Navigating uncertainty has become a defining feature of healthcare leadership today. But Andre Dick, MD, is treating it as a strategic advantage.
At Seattle Children’s, where he serves as senior vice president and surgeon-in-chief, that mindset is shaping how the system responds to workforce burnout, access challenges and policy headwinds.
From deploying AI tools to ease administrative burden on clinicians to advocating against cuts to Medicaid and employing a more sustainable approach to expanding access, the pediatric system is taking a deliberately solutions-oriented approach to core industry challenges.
Dr. Dick recently shared more about how Seattle Children’s is approaching recruitment and retention, care delivery and long-term strategy in an increasingly uncertain landscape.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: What’s the single biggest challenge commanding most of your attention and energy at Seattle Children’s this year? What actions is the institution putting in place to address it?
Dr. Andre Dick: It is difficult to point to just one single challenge I or the organization is facing, as the defining issue. Commanding our attention right now is the compounding, macro-level turbulence across healthcare — specifically the intersection of economic constraints, access barriers and profound provider burnout. However, at Seattle Children’s, we view this turbulence as an invitation to lead with intention. We are deliberately acting to transform uncertainty into our greatest advantage by focusing on two key pillars:
Empowering our workforce through technology: To combat burnout and allow our clinical staff to work at the top of their license, we are reimagining our workflows. By leveraging adjunctive technologies — like ambient AI scribes — we are significantly reducing administrative burdens. This directly supports the well-being of our faculty and staff, which ultimately benefits our patients and families by elevating clinical quality and safety.
Protecting the pediatric safety net: Recent federal reforms aimed at curbing Medicaid state financing are inadvertently destabilizing the essential safety net for our most vulnerable population: children. In response, we are aggressively advocating at the local, state and federal levels to preserve this vital funding so we can continue delivering the high-quality, equitable care our patients demand and deserve.
Q: A recurring challenge we hear from clinical leaders is that recruiting specialists has become especially difficult — that it increasingly feels like a race to the top, where top-tier talent flows to the systems that can offer the most compensation. How is Seattle Children’s navigating this? Beyond pay, what differentiators have proven most effective in attracting or retaining top clinical talent?
AD: While competitive compensation is certainly foundational, career fulfillment for top-tier pediatric specialists goes far beyond a paycheck. At Seattle Children’s, we are finding that the most powerful differentiator in today’s highly competitive market is a demonstrable commitment to our clinicians’ well-being and professional agency. We are navigating this challenge by focusing on three key areas.
We are on a critical journey to fundamentally improve the day-to-day lives of our providers. By heavily investing in workflow efficiencies and leveraging advanced technologies — like the ambient AI tools mentioned earlier — we are removing administrative friction so specialists can focus on what they do best: caring for patients.
Top talent also wants a voice in the future of their institution. As we expand our clinical and research enterprises, we are intentionally integrating faculty and staff input directly into our strategic planning process. This drives deep, meaningful engagement and ensures our clinicians are architects of our growth.
We recognize the evolving needs of the modern medical workforce. By incorporating greater flexibility into how and where our specialists are deployed clinically, we offer a more sustainable and balanced practice model that top-tier talent highly values.
Q: Children’s hospitals increasingly serve as regional or national referral hubs for the most complex cases. How are you balancing the push toward ultra-specialization with the need to ensure equitable access, especially for families facing geographic, economic or social barriers to care?
AD: Seattle Children’s serves the WAMI region — Washington, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho — and the Pacific Northwest — a uniquely vast geography that covers approximately one-third of the U.S. landmass and is home to over 4 million children. To balance the push toward ultra-specialization with the need for equitable access in these wildly diverse sets of geographies, we employ a highly intentional, dual-pronged strategy across this territory.
We actively expand access by delivering routine and foundational pediatric care directly within local communities with our primary care and specialty care network partners. This mitigates the significant geographic, economic and logistical burdens on families.
By maintaining our main campus and multiple large outpatient centers as the specialized referral hub, we ensure that the most complex, high-acuity cases benefit from our top-tier expertise and advanced infrastructure.
Ultimately, this hub-and-spoke approach alleviates barriers to care and ensures that every child in our region has equitable access to the exact level of high-quality care they need
Q: What’s one policy or regulatory change you are watching that could materially affect pediatric transplantation?
AD: We are closely monitoring the ongoing modernization of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, which represents a vital shift toward increasing the efficiency, transparency and volume of life-saving organ transplants.
Within that broader modernization effort, the specific regulatory change we are most focused on is pediatric organ allocation policy. The pediatric transplant community has long advocated for a definitive regulatory standard that prioritizes all pediatric donor organs for pediatric recipients.
Children account for a relatively small percentage of overall transplant candidates, but their physiological needs are highly specific, and they represent our future. Organ donation is a profound testament to the human spirit and the ultimate gift of life. While we have seen some positive strides in continuous distribution and allocation models, fully realizing this pediatric-to-pediatric prioritization goal could drastically reduce wait times and potentially eliminate pediatric waitlist mortality entirely.
Q: Ambient documentation has dominated the AI discussion, but we’re starting to hear about systems piloting AI more directly in quality and safety. Can you share an example of how Seattle Children’s is using AI to drive improvements in clinical quality or patient safety?
AD: At Seattle Children’s, we recognize that patient safety and clinical quality are not just goals, it is foundational and allows us to deliver high-quality, equitable and innovative care to the patients and families we serve everyday. While we continue to invest heavily in a vast portfolio of traditional quality-improvement initiatives, we are strategically deploying AI to augment these efforts. Our approach spans from foundational workflow improvements to direct clinical support. While much of the industry views ambient AI primarily as an administrative aid, we see it as a foundational component of patient safety. By actively integrating ambient AI scribes, we are directly addressing physician fatigue and cognitive overload — two major risk factors for clinical errors. This alleviates the significant burden of documentation, allowing our providers to maintain their full focus on the patient for safer, more engaged care.
We have developed and deployed a proprietary AI tool that actively analyzes our internal safety tickets and incident reports. This system helps identify hidden trends and early warning signs, enabling us to proactively focus our quality and safety efforts before issues escalate.
We are also piloting a system designed to surface the right clinical standards and evidence-based best practices for our medical staff at the exact moment they are needed, directly supporting high-quality clinical decision-making at the point of care.
Ultimately, technology is just one part of our broader mission. With or without artificial intelligence, our commitment to safety and quality will always be our utmost priority. We will continue to invest across our entire portfolio of work to consistently improve both the quality of, and access to, care for the patients and families who rely on us.
At Becker's 4th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable, taking place November 2–5 in Chicago, more than 1,500 hospital and health system executives tackle decisions that determine whether organizations thrive or merely survive: protecting margins under cost pressure, choosing where to grow, renegotiating payer relationships, stabilizing the workforce and proving real ROI on technology. This is where leaders work through them together, face-to-face. Apply for complimentary registration now.