Tony Reed, MD, PhD, MBA, CPE serves as Chief Medical Officer, Temple University Hospital.
Tony will be serving on the panel "Physicians and EHRs: The Next Fronteir to Limmit Frsutration and Burnout" 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 Tony's session, click here.
Question: How do you plan to pivot strategies this year to better serve patients?
Tony Reed: It’s not so much pivoting as it is multi-tasking. But multi-tasking in a strategic way. ‘Do more with more’ went away a long time ago. ‘Do more with less’ doesn’t work for the well-being of our healthcare workforce. So we work smart. Better intelligence from sophisticated regression models, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Focus on those objectives that matter most to the overall health of our community and our organization. Being intentional in our workstreams and in our growth and development. Specifically, we are focused on the basic elements – 1) Enhanced patient safety in a post-COVID era, reducing the number of hospital-associated events, improving the reliability and consistency of our care delivery. 2) Optimized processes for patient experience through patient-centered approaches to care, more efficient flow through the health care system from first contact through post-visit care, and care delivery where, when, and how the patient desires care. 3) Strategic growth in our service offerings and our outpatient footprint. 4) Advanced payment models such as direct contracting, shared risk agreements, and total cost of care structured formats.
Q: What technologies and innovations are you most excited about in healthcare right now?
TR: At home technology. Whether it be wearables or in home devices that connect the patient with their provider, we’re interested. In our market, tele-technology exploded during COVID and we were able to keep pace. Now we must seize the opportunity to see how far we can take it to meet the patients where they are and in a way that they want to be met. Our providers love it too. The volume of ideas flowing in to our IT shop is amazing. I have total admiration for the creativity of our team.
Q: What will the lasting legacy of COVID-19 be on the healthcare system?
TR: I think of us a being akin to the Phoenix a year before COVIE, we were struggling. We began a transformation that went well in the months leading up to the first COVID case that allowed us to both survive the closure of Hahnemann in the months prior to COVID and thrive during a massive onslaught of COVID cases in the first wave. Our team, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and everyone else, rose to the challenge through their tenacity and resilience. We proved to ourselves that we can handle any kind of major event with grace, dignity, and perseverance. Along the way, we learned to make the changes necessary to stay current with external pressures and evolved ourselves to expand our internal fortitude for those pressures. In the end, it has helped further define our role in the community of north Philadelphia and in society.
Q: What advice do you have for emerging healthcare leaders today?
TR: Learn. Never stop learning. Study history. Study the history of health care management. Study the basic principles of operating a healthcare business in the light of our prime directive – primum, non nocere (first, do no harm). Safety first – reliability as a part of safe, high-quality care – treatment in the manner in which a patient wants to be treated – execute on sound business principles – and the finances will follow. The last part is just as important as the first part. Healthcare leaders today need to understand that this is a business and that we need to make business decisions that will have large, rippling, lasting impacts. Studying business and finance helps gain foundational knowledge. Having a solid mentor brings it all to life.