Dr. Hanks recently joined the Becker’s Healthcare Podcast to discuss his roles as a CEO and practicing emergency physician, and how his dual work boosts employee morale, strengthens his leadership and employee relationships, and provides him firsthand knowledge of the challenges frontline healthcare workers face on a daily basis.
Editor’s note: Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: How do you balance the responsibilities of being both president and CEO with working regular shifts in the emergency department?
Dr. Steven Hanks: It’s been an interesting journey for me, because although I’ve been an executive for many years, I never wanted to lose my clinical skills or disconnect from the clinical environment for a number of reasons. Some of it’s selfish. I like being a doctor. That’s what I went to medical school for, and I still greatly enjoy it.
What I’ve come to learn over the years is that there are enormous other benefits to a leader of a healthcare organization actually getting into the trenches with the troops on the front line, because I’ve often said that I learned more about the way the various pieces of my organizations work from the small amount of time I spend in the clinical setting than all the other time I spend in meetings, working with my board on rounds and all these other things. There have been a lot of side benefits.
Another big benefit is it really speaks to the morale of our colleagues when they see the CEO essentially in the emergency department or on the floors as a hospitalist, pitching in and helping, and they know that I experience what they experience. I live with the same frustrations they have with the medical record. I see the same issues with flow and the timeliness of turnaround of laboratory studies, or X-ray studies, or whatever it might be. I have to deal with the fact that we may not be able to accept a transfer, or we may have difficulty effectuating a transfer. They all realize I’m walking a mile in their shoes. It does have a very uplifting effect, I believe, on the morale of our colleagues.
Q: What inspired you to take on holiday shifts, allowing doctors to spend time with their families?
SH: We have 29 separate entities I’m responsible for. It’s a very large organization. My day job really doesn’t afford me time to do clinical work during typical work hours. I take time on a Friday evening, on a weekend or on a holiday. The ER physicians or the hospitalists, when I’ve done this with the hospitalist service in the past, they really like that, because it relieves one of them of having to be on a weekend or a holiday. For me, it works out because my kids are all grown and I’m available. It also adds to that impact on the staff when they see me working on a holiday, of all things. A lot of physicians who are engaged in medical management positions or executive positions who still practice often will practice during the usual daytime hours, and that’s not what I do.
Q: How does your hands-on experience in the emergency department inform your leadership decisions for St. Joseph’s Health and St. Peter’s Health Partners?
SH: We have multiple hospitals, and I go between a couple of them. I’m able to contrast and compare, and it’s always remarkable how similar some of the issues are, and yet how different the approaches, responses and solutions can be even within the same organization.
That’s been one insight that I’ve been able to bring, the transitioning of ideas from one entity to another. We always talk about sharing of best practices, it’s almost become overused, and yet, when you look at how many organizations really are able to effectively do that, it’s a small number.
It’s made me a lot more approachable in the eyes of the staff. The staff are much more willing to reach out to me directly, or to stop me in the hallway, or if I see staff out in the community somewhere, there’s a sense of approachability that I think is bred from the fact that I’m spending that time. I have that additional opportunity for communication and understanding what the staff challenges are, what the issues are, and it’s been enormously helpful.
We’ve been having problems in many emergency departments with the flow of patients because of nursing shortages, really across the entirety of upstate New York where we’re located. We still have beds that are offline post-pandemic. Patients who are in need of hospital services are piling up in the emergency departments, and that leaves no room for the next emergency patient to come in. The waiting rooms get full, the wait times get long. It’s not an ideal situation from the perspective of the experience of the patient, but it’s also an unsafe condition. I’ve been able to see that and glean some insights that I’ve been able to bring back to my hospital presidents to say, “Hey, could you try this? Could you try that?” They’re very responsive about trying out various suggestions.
Q: What message do you hope to send to your staff by maintaining a clinical role alongside your executive duties?
SH: I hope they see that we’re all in it together and that what we’re really about is providing care; care for patients, their families, care for our community. If not us, who? The hospital business today and the health system business is a very difficult business, especially on the non-profit side, and particularly in parts of the country like ours, where there’s not a lot of population growth, populations aging, and we have increasingly more and more government-insured patients, which puts incredible financial pressures on our healthcare organizations.
We have to operate very lean. The fact that I’m in there in the trenches, I experienced that myself. Knowing that really helps them to believe that I understand, that I feel their pain.
During the COVID pandemic, we got to a point where we had so many doctors out with COVID, and we had so many patients that we were literally running out of people to care for the patients. I came off of my regular duties, and I became a full-time COVID physician. I took care of COVID wards for a period of time during the pandemic. I even volunteered after it settled down in New York to go to another Trinity Hospital in Idaho to help them out when they were desperate as well. It creates an esprit de corps that it’s impossible to bottle without actually living it.
