Ms. Anthony joined Children’s National in Washington, D.C., in 2017 through the HSC Health Care System, where she led The HSC Pediatric Center and HSC Home Care. She played a key role in integrating HSC Health Care System with Children’s National starting in 2019 and was named chief of staff in 2022.
Ms. Anthony told Becker’s that, in her current role, she is focused on financial stability, partnerships and innovation. She shared more about her strategic priorities, how she plans to leverage her experience in stakeholder engagement in the new role, and her plans for integrating innovation into the hospital’s strategic vision.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: What are your top strategic priorities as the new chief strategy officer at Children’s National, and how do you envision them influencing the organization’s growth and direction?
Donna Anthony: Growing our financial stability is critically important through times of change. Children’s hospitals are financed very differently, and so that’s something that we need to be laser-focused on.
There’s a couple of components of that. One is strengthening our muscles for execution. We have been through the pandemic, we’ve been through various times of change, and we continue to need to be very nimble to ensure that we can act swiftly to accommodate those changes.
The other piece is partnerships. Pediatric care is very regionalized, and so ensuring that we can work with the right partners in our community, one, to expand our mission; two, to serve as many children as possible and ensure that we are surrounding the whole region and not just thinking about the own walls of our hospital — is really important for us.
Q: What challenges have you encountered while driving strategic initiatives at Children’s National, and how have you navigated them to achieve progress?
DA: Birth rates are declining nationally and regionally, and so looking at market share is different for children’s hospitals. We’re thinking about more patients that already exist coming to our hospital, as opposed to finding new patients that are out there that aren’t coming to us or going to be born. So it’s really a different strategy on the pediatric side than it is on the adult side.
So that birth rate decline — I think all children’s hospitals are thinking about it, and it’s critically an important piece of the strategy.
Of course, it’s also how you think about your balance sheet and your finances paired with the mission in your community, and both of those need to be critically important for the success of the organization. And then, in a lot of ways, they can be complementary.
Additionally, the workforce for children’s hospitals is important to being able to deliver on a strategy. So you can set up new service lines and new geographies, but if you don’t have the staff to do it, then you’re not going to be able to deliver on that vision.
And so, in pediatrics, folks are dually credentialed, highly specialized, and so making sure that our strategy actually is about recruitment and retention is a key part of the strategy development that we have at Children’s National — being that premier employer.
Q; How do you plan to leverage your experience in stakeholder engagement to foster collaboration and drive meaningful change at Children’s National?
DA: I’ve been in a chief of staff role for three years, and that’s all about building consensus internally and building those relationships at all levels of the organization, getting folks on the same page, and ensuring that people have the context that they need to understand the decisions being made, to understand how it’s going to impact them and how they can support us being successful.
I’ve really been focused on that, as well as navigating a CEO transition over the last year and a half — our long-term CEO, Kurt Newman, MD, retired in 2023, and Michelle Riley-Brown assumed the role. So that’s been all about internal-facing work. That work is going to be critical to success for the strategy work where it’s both internal, supporting execution and external, focusing on partnerships.
Q: What role do you see innovation playing in the future of pediatric healthcare at Children’s National, and how do you plan to integrate it into the organization’s strategic vision?
DA: Innovation previously sat within the research arm of our organization, and then our strategy developed. Now, we’ve pulled it more across the enterprise. So how do we think innovatively and apply those standards and the science of innovation to our back-office functions? How are we applying it to our clinical functions? And so what we’re doing is taking that kind of innovation arm and that science and spreading it across the enterprise.
Q: Can you share a specific example of an innovative initiative at Children’s National that led to measurable success? Are there any data points or outcomes that demonstrate its effect?
DA: A lot of our work is looking at administrative burdens for our workforce and making sure that our clinicians can work at the top of their license. We talk about genetic medicine and the innovation in science and accelerating pediatric health. But there’s also the administrative pieces of medicine that are really bogging people down and not letting them do the work that they need to do to serve our patients and provide that patient-centered care.
We’re taking the mindset of innovation that we apply to our research and saying, how do we do team-based care? How do we rethink our clinical teams and models? And how are we taking away a lot of the documentation burdens while maintaining compliance?
We’ve been working with all of our vendors to look at how we can deliver and streamline the workload, particularly on our clinical workforce. We’ve seen some really good outcomes there in terms of increased productivity and the availability of our physicians to see more patients.
For example, we piloted an AI-powered clinical solution that automatically documents patient encounters. Our pilot with 30 providers covered 7,500 AI-assisted encounters. On average, providers spent 10 to 20 minutes less per note. The initiative brought joy back to our providers, reduced their administrative burden, and increased face-to-face engagement, particularly during sensitive conversations.
