Nebraska Medicine’s Michael Ash, MD, has dedicated his career to transforming patient care.
He began his career as an internist and pharmacist before spending a decade as chief medical officer at Cerner. In 2014, he joined Omaha-based Nebraska Medicine as senior vice president, chief transformation officer and worked his way up to a COO appointment in 2022. During that time, he led initiatives to take the system from ranking 92nd in patient safety to 5th and led growth initiatives while improving the health system’s financial stability.
Now, he’ll have the opportunity to impact patients at a higher level. Dr. Ash was named the next CEO of Nebraska Medicine May 15 and plans to continue his work expanding access and quality of care to the community, while also strengthening the team member experience. He will begin serving as CEO July 1, succeeding James Linder, MD, who is stepping down from the CEO role after seven years.
“What drives me every day is the privilege and responsibility of supporting patients and the incredible team at Nebraska Medicine,” he told Becker’s. “Every day, I’m witness to the incredible transformational care and people who bring their best selves to work every day to heal and treat our patients.”
When Dr. Ash joined Nebraska Medicine, he brought with him a passion for leveraging technology in a meaningful way to improve outcomes and the clinician experience. Under his leadership, Nebraska Medicine was the first health system to go live with Nuance’s DAX, voice technology to ease documentation burden on clinicians.
“The technology we are investing in, and are early adopters of, is designed to make lives better,” he said. “It improves operational efficiency, helps manage the chaos and mundane paper cuts of the broken aspects of healthcare today.”
As CEO, Dr. Ash plans to continue adopting new technology in a thoughtful way to improve patient care, operational efficiencies and financial performance. In today’s world, that often means adopting AI-driven tools and applications to alleviate patient flow and capacity issues.
“Like most academic medical centers, we have been running at a high capacity and that has impacted our ability to care for inpatients, perform surgeries and accept transfers from across the state,” said Dr. Ash. “We’re shortening the length of stay and increasing patient capacity with advanced technology. Through these efforts we’ve created the equivalent of adding another unit to the hospital. We’ve seen a 13% increase in transfers and become more efficient.”
The health system also improved its discharge lounge for patients waiting on rides or final steps before discharge. Previously, staff members would have to look at information in multiple locations to identify patients who would benefit from the discharge lounge; now with AI, the process is automated.
AI has also improved efficiencies for perioperative nurses, who used to meet twice per day for 30 minutes to debrief and plan what rooms needed after each surgical case. AI automated that information so the nurses could focus on patient care instead of report outs.
These initiatives improved clinician and patient satisfaction in addition to outcomes; they’re also showing a financial return on investment. Since becoming COO in 2022, Dr. Ash has led several initiatives to improve operational efficiency, attributing approximately $24 million in benefits to his process improvement team and AI initiatives since the start of this fiscal year.
Nebraska Medicine is also expanding its footprint with Project Health, a $2.19 billion facility focused on clinical research and education. It’s a University of Nebraska Medical Center facility that Nebraska Medicine will lease for patient care. Around 3,000 learners use Nebraska Medicine locations to train each year, including 700 residents and fellows. Project Health will expand and modernize opportunities for those students and researchers.
The University of Nebraska Board of Regents approved the first intermediate design report for Project Health in April, which will be a multi-year initiative.
In addition to his work with Project Health, Dr. Ash spearheaded Nebraska Medicine’s innovation design unit, which opened earlier this year. His team created 17 patient rooms to optimize team-based care, enhance quality, improve clinician experience and provide a better environment for patients and their families. The patient rooms are divided into zones testing various room designs and equipment processes and includes virtual nursing.
The innovation design unit was developed as a testing ground to figure out what works and double down there; they’ll replace what doesn’t work quickly. Dr. Ash takes a thoughtful approach to innovation; he doesn’t tell his team to “fail fast”; instead, he says “learn quickly.”
“This isn’t a static environment. It’s constantly evolving,” said Dr. Ash. “We are working with key strategic partners to become early adopters with quality, patient safety, experience and higher operational efficiencies.”
The rooms are equipped with technology to monitor the environment and predict fall risks based on a variety of datapoints including monitoring for movement patterns as well as food and liquid intake. The goal is to create an environment focused on patient safety, healing and family participation. Nebraska Medicine is even testing bed configurations to support families staying overnight in the room. There are respite areas, teleconferencing and work spaces to bring in family members who don’t live nearby.
“Healthcare is too important not to evolve, so we have to do everything we can to make it better for the people we serve,” said Dr. Ash. “We also want to make the environment less chaotic for the staff. Some of the virtual nursing and early detection we’ve found works well and we’re starting to roll out now. We don’t have to wait.”
Nebraska Medicine has always kept caregivers and team members central to decision-making, and the need for additional support became more critical during the pandemic. Clinician burnout and shortages are a significant problem for many hospitals, and Dr. Ash knows well the impact his leadership and culture-setting has on the entire organization. Nebraska Medicine’s culture is built on the ITEACH values: Innovation, Teamwork, Excellence, Accountability, Courage and Healing.
“If people assume positive intent, work as a team and support each other to support our brand promise, which is serious medicine and extraordinary care, then every day we have opportunities to introduce innovative changes,” said Dr. Ash.
Every month, the leadership team asks front line workers and managers to submit questions for a forum where leaders address the issues and changes ahead. The leadership team also meets with managers and frontline workers multiple times per month for rounding and roundtable discussions to constantly learn how to better support them.
“Some people say ‘culture eats strategy.’ I say ‘culture enables strategy’,” said Dr. Ash. “Our culture absolutely allows us to fulfill our brand promise and mission to transform lives.”
