Nancy Gaden, DNP, RN, NEA-BC, serves as the Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer at Boston Medical Center.
On May 10th, Nancy Gaden will present at Becker's Health IT + Clinical Leadership 2018. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place May 10-11th 2018 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Dr. Gaden's session, click here.
Question: What did you notice about your most recent healthcare experience as a patient?
Nancy Gaden: For many people, an inpatient care experience illuminates — often for the first time — the critical role of the nurse. I have had many discussions over the years with friends who discovered what professional nursing is when they were a patient in a hospital. My own surprise was seeing, really for the first time, how critical the primary care physician's role is in communicating, decreasing anxiety and tying together all of the members of the healthcare team once a patient has been discharged from the hospital. The office practice is your lifeline, and everyone who works there is an extension of the provider as they travel with you on your journey!
Q: What change in reimbursement is your organization feeling most acutely, and how is it affecting your two- to five-year strategic plan?
NG: Like many states, Massachusetts has adopted new Medicaid delivery and payment reform by moving providers into ACOs. In Massachusetts, 25 percent of our residents are covered by MassHealth, our state Medicaid program. Here at Boston Medical Center we disproportionately serve low-income patients — so, for us, this completely changes the way we are paid for more than half of our patients. To ready ourselves we are bringing the best of our hospital, physician group and health plan to succeed with reform. We have reorganized our governance to coordinate decisions across our entities, and we have created a new population health division to focus on medical management. We are investing the incentive funding, which will replace our supplemental funding, in programs and infrastructure we believe will improve care while reducing cost. Addressing social determinants of health head on is a critical component of our approach — and, for a system with the mission statement "exceptional care without exception," this is the most exciting piece of all.