Peter Banko, president and CEO of Baystate Health is all in on AI transformation. He’s excited about what new technology can bring to the organization across all departments and sees real opportunity for needle-moving investments across the platform. But that wasn’t always the case.
Six to nine months ago, he would have told a very different story.
The president and CEO of Springfield, Mass.-based Baystate Health — the community safety net academic medical center serving Western Massachusetts — had been wrestling with where his organization stood on the technology curve. He thought their technology was too far behind to catch up. How could they incorporate AI without other significant upgrades?
Then two executives and five physicians met with an IT partner and changed his mind entirely.
“We’re doubling down on AI,” Mr. Banko said. “Our semantic layer is being put in now, and so we view AI as a big opportunity. I would tell you six to nine months ago, I was not thinking down that path from a technology end, but we’re really going to implement new technology tools and AI across our entire platform from clinical all the way to finance and supply chain and HR.”
What surprised Mr. Banko wasn’t just the technology. It was who drove the conviction.
“I was a little skeptical, and I kept questioning them. They convinced me that this was the path to go and leapfrog,” he said. “I found the physicians and clinical leaders were more receptive than business leaders, which convinced me we’re right down the right path.”
The experience reshaped how Mr. Banko thinks about decision-making itself. He described the shift as one that will touch every corner of the organization — workforce composition, operating rhythms, how leaders make decisions day to day.
“It’s going to change our workforce. It’s going to change how we do work. It’s going to change how we make decisions,” Mr. Banko said. “We’re ready for that path, but it’s going to take a lot of change in transition management to get there.”
That readiness for change is now the central leadership challenge in healthcare, and not just at Baystate. Mr. Banko pointed to a Gallup survey finding that one in five American workers describe their work environment as miserable, and a recent Becker’s-published B.E. Smith survey in which two-thirds of executives said they were likely to be looking for a new job within 12 months.
“People are looking for strong leadership, strong teams, and recognition and support,” he said. “We need to be more decisive with our workforce — supporting teams, nurturing and developing teams, spending time with them, communicating and helping them with change.”
To steady his own organization against broader uncertainty — federal policy shifts, a more than 70% government payer mix, evolving care models — Mr. Banko developed five anchoring convictions predicting what the future would hold. The exercise drew on input from board members, community stakeholders, and leadership, and has given the organization something concrete to orient around even as external pressures multiply.
“It’s just helped our board and leadership and physicians and our team members grab on to something,” Mr. Banko said. “We know the five things we think are going to happen. If we just charge towards those directions, we’ll be fine.”
In the workforce, the horizon looks more complex. Mr. Banko sees AI displacing significant categories of work, roles in finance, law, and administrative functions among them, and is moving proactively to retool. Baystate operates in a region rich with colleges and universities, a geographic asset the system is deliberately leveraging.
“We’re working with them to create programs that don’t exist anymore — AI or certain software-based certifications — so that we can retool our workforce of the future,” he said. “Because there’s so many colleges, we’re growing our own. We’re expanding our med school class, expanding our residency programs, expanding partnerships with UMass Amherst and other local universities just to train the right people that we need. Because unless we grow our own, we don’t think there’s going to be the workforce to do what we need to do.”
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