Q&A With Cook County Health Chief Strategy Officer

Andrea Gibson, who previously served as CCH's interim chief business officer, shares insights about her new role of implementing and leading organizational growth and strategic initiatives.

Following Israel Rocha Jr.'s leadership appointment in 2020 as CEO of Cook County Health (CCH) in Chicago, Illinois, came the announcement of several new C-suite members to help lead the health system.

Among those appointments announced in August 2021 included Valarie Amos as the chief human resources officer, Shannon Andrews as the chief equity and inclusion officer, Curtis Haley as the chief revenue officer, and Andrea Gibson as the health system's chief strategy officer.

Gibson, who previously served as CCH's interim chief business officer, recently spoke with HealthLeaders about her new role as implementing and leading organizational growth and strategic initiatives for the health system, which includes safety net hospitals in Chicago and Cook County, Illinois, community health centers, the Cook County Department of Public Health, Cermak Correctional Health Services, and a Medicaid managed care plan.

Recently, Gibson spoke with HealthLeaders about her new role.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

HealthLeaders: What has been your experience getting settled into your new role as chief strategy officer and what have you been focusing on?

Andrea Gibson: I would caveat this by saying it started in earnest in January. I was covering finance for the past year and a half. We brought on a CFO this fall and so I've been spending a lot of my time the past five months transitioning finance.

Rocha established this position to allow us to have a resource who is thinking down the road in terms of what our strategy should be and what our business development should be. What I have been doing, in addition to transitioning out of finance, is thinking a little bit more about the role and structure of the office. It'll include a division of clinical affairs, business intelligence, and project management. There'll be an arm of business development and project and actual implementation. It was important to Israel that [the position] not just be about strategy, it is also about executing on those strategies.

HL: How have your previous roles at CCH prepared you for this new role?

Gibson: In my new role, I'm going bring a lot of my background in finance and budgeting and planning to it. I think the CFO and I will continue to work closely together to work through proposals that have a positive dual impact both on our patient population but also on our bottom line.

I oversaw all of the finance operations when we didn't have a CFO for the past year and a half, and that drew on my prior experience of being a budget director for the county and working for the city of Chicago for many years in budgets. But before that, I was the director of project management here at the health system. I think that the two roles, the two categories finance and project implementation, will really support me in the role of chief strategy officer.

I think it's important when you're developing strategies that you evaluate the impact on the bottom line. You also have to be able to think through how you are going to implement and how you operationalize strategy. I've had experience at the health system in both areas.

HL: What pain points do you hope to address this year as the chief strategy officer?

Gibson: We have a lot of lessons learned as we made our way through the pandemic. We've done a lot of great things in the past couple of years during this difficult time. We've started to build the infrastructure on how to do things and do things quickly that are necessary to help support our long-standing mission to serve the underserved population.

One of the things I want to do is bring a lot of the can-do spirit that we've had over the past couple of years and apply it to additional strategies to continue to grow and build the foundation for the future.

More concretely, I want to finish building out the office. That means hiring some individuals in the clinical affairs department. Also, we have established this year an investment fund, and the intention is that we have an internal process to make proposals. A lot of the projects that we are looking at for the future require some kind of startup funds before they can be financially sustainable, so [we're] developing a process around that.

Also this year, we have to do our strategic plan, as that's a requirement every three years. And so that's a tangible item that has to be done this year.

The other big thing is the county received a billion dollars in stimulus funds from the American rescue plan act from the spring, and we were awarded through that funding source a fair amount of dollars in the coming year and years, and so it will be also about managing that process, and making sure we are pursuing initiatives there that help us move the organization forward.

HL: How do you plan on working to grow the organization and implement new strategic initiatives this year?

Gibson: A key to that will be through the investment fund that we have. We put $10 million in the budget so we could initiate programs that service benefits to our patients and are financially sound.

Something that we started this past year that we want to continue is looking at service lines. We established this year a service line in cardiology, neurology, and oncology. What that means to us is investing resources in those areas and having more of an integrated clinical approach, in hopes to grow the volume. We're going to be working on implementing that and also evaluating how we do with that against our plan. We'll also be working up some additional proposals.

It'll probably be an annual review of what would make sense, so it aligns with our budget. We have to do a nuts-and-bolts evaluation of what service lines are needed, and what the financial equation is for each of those. It's bringing that kind of analytical mindset to what services we offer.