Three health system CEOs presented how their healthcare systems made steps to transform leadership and care at their organizations.
HealthLeaders recently hosted a CEO Ideas Exchange, where three health system CEOs shared how they worked to transform leadership and care at their organizations.
The event featured presentations from three HealthLeaders Exchange member CEOs, including Tori Bayless, CEO of Luminis Health; Dr. Imran Andrabi, president and CEO of ThedaCare; and Flo Spyrow, president and CEO of Northern Arizona Healthcare.
Below are highlights from their presentations and advice for executives on how to model these changes at their respective provider organizations.
Creating diverse leadership
Luminis Health, headquartered in Annapolis, Maryland, is a health system that came together through the merger of Anne Arundel Medical Center and Doctors Community Health in 2019. Following a comprehensive strategy, the organization has aimed to unify the system while also ensuring diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) remain part of its core values.
During her Ideas Exchange presentation, Luminis CEO Tori Bayless shared how the organization "transformed the governance and leadership of Luminis Health to be more diverse and representative of the communities" that it serves.
Bayless attributes the American Hospital Association 2015 equity pledge as the catalyst for Luminis’ initiative, mentioning that it “helped structure the work of the organization” in four parts: REAL (race, ethnicity, and language) data collection and analytics, leadership and governance, diversity, cultural competency training, and community partnerships.
Luminis also took three deliberate steps in creating a more diverse and equitable leadership and governance board to help drive the initiatives:
- Created a Board Health Equity and Anti-Racism Task Force (HEART Force), made up of trustees, executive staff, medical staff, and external community partners to guide the health organization's efforts.
- Started measuring and tracking diversity and made it one of the organization's "true north metrics.” DEI measurements have increased across the board between 2018 and 2021.
- Implemented the "Rooney rule," ensuring at least one person in the final slate of being considered for a position is a racial ethnic minority.
The health system also uses "Race forward," a racial equity impact assessment from the Center for Racial Justice Innovation as a lens, and was the first health system to start a "Coming to the Table" chapter to focus on monthly meetings to create "candid and safe dialogue" around racism.
Bayless also shared Luminis Health's "Vision 2030," a 10-year strategic plan to guide the organization into the future, which encompasses the DEI initiatives.
Bayless said, "through this framework, we'll ensure that diversity, equity, anti-racism, inclusion, and justice are paramount in our vision 2030,” adding that Luminis will become “a national model."
She also added, “By putting forward and implementing the recommendations of the Health Equity and Anti-Racism Task Force (HEART), it’s prominent in our Vision 2030, [and we want to] make sure that we are learning as much as we can, sharing ideas as much as we can, and prioritizing this work for our own organization, and in partnership with the community."
Growing adaptive leadership
ThedaCare, a community health system headquartered in Appleton, Wisconsin, has found ways to rethink leadership in the organization and streamline problem solving.
During his presentation, Dr. Imran Andrabi, president and CEO of the organization, shared how the health system's core strategy of adaptive leadership was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We've been on this journey over the last few years to become an adaptive organization, realizing that in healthcare, so much is changing so frequently, that we will not be able to predict all the different things that are going to happen in the future," Andrabi said. "The pandemic is a great example of what it put all of us through, in terms of being nimble and being able to pivot and be adaptive."
ThedaCare’s definition of an adaptive leader is "one who is able to continually create value … under varying conditions … while building a simple and elegant, high performance, high fulfillment organization," Andrabi said.
ThedaCare's adaptive leadership framework is made up numerous steps:
- Define what an adaptive leader is
- Looking into the idea of the domain of knowledge, and deconstructing how much a leader knows versus what they don't know
- Depth of thought and action: finding the root causes (the important) of problems instead of focusing on the symptoms (the urgent) to create streamlined problem solving
- Shifting leadership mindset from fixed to growth; changing thoughts from "I cannot fail…" to "I can only learn and grow…"
- Reframing problems and how to approach the work needed to solve them
The organization also created an adaptive leadership cohort, in which they "did a lot of didactic education from a mindset perspective in terms of how to think as an adaptive leader, and how to take some of these principles and make them [their] own," Andrabi said.
According to Andrabi, the organization then broke up the cohorts into smaller groups and had the leaders come together to pick the top four issues that they wanted to simplify and figure out ways to get to the root cause, thus creating a "significant impact across the entire organization with principles learnt during adaptive leadership."
Transforming care
Northern Arizona Healthcare (NAH) is a two-hospital health system headquartered in Flagstaff Arizona, which also serves over 700,000 people across the region through numerous specialty clinics, outpatient centers, cancer centers, and air medical transport.
During their presentation, president and CEO, Flo Spyrow, along with vice president of care transformation, Jacob Lansburg, shared how the organization transformed the way the health system delivers care.
The first step the health system took to become a fully-integrated organization was to eliminate the two hospital boards and create a system-wide board in its place.
The organization created a new framework for the organization to achieve "excellence in everything," and transform the healthcare environment. By creating a blended framework out of the "Balridge framework" and "Lean-Six Sigma methodology" to develop their "own unique approach to the pursuit of high reliability, differentiation, and amazing healthcare," Spyrow said.
The organization is focused on committing to obtain national ranking in the next few years and are focusing on leadership across the organization.
"It's all about leadership at NAH," Spyrow said. This includes creating specialized strategies for each leadership level for:
- The board of directors
- The health system's senior leadership
- The health system's physician leadership
Lansburg shared how NAH has created a multi-year strategy between 2020 and 2023 to create improvements for the health system around:
- Structure
- Overview and insight
- Stability
- Capability
- Robustness
By building a culture of continuous improvement in the organization, Lansburg said NAH is continuing to focus on continuous education and improvement to help leadership teams get to the root cause of problems and meet goals. The organization also created a "Care Transformation Team" to accelerate operation and improvement competency through the leadership teams.
Spyrow concluded the presentation explaining that the organization owes its staff and patients to make strides to offer high quality care, and to continue to grow and learn.
"We have to live in this world of possibilities and what we should be, versus what we are today," Spyrow said.
The HealthLeaders Exchange is an executive community for sharing ideas, solutions, and insights. Please join the community at our LinkedIn page.
To inquire about attending a HealthLeaders Exchange event, email us at exchange@healthleadersmedia.com or visit our website for more information.
Melanie Blackman is a contributing editor for strategy, marketing, and human resources at HealthLeaders, an HCPro brand.