Becker's 11th Annual Meeting: 4 Questions with Kathleen Jordan, Chief Medical Officer at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital

Kathleen Jordan, MD, serves as Chief Medical Officer at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital. 

On April 6th, Dr. Jordan will serve on the panel "Homeless and Mental Health – Solutions for a Growing Population" at Becker's Hospital Review 11th 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 on April 6-9, 2020 in Chicago.

To learn more about the conference and Dr. Jordan's session, click here.

Question: What, from your perspective, is the biggest challenge about the future of work for hospitals, and what can they do about it? (i.e. automation, desire for more flexibility, clinician shortages, etc.)

Kathleen Jordan: There are looming challenges in the affordability and access to care for increasing swaths of our populations. There has been a growing divergence into tiers of care that put health care providers and institutions in ethical and financial dilemmas, push some providers into schedules that promote burn out, shifts the burden of care to Hospitals, and, most importantly, leave some of our community without the care they need.

Q: How can hospitals reconcile the need to maintain inpatient volumes with the mission to keep people healthier and out of the hospital?

KJ: I would be delighted to close our Hospital if our community were so healthy as to no longer need it. We should be so lucky! Our mission is to be there for our communities, which traditionally has been Hospital-based, but we need to keep up with community needs which may be more ambulatory, home-based or even mobile services. Healthcare is not limited to the inside of hospital walls. (A few years ago we closed our AIDS dementia unit at a Dignity Hospital in San Francisco due to diminishing community need since it’s opening in the 1980s as a response to the AIDS health crisis. The “closing” was a joyous occasion and celebrated the successful treatment of HIV that we make happen via our outpatient settings!)

Q: What do you see as the most exciting opportunity in healthcare right now?

KJ: Telemedicine offers so much opportunity, recognizing the broader definition to be any health-related services via telecommunication. (It’s not just a doctor:patient face to face although that is the classic face of it), it can be emails, biometric devices and monitoring, reminders, education of patients, peer to peer support and consultation, remote diagnostic tools, amongst a whole host of other things.

Q: Healthcare has had calls for disruption, innovation and transformation for years now. Do you feel we are seeing that change? Why or why not?

KJ: We are seeing lot of exciting innovation and disruption. Certainly some socioeconomic groups are exploring apps, online tools while concierge practices and telemedicine have changed site of services and model of care but we struggle with payer coverage keeping up, which often slows or, at worst case, prohibits access to innovation for significant portions of the population.

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