Cliff Megerian, MD, FACS, serves as Chief Executive Officer at University Hospitals Health System.
Cliff will serve on the keynote panel "What Does the Successful System of the Future Look Like?" at Becker's Hospital Review 12th 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 in Chicago from April 25-28, 2022.
To learn more about the conference and Cliff's session, click here.
Q: What are your top priorities for 2022?
Cliff Megerian: Our team comprised of more than 30,000 caregivers did a phenomenal job taking care of our patients and community these past two years, while also executing many aspects of our strategic plan. This year we will enhance our efforts around implementation of our strategic plan that’s designed to transform the industry standard of care while also establishing UH as the most trusted health care partner in Northeast Ohio. A key aspect of this includes ensuring our culture serves as a competitive advantage, where our caregivers want to stay and others are enticed to join. At UH we have invested a great deal of time in refreshing our core values – Service Excellence, Integrity, Compassion, Belonging and Trust – to guarantee we focus as many resources on taking care of our team as we do in caring for our patients. Additional key aspects of our strategic plan accentuate our Patient First and Exceptional Care mantras –transformative approaches that prioritize expanding access to high quality care and continuously improving our care delivery outcomes, total experience and cost of care. As an industry, we must pledge to do our part to change the narrative from being ‘providers of health care’ to being ‘promoters of health equity’.
Q: What will the lasting legacy of COVID-19 be on the healthcare system?
CM: While it’s clear the pandemic wreaked havoc on millions of lives, it has also taught our industry many things. Importantly, we have dramatically improved ‘speed to market’. As an industry, we have removed barriers that caused a protracted process in launching clinical trials or getting new therapies to the bedside. For UH specifically, we significantly streamlined our own processes that enabled us to be one of the first in the country to launch the Remdesivir therapeutic and the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials as well as the more than 260 other COVID-19-related clinical trials and research studies we commenced during the pandemic. We have also become significantly more accepting of Telehealth – both as providers and as patients – recognizing the convenience it offers and the access it expands. We have also learned to be more collaborative. For example, while traditionally very competitive, UH and Cleveland Clinic made the decision to collaborate on efforts to improve the well-being of the communities we serve. Our ‘Stronger Together’ pledge, fortified through our collective pandemic response, emphasizes that while we will continue to compete, we can create powerful scale to help us better address larger public health challenges facing our communities. UH also formed relationships with non-traditional collaborators (i.e. NASA) to co-create solutions for PPE sterilization. Additionally, I think we’ve applied some of the concepts deployed in a ‘just in time’ production environment to the healthcare landscape. For example, we’ve learned how to quickly pivot and scale up and scale down rapidly in our staffing, operational and incident command models to address the various waves of COVID-19 surges we’ve encountered. That kind of agility will serve us well in addressing future crises or evolving industry paradigms.
Q: What advice do you have for emerging healthcare leaders today?
CM: The pandemic has brought to light four leadership opportunities we, as health care professionals, can embrace to truly make a difference in people’s lives as we move forward.
1). Consumerism is here to stay and what consumers want today can change instantly tomorrow. For example, pre-pandemic, we were focused on improving access to care by increasing the number of physical locations where our patients could seek care. However, in a COVID-19 world that “consumer need” immediately shifted to a desire for virtual care. As it turned out, the virtual solution proved to be extremely convenient for patients -- reducing travel time, wait time, and scheduling conflicts as well as reducing their fear about the potential for catching COVID-19 if they left their home. Virtual care also proved beneficial for our clinicians – decreasing no-show rates and in some cases enabling a glimpse into the patient’s home life which is often a component of their total health picture.
2). Make a personal commitment for continued self-education. With the pandemic, information about COVID-19 changed rapidly. It required all of us to educate ourselves on the latest developments throughout the day. But it also elevated those on our team who were the most studied in infectious disease to serve as experts in the community, informing the public, our stakeholders and local governments on how to stay safe. Not only is continuous self-education your duty to those you serve in health care, but it will help you differentiate yourself from others in your chosen field. I also encourage you to look beyond your technical scope for learning opportunities. Consider supplementing your degreed learning with courses in leadership, perhaps even studying historical leaders who overcame great challenges.
3). Honesty, Transparency and Accuracy will always win hearts and minds. Health care is a high stakes business. People put their lives in our hands and we have to do everything in our power to earn and keep that trust. The fact of the matter is, sometimes you will not have all the answers. I know there have been many times when I’ve been completely flummoxed. But the worst thing you can do is fake it. During the pandemic, we didn’t have all the answers for our employees or our patients. But we promised to tell them what we knew when we knew it. We communicated often, even when we had no new information to share, just to let them know we understood their concern and we would provide more information once we had it. As health care professionals, it is vitally important to always be perceived as honest, transparent and accurate with all stakeholders – from patients and families to coworkers to vendors to volunteers. As Benjamin Franklin said, “it takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.” Make sure to treat people the way you want to be treated.
4). The power to heal is one half science and one half compassion. There will be days when you are tested to extreme levels and so it’s important to recognize the challenge, take a breath, and remember why you chose to get into health care to begin with because your role may change instantaneously. We witnessed this firsthand during the pandemic when our patients were not allowed to have friends or family members visit while they were in our hospitals. Instantly, many of our caregivers took on the role of family member – from comforting mothers who were giving birth to holding patients hands as they took their last breath. Our most sought after caregivers were those who helped eliminate pain, fear and loneliness by excelling in the intangible emotional art of science.