The Way Forward: Q&A with Cook County Health CEO

Israel Rocha Jr. shares the biggest challenges the health system is facing and how the Change Institute is addressing them.

Israel Rocha Jr. is eager to move healthcare forward using innovation and ideas created during the pandemic.

He hit the ground running when he joined Cook County Health in October 2020 to serve as the CEO of the Chicago -based health system during the pandemic, and he has a strong focus on making healthcare more equitable through continuous innovation.

Rocha will join more than a dozen healthcare executives at The Way Forward, a HealthLeaders leadership summit scheduled this week at the Loews Atlanta Hotel in Georgia. He will join other CEOs and CFOs in discussing strategies to move healthcare forward, and will share information about lessons learned at the Cook County Health Change Institute.

Rocha recently spoke with HealthLeaders about pandemic learnings, current challenges, and what he looks forward to discussing during the leadership summit.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

HealthLeaders: What was that experience like joining the health system during the pandemic?

Israel Rocha Jr.: Exhilarating. It was definitely an opportunity to get to meet the team right away, to get in the middle of all the action to be able to make a difference. Most importantly, one of the things that I will probably remember as a highlight of my career was to start the mass vaccination program across Cook County, where we were able to give a million doses directly and then coordinate another 1.5 million doses at our public health department. Being able to make that kind of difference right at the front end was incredibly rewarding, and it hsd highlighted the kind of difference you can make in my current role.

HL: What are some of the biggest learnings that you've taken away from the pandemic?

Rocha: What we have been able to take away from the pandemic is how we can bring medicine to people in need and to do it in new ways. One of the most amazing things that we can do is to rethink the way that we deliver healthcare and take that lesson into the future.

We recently created a new institute at Cook County Health called The Change Institute, and what it's geared towards doing is taking the lessons we learned from COVID and applying them to the four most pressing issues that we see are the leading causes of premature mortality and morbidity: cardiology, neurovascular and cerebral vascular disease, oncology, and endocrinology. How we can take those lessons learned about bringing vaccines and medicine to people in new ways is something we hope to help change healthcare. We had a lot of innovations that were put in place during COVID and we want to be able to take that kind of energy into the future.

HL: What are your biggest pain points and how are you addressing them?

Rocha: We join the rest of the nation in saying that staffing is a pain point. We are working with our HR team to restructure the way that we recruit, retain our staff, and examine how we have our roles structured and what we can do to be a more competitive employer and be a workplace of choice. We are working hard to offer sign-on bonuses and recruitment packages, and being able to talk to our employees about how we can really engage with them and design a better system.

HL: You'll be joining other healthcare executives for The Way Forward. What are you looking forward to learning and sharing during the event?

Rocha: It's helpful to learn from everybody's work. I'm excited to hear about everybody's innovations because, as we talked about, during COVID there were a lot of challenges but there was a lot of innovation. It's always a wonderful thing to learn from each other, to hear everybody's experiences, and bring back those ideas to put them in place in our health system.

[I'm interested to hear about] the challenges we have: workforce, being able to make sure that our patients are engaged in care, how we can be more inventive to get more people in the door, how we are able to spread our access to make sure that everyone is being seen, and how we're doing that to build capacity and to make healthcare more equitable for everyone. We're really interested to hear that so that we can continue our mission here.