Stanford Health Care's CEO on leading in a time of misinformation

Hospitals and health systems across the U.S. continue to grapple with vaccine hesitancy. Stanford (Calif.) Health Care CEO David Entwistle shared with Becker's in November how the health system achieved a 97 percent vaccination rate among its staff.

Question: What strategies has Stanford Health Care been using to navigate this era of misinformation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic?

David Entwistle: We place a high priority on helping our patients; colleagues; and local, national and global communities access accurate and relevant information about public health. For the pandemic, we felt it was particularly important to provide resources that are widely accessible and understandable. Beyond our primary COVID-19 resource website, we collaborated with community partners to create a website devoted to COVID-19, with FAQs, videos, model social media messages, infographics, and many other informational resources in both English and Spanish. Stanford Medicine physicians created a resource page for the COVID-19 crisis in India, and others created animated videos with public health messages about COVID-19 that have been viewed by millions around the globe.

We also had to ensure that our own staff received the best information for their health. Across our health system, our staff achieved a 97 percent COVID-19 vaccination rate, which we attribute to a strong information campaign to ensure that our workforce was empowered to make the best choice for their own safety and the safety of our patients, colleagues and community. Our COVID-19 vaccination communications included regular email messages to our workforce, organization-wide town halls and fact sheets in multiple languages. We also offered our employees one-on-one conversations with health providers about the vaccines and created pocket conversation guides of "Words that Work" to help providers discuss COVID-19 vaccination with patients.

Q: As CEO, what are your top three areas of focus over the next year?

DE: Health disparities are not new, but our understanding of their root causes and how we can address them are coming into sharper focus. During the pandemic, Stanford Health Care forged strong bonds with county health departments and local communities to ensure equitable distribution of vaccines, and we invested substantially in our surrounding community to lessen the impact of COVID-19. Looking ahead, we plan to leverage these relationships and continue this engagement to enhance health for underserved populations.

A second area of focus builds on an effect of the pandemic. During shelter-in-place orders, Stanford Health Care, like many health systems, significantly expanded and evolved our telehealth offerings. As we continue to deliver care on this platform, we're focused on hardwiring these advances into our clinical workflows to ensure our patients have an omn-channel experience that addresses their needs in the way that makes them most comfortable.  Recognizing that technology can also be a barrier, we created a customized patient survey to ensure an ongoing, active dialogue with patients about what works best for them, with the goal of adapting our services to ensure access. 

Cancer care is also a critical area of focus for the coming year, and certainly will be for many years to come. Through a major renewal project to build the Stanford Medicine Cancer Center, our goal is to expand patient access — on campus and beyond — to personalized, comprehensive and cutting-edge cancer care that is at the vanguard of the latest biomedical advances.

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