Matthew Sullivan, MD, serves as Associate Chief Medical Information Officer at Atrium Health.
On May 26th, Dr. Sullivan will serve on the panel "Biggest Healthcare Disruptors and Their Impact" 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 May 24-26, 2021 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Dr. Sullivan'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.)
Matthew Sullivan: I think that our largest challenge will be the ability for our hospitals to be adaptable to the needs of the country’s healthcare needs. That comes in many forms, but the immediate issue is the cost of healthcare and how we can partner with patients, vendors, pharmaceutical companies, and the government to deliver quality healthcare at a lower cost. There are many potential solutions and we must not be afraid to adopt them, manage the response, and modify our approach to realize this.
Q: What, if anything, should hospitals be doing now given economists' projections of a forthcoming economic downturn?
MS: There are suggestions that mortality actually improves with an economic downturn and that begs the question of “what are we spending money on”? There appears to be a relation of less socially destructive behavior (smoking and alcohol use) with harder economic times. To me, that suggests that a focus on prevention (alcohol, drugs, tobacco) and a focus on improving lives (e.g. social determinants of health, preventative care) may be critical to a hospital system’s ability to maintain solvency during an economic downturn. That requires that a hospital invests in both the community and its primary care physicians.
Q: How can hospitals reconcile the need to maintain inpatient volumes with the mission to keep people healthier and out of the hospital?
MS: This is a two-pronged question and I believe that there will need to be a shift in care to move patients more rapidly out of the hospital with heavy reliance on cost-effective home care, however, that is going to require a cultural shift for folks in the US who are often not engaged in the care of their elder family members. The second issue of keeping people healthy is a very complex issue but investment in tobacco cessation, healthy weight, and improved access to healthy food is paramount to long-term success. We’ve seen a decrease in Lung cancer as smoking rates have declined. It also wouldn’t be a shocker if type II diabetes and coronary disease went down if our obesity rates declined.
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?
MS: I think of this like influenza: we are seeing the drift, but there hasn’t been a huge shift that has substantially changed the environment. I suspect that we are close to achieving an “innovation breakthrough” in a couple of fields: smart-phone patient-physician-based EMR interaction and more broadly spread genome targeted therapies are two that come to mind.