hooper is involved in an initiative to double the number of residents at the health system.

"We are trying to work with our academic partners to increase the number of resident slots, so we can help address the physician shortage that everyone is experiencing across the country," Hooper says.

Sentara operates 12 hospitals, with 11 hospitals located in Virginia and one hospital in North Carolina. In Virginia, Sentara has residency partnerships with several academic institutions, including Virginia Health Sciences and Old Dominion University.

"We have partnered with medical schools for residency slot increases and are working on several specialty programs and primary care programs, which includes a neurology program that we started this year at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital," Hooper says. "We also have approval to start a cardiology fellowship program at that hospital."

Sentara is recruiting for an internal medicine program director to work toward creating an internal medicine program in the Williamsburg, Virginia, area. The health system is expanding the rural track primary care program at Sentara Albemarle Medical Center in North Carolina. At Sentara Northern Virginia Medical Center, the health system has approval to start an internal medicine residency program and hopes to start other residency programs.

Hooper and other executives at Sentara are working closely with their academic counterparts to boost the number of residents at the health system.

"We meet with officials at Virginia Health Sciences and Old Dominion University to make sure that we are aligned with our needs in terms of training facilities and training opportunities for their students," Hooper says.

Boosting preventive care

Hooper says Sentara is using population health tools to close preventive care gaps for patients, including embedded screening processes in the health system's electronic medical record that look for the care needs of patients automatically.

"Whether it is in the inpatient setting or ambulatory clinic setting, patients are automatically assessed for gaps in their population health needs such as colon cancer screening and A1C checks," Hooper says. "There are processes in place to alert physicians and other care team members about these gaps."

Once a care gap has been identified, Sentara has processes in place to intervene.

"We have resources in place such as care managers and automatic scheduling tools in the electronic medical record to make sure that once patients have an identified gap, we can set them up in the outpatient setting with the right services to close that gap," Hooper says. "We have tools and personnel in place to make sure gaps get closed at the population-health level."

Since Sentara has put care gap closure processes in place, the health system has seen significant improvement from a population health standpoint in areas such as hypertension screening, hypertension control, A1C checks, and colon cancer screening, according to Hooper.