Michael Young took on his first CEO role in 1986. Now in his fifth year as president and CEO of Philadelphia-based Temple Health, he remains focused on improving access to care and developing strong leaders.
Becker’s connected with Mr. Young to learn more about his leadership of the 990-bed health system, which includes more than 12,000 employees.
Editor’s note: Responses were lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: If you could share one strategy with other health system CEOs, what would it be?
Michael Young: Our biggest strategy is trying to make it simple for the patient. My sister, who’s getting care at both a regional hospital and a top-10 academic teaching hospital, is trying to get her online charts coordinated. Her son is a software developer, and it took him two hours to coordinate her two different accounts.
We have to remember that not all of our patients are digital wonders. They might not understand healthcare, so what do we do to make it easier and more coordinated? We particularly focus on that in our cancer center, Fox Chase. We’ve seen tremendous volume growth and patient appreciation because of a much stronger navigation program there. But ease of access is something we need to focus more on.
For patients who have cancer and go back to their primary care internist or family physician, those physicians are not always up to speed on every drug or every treatment because the cancer world is changing so quickly. So we’ve developed a cancer-driven internal medicine pod, where patients get follow up care from internists who are tuned into the ever-changing cancer world. After the treatment is completed, they’re transferred back to their normal, long-term primary care. It’s been really good for the primary care world. This helps us, too, and at the end of the day, we have the long-term relationship, so we’re grateful to transfer the patient back.
Q: What is something the healthcare industry is not talking about enough?
MY: We’re not talking enough about the economic hardship we create for patients in our very complex systems. The average American is struggling paying their bills, and when you add the healthcare costs on top of that — for example, my son went to an urgent care and they ran a lab panel. It was $783, and if he had gone to CVS, it would have been $28. That health system made a lot of money off him, and we’ve forgotten about that.
Q: What is one of your lesser-known talents or leadership superpowers?
MY: The least known of my talents are my teaching skills. My father was a teacher, and when I look back over my 40-year career, I look at all the people who have learned and gone on to do great things. We’ve recently lost executives to the Mayo Clinic, Sloan Kettering, Harvard, Emory, and it’s rewarding to watch them do very well.
When you lose people to those really good places, in the long term, it’s a great recruiting tool. You can say, “The person who had this job before you is at the Mayo Clinic now.”
The thing that gets overlooked is we’re all so busy. We’re so busy being busy that we forget, on a minute-by-minute and a day-by-day basis, what are we really doing to develop our people? What assignments are we giving them that will give them skills that they need, at the same time allowing us to accomplish what the organization needs? We have to think and do more about that on a daily basis.
Q: What was your first job? Biggest thing you learned?
MY: My first job was delivering newspapers at 11 years old. I would get home from school and deliver my 110 papers, and my brother would deliver about 110. Then, we would hop in the car, eat dinner and go to swim practice.
I learned that there are no days off; you couldn’t take off because there wasn’t anyone else who knew where to deliver the papers, who got them, and who didn’t. It really taught us dependability.
Q: Picture this. It’s the first day of your retirement. What, if anything, do you worry about regretting? What do you hope your legacy will be?
MY: On the first day of retirement, I’m going to sleep until 8 a.m. instead of 5 a.m. The fear or the regret will be, did I do enough? Did I run out of bounds when I could have gotten two more yards, and that would have gotten us a first down, and maybe we would have won that game? Did I leave all the sweat out in the field that I possibly could?
