Randy Oostra, DM, FACHE, serves as President and Chief Executive Officer at ProMedica.
On April 1st, Randy will speak at Becker's Hospital Review 10th Annual Meeting. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place April 1-4, 2019 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Randy's session, click here.
Question: What one strategic initiative will demand the most of your time and energy in 2019?
Randy Oostra: Throughout the remainder of the year, we expect to continue focusing on ProMedica’s strategic initiatives related to addressing the social determinants of health and healthy aging. While the two initiatives may appear to be separate, we definitely see overlap in the efforts and impact.
As ProMedica continues to integrate with HCR ManorCare, we will focus keenly on how the combined organization can transform health care for seniors, leveraging our experience in social determinants of health, clinical excellence, and other key areas to drive innovative approaches in healthy aging and care coordination. By doing so, we believe we will be able to better address many of the issues poised to strain our industry, including demographic shifts, projected workforce challenges, cost concerns, and affordability issues.
Also, we are expanding our research and data analytics efforts on the impact of our social determinants of health and healthy aging initiatives. We expect that the data gathered will help to inform future efforts and facilitate the development of transformative models of care.
Q: Tell us about the last meaningful interaction you had with a patient.
RO: Patients are at the heart of what we do at ProMedica, and we had a recent patient interaction that highlighted just how committed our caregivers are to ensuring a positive patient experience. After a patient’s stay at one of our hospitals, he wrote to us to explain the positive impact our caregivers had on his health outcome and overall experience. He took copious notes and was able to explain in detail why he felt the care he had received went above and beyond. He asked that we personally recognize the caregivers for their compassionate care. Before we even had a chance to respond, the patient had taken to social media to ask if we had connected with the caregivers yet. It was clear how important this was to him.
Always welcoming an opportunity to recognize outstanding work, members of our senior leadership team made a personal visit to the caregivers the patient had referenced with cookies in hand. We thanked them for the extra effort that led the patient to reach out to us and for fulfilling our mission every day. It was a rewarding patient interaction that led to a rewarding staff interaction. We are looking forward to regularly recognizing our caregivers who exceed expectations with similar personal visits in the future.
Q: Healthcare takes a lot of heat for not innovating quickly. What's your take on this?
RO: It’s no secret that innovation on the healthcare delivery front has been slow going. Many things can hinder innovation in health care, but leadership is one of the more significant factors. Traditionally, healthcare leaders have worked in large, highly structured organizations that tend to be risk adverse. As a result, our industry has been incredibly incremental in taking risks — even seemingly moderate Innovation risks. The efforts to minimize risk have been so extreme that they often have made it difficult for healthcare organizations to create a culture of innovation.
As the healthcare industry experiences major shifts like the rapidly increasing senior population, organizations will face even more pressure to find creative approaches to healthcare delivery. If we don’t innovate in meaningful ways, outside disrupters will be happy to do so. And, they are not bound by the risk aversion to which we’ve grown accustomed.
As healthcare leaders, we would serve ourselves well to identify areas of innovation within our organizations, nurture them and protect them. While ProMedica continues to integrate with HCR ManorCare, our leaders are focused on identifying opportunities to innovate. Even small pockets of innovation that are enabled to flourish have the potential to spread throughout organizations and lead to large-scale solutions that help to transform industries.
At ProMedica, our major innovation efforts at this time center on expanding social determinants of health screenings; keeping people out of the hospitals and delivering health care at home; and investing in communities as an anchor institution to drive opportunities and provide better access to housing, education, employment and other support services.