When Joon Lee, MD, became CEO of Atlanta-based Emory Healthcare two years ago, the system was in financial distress. It had a negative operating margin, legacy leadership structure and operating model that was losing money. The system needed a turnaround quickly.
Dr. Lee was up for the challenge.
“Like many healthcare organizations, the concentration on workforce has been critically important,” he said during an interview for the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast.” “When we started in ’23, we, like other major health systems, faced severe workforce shortages throughout the spectrum of healthcare; everything from nurses to tech to frontline workers to environmental service. We took that head on, and we’ve aggressively pursued real investment in our workforce, including everything from pay scale to how we recruit the workforce and how we retain them.”
Emory launched new team engagement and culture programs, and focused on ways to reduce the stress and cognitive burden on clinical and administrative staff. But they also made real investments. The health system spent $150 million to increase the salaries of nurses, advanced practice providers, environmental service, guest services and other frontline workers.
“That’s critically important for us to deliver care, and along with how we redesigned the benefits as well as how we redesigned talent acquisition, has paid dividends,” said Dr. Lee. “I’m really proud to report that we’re actually at pre-pandemic levels and below pre-pandemic levels in terms of turnover for the clinical and nonclinical workforce.”
Emory has “aggressively” targeted integration and systemness with its cultural transformation. Dr. Lee said he wanted to go from a “holding system” of 11 hospitals and 2,000 physicians to an integrated singular operating system through cultural and structural changes.
“It has many different components, as you might imagine. For example, we created a command center that is centralized and manages all of the bed capacity at once,” he said. “Same is true for the contract center, access center and other components in the background, including revenue cycle, financial analytics and supply chains. But all these things coming together has really allowed us to function much more efficiently as a healthcare system, and that’s allowed financial performance to really improve over the last two years. We’ve had double-digit growth within the system.”
The results speak for themselves:
- Revenue grew from $5.8 billion to $7.7 billion
- Negative operating margin to expected 6% operating margin this year
Emory was able to ignite growth without acquiring new hospitals or large physician practices.
“That’s really the culmination and result of those other changes: investing in the workforce, changing the culture so we’re functioning more as a coordinated delivery system than individual hospitals or individual offices that share a brand name,” he said.
The health system also digitally transformed. Dr. Lee realized the importance of leveraging data and analytics to improve operational efficiency. The “systemness” he desired wouldn’t be possible without the right actionable data to bring all disparate facilities together.
“We’re very much focused on becoming an analytics-driven organization, and that requires a few factors. I would argue that it requires three important ones,” said Dr. Lee. “One is what we call the single source of truth; if we don’t ultimately have this single set of data and analytics that the whole team is looking at, taking action by, then we’re not going to get to the right place.”
Everyone should have the same dashboard and information for coordinated efforts within the system. But just that “single source of truth” isn’t enough; the information also has to be accessible to a large portion of the organization so everyone can take advantage of it. That accessibility is the second component of Emory’s success; the third is having a culture of data consumption.
“That has to start from the top,” said Dr. Lee. “That has to start from my position, and my team members have to know I am focused on making decisions based on real data and analytics, and that my expectation of them is to do the same. AS that propagates down through the organization, we become very much a data-driven organization, and I’m a firm believer that it’s the data-driven organizations who are going to create success and turn out to be the winners in healthcare and elsewhere.”
