While former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill is often credited with saying, “All politics is local,” for Damond Boatwright, CEO of Springfield, Ill.-based Hospital Sisters Health System, the saying matters four times as much when it comes to healthcare.
Workforce shortages, thin margins and limited capital are among the most common pressures facing rural hospitals and health systems. Speaking at Becker’s CEO + CFO Roundtable in Chicago Nov. 2, four rural health CEOs shared what is working for their organizations and how they’re meeting patient needs.
Editor’s note: Responses have been edited for clarity and length.
Marc Augsburger, BSN. President and CEO of Edgerton Hospital and Health Services (Edgerton, Wis.): One of the things that we found that’s going very, very well for us and larger hospitals around us is that we have an extremely vibrant swing-bed program. We can offload patients for longer-term rehab, but they’re still getting hospital-level care while they’re being rehabbed. We’re able to provide hospitalist oversight any and every day that they need on-site.
Damond Boatwright. President and CEO of Hospital Sisters Health System (Springfield, Ill.): For me, it is meeting people where they are, sort of in a non-judgmental way. They’re going to come in many different shapes and forms, and with various issues that they face. Many of those are physical, but there are also emotional and financial issues. It’s about meeting people where they are and providing simple compassion, care and respect, not just dealing with the physical condition that brought them into the hospital. The other one is fundamental — it’s access, access, access. That’s the reason why they come to begin with, and putting up barriers, impediments and long lengths of stay, in long duration, in any part of the hospital or the physician or the ambulatory clinic cycle, is a frustration for them because many of them can’t spend all their time in the moment with us.
Victoria Hanson, PhD. Regional President and CEO of Avera Sacred Heart (Sioux Falls, S.D.): What truly works — and works well — is when you invest in communities. You walk in the parades. You build the relationships. You do things, but more importantly, you have local leadership. You have a local personal touch in those communities, no matter how small. We have a rural clinic in Nebraska that’s open two days a week in a public library. Is that making the organization a high margin? No, but it’s incredibly important that it’s there.
Rick Smith. CEO of Troy Regional Medical Center (Troy, Ala.): One of the first things I did was evaluate our emergency department, and we had just a hodgepodge of family practice people who flew in for two or three shifts and flew out. We have changed that now. We have a stable group of board-certified emergency room physicians who are local, and the community sees that care now being delivered at a much higher standard. We’ve kind of carved our niche into a couple of different services. We’ve got swing-bed services as well; we have a geropsych unit and a medical addiction unit, and we’ve got one of only two in the state that has a board-certified addiction medicine physician.
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