Nishant Anand, MD, FACEP, serves as Chief Medical Officer and Executive Vice President for BayCare Health System and President at Baycare Physician Partners.
On May 24th, Dr. Anand will serve on the panel "Which Leadership Models are Working and Which are Not? How Centralized or Decentralized is Leadership? Does the Leader or the System Make the Difference?" and on May 25th Dr. Anand will serve on the keynote panel "Leading with Transparency" 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. Anand'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.)
Nishant Anand: There are two headwinds we are currently facing: aging demographics and financial pressures due to skyrocketing health care costs. We all know that our country’s demographics are changing, as baby boomers age into Medicare and seniors are living longer. This will result in increased demands on the health care system. Patients will have a higher medical need, resulting in a greater need for hospitals. This will challenge hospitals as they will need to provide more intense services while obtaining lower reimbursement from the Medicare program. Tackling this through a proactive population health approach as well as reducing clinical variation will be key to success.
In addition, the workforce of the future will be stretched as pockets of health care move to outpatient in ambulatory services. There will be more jobs in health care, yet the less “lifestyle-friendly” roles will be more challenging to fill. This is where automation can help us. Tasks that are routine, repetitive tasks have the potential to be automated, freeing up capacity for people to take on other roles.
Q: What, if anything, should hospitals be doing now given economists' projections of a forthcoming economic downturn?
NA: It is difficult to predict when the next economic downturn will hit, however certain market forces and trends in health care are already underway. As a result, there are four things we should be doing now:
- Becoming more efficient with variable costs
- Reducing clinical variation
- Optimizing the appropriate site of service
- Focusing on delivering value-based care through population health initiatives
Q: What's one lesson you learned early in your career that has helped you lead in healthcare?
NA: When I was at Mayo, one of the things they taught us was that the needs of the patient come first. It can be easy to forget the patient’s perspective and impose our own as administrators and executives. But I think the patient’s perspective is the one that really matters. So I always try to put myself in the patient’s shoes and that helps guide decision making.
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?
NA: We are just starting to see the beginnings of these efforts take hold. It is hard to change the status quo, but these are the industries that are most ripe for disruption. I see the health care industry transforming itself with leaders and laggards, innovation coming from both within and outside the industry and disruption coming from outside the industry. Our opportunity is to disrupt our own model. The fragmented fee-for-service model isn’t working. We all call someone when we have questions about services, “Who’s the best doctor for this? Can I get in sooner?” Our patients deserve the highest level of care and shouldn’t have to have an “in” to get the best service. We are the people who have the opportunity to disrupt our industry and create a better clinical product. If we don’t do it, someone else will. And we have the opportunity to do it with the patient at the center of everything we do, rather than the dollar or the bottom line.