Patrick Runnels, MD, MBA, serves as Chief Medical Officer of Population Health at University Hospitals and Vice Chair of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
Patrick will serve on the panel " Emerging Population Health Models for Large Systems That Drive Real Change" 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 Patrick's session, click here.
Q: What are your top priorities for 2022?
Patrick Runnels: Over the past five years, our health system has worked hard to master delivering high-value care, from documenting risk to hitting quality metrics. Yet, despite being in the top 5% of performers in the nation for the Medicare Shared Savings Program, our goal is to reach even higher because our patients deserve the best. To truly get great outcomes for chronic disease, we are not only creating innovative solutions around how we approach the work, but we are helping our clinicians approach the work differently. We feel our industry needs to be more proactive at helping clinicians enact the needed changes in practice culture and identity. To that end, UH will be investing in robust inter-professional team training – among the most robust, evidence-based interventions for reducing physician burnout – which shifts away from workflows organized around physician needs and toward workflows in which inter-professional teams work in unison to meet patient needs. That investment includes deliberately protecting time within the work day for teams to work together. In addition, we plan to give these teams protected time and training to redesign workflows to meet patients’ needs. These two efforts will take time and resources, but we believe they are critical to delivering high-value care.
Q: What will the lasting legacy of COVID-19 be on the healthcare system?
PR: While the near overnight acceptance of virtual care and virtual work as standard operating procedure will, rightly, be seen as hugely consequential, the larger trend it represents is the transformation of the relationship that the workforce has with the work we do. COVID-19 accelerated and highlighted many of the ways in which the current workflows across the industry lead to diminishing clinician well-being. From internal struggles to adapt to changing technology to expanding documentation requirements and quality expectations to stressors related to the pandemic, it’s very unfortunate that nearly 15% of the healthcare industry workforce didn’t just leave their jobs, but left the field in 2021. To meet with clinicians around the country is to feel the despair they have about their own ability to make a difference.
No one intentionally designed the industry this way, it was just difficult to engage in the challenging work of transformation, whether because of regulatory change, margin pressure or the constant evolution of healthcare technology. Yet, this mood can be changed. The antidote to contempt and despair is hope. Hope is not mindless optimism, but the belief that you can make a difference despite it all – indeed, hope is the engine that drives innovation and transformation.
To inspire hope, our industry must be honest and allow people to acknowledge that things aren’t right. From there, our industry must invest in supporting teams to solve the problems in front of us – from a nationwide nursing staff shortage to the unfathomably insufficient infrastructure for managing mental illness and substance use disorders. These problems do not have easy fixes, but we also cannot afford to just wait them out. The lasting legacy, then, of COVID-19, is to shift our focus, not entirely away from new technology, but certainly more directly toward innovation in HOW we do the work we do. That legacy will take longer to register, but will also be the most impactful on our lives.
Q: What advice do you have for emerging healthcare leaders today?
PR: The pace of change is about to pick up. Whatever the path forward for funding high-value care looks like, nearly every corner of our healthcare systems must reinvent itself. And large-scale, transformational change is really, really hard. So, preparing yourself to be a transformational leader is of paramount importance.
When I started on my own leadership path, strategic thinking and financial competence were given the greatest weight. The conventional wisdom was that leaders were master tacticians that poured over Excel spreadsheets and concocted grand strategic plans with a small group of like-minded individuals. But here’s the thing – that worked mostly because the formula was pretty easy: find the highest gross margin services and invest heavily in those, while minimizing costs everywhere you could. And health systems were very financially successful so long as overall healthcare spending wasn’t too high.
And then it got too high. And the results we were getting for what we were spending weren’t very good. And it turns out that it’s really, really hard to pivot from an entrenched business model 40 years in the making by simply managing costs and developing grand strategic plans.
Great transformational leaders must be what Richard Boyatzis terms Resonant. Resonant leaders are able to build compelling visions of where we are going, while demonstrating that they understand those whom they lead (empathy). They work by inspiring, focusing on the positive, helping people connect to each other, and empowering those on the frontline to solve problems instead of trying to do and solve everything themselves. And that requires serious investment in building your own emotional IQ, which can be improved.