Adolphe Edward, DHA, FACHE, CHIE, MS, MBA, MSHA, serves as Chief Executive Officer at El Centro Regional Medical Center, University of California San Diego Health System.
Adolphe will be serving on the panel "The Leadership Piepline: Best Ideas to Restock and Win in the Next 18 Months" 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 Adolphe's session, click here.
Question: What are your top priorities for 2022?
Adolphe Edward: Our ECRMC priorities will always remain; a) caring for our communities; b) delivering outstanding quality health care and lastly taking care of our most important assets, our staff. Financially we need to be very concerned about how much of what we do matter to the community and organize exist from other service lines that may not be needed. Basically, being resource Stewart, and always doing it within the limitations of our budgets to benefit as many patients as we can.
Q: What technologies and innovations are you most excited about in healthcare right now?
AE: We are concentrating our efforts in rolling out a new EMR/CERNER and getting ride of old legacy systems that have kept us from doing more. During COVID 19 we proved that we maybe small as we expanded to 245 beds but our staff resolve and resilient in knowing that our community needed us drove us to find ways to make things better for our patients. We, like many, did not anticipate COVID 19 pandemic, but we were prepared for disruption as we anticipated new futures and found help from our mothership system to provide things like ICU/ECMO services when needed, Vascular/IR, and other services. It was great that I also had 22.5 years in the US Air Force and had deployed to Baghdad or I would not have been fully prepare to lead my team in a pandemic environment.
Q: What will the lasting legacy of COVID-19 be on the healthcare system?
AE: Being able to remain flexible is key to our future. Strategy and preparation as well as caring for the care givers will all come to help us prepare for that future we speak about now. We must be able to redeploy our workforce into new roles depending on the need of our patients. Nurses and allied health professions are experts now in doing this after the pandemic practice. So, Train, Train and train more and prepare for what is next will also be a legacy of the pandemic. At the end of the day “Going back to basics” will be the true lesson of all times that we have found to be reflective of our system. We should not be wondering what is “THE NEW NORM” we should be leading and guiding our teams to prepare for doing what we knew to do to ensure proper patient and community care happens. Removing internal silos and asking Federal, State, Local, as well as city officials for help should be respected and expected. Hospitals cannot do this alone and should not be left as a lone wolf.
Q: What advice do you have for emerging healthcare leaders today?
AE: I would ask them to remain flexible, to look at what is complicating the environment and what is creating Noise and remove that, and to facilitate care and compassion more than pushing limited policies/ and governance. I would also ask them to help us adapt, be agile, remain comfortable with ambiguity and move our systems on a dime. Courage to challenge the status quo and creativity maybe the norm so for them to help us all stay flexible.