Rishi Sikka, MD, knows delivering healthcare takes a system — not just one person.
He became CEO of Albuquerque, N.M.-based Presbyterian Healthcare Services in October. Before that, he served as president of Village Medical and as president of system enterprises for Sacramento, Calif.-based Sutter Health.
Earlier in his career, Dr. Sikka worked as an emergency medicine physician, a role that brought some of his most challenging days. In college, he held summer jobs at the front desk of an eating disorder clinic and in the finance department of an HMO — experiences that shaped his leadership style and belief in servant leadership.
Becker’s connected with Dr. Sikka to discuss his leadership strategies, career journey and vision for the future.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: If you could share one strategy with other health system CEOs, what would it be?
Dr. Rishi Sikka: The decisions you make as a CEO should be the hard ones. The easier decisions should be made closer to where their impact will be felt.
Those harder decisions, in my mind, are probability-based decisions: if you do A, there’s a probability of X, Y, Z; if you do B, then there’s a different probability of X, Y, Z. At Presbyterian, those are anchored in values — specifically, what’s in the best interest of patients and people.
Even if things don’t turn out exactly as you thought — and if they don’t, you need to rebound and course correct — if you can say that you anchored that decision on values, it’s really hard to fault the outcome that occurs.
Q: What was the hardest day of your career? How did you get through it?
RS: Some of the hardest days in my career were when I was working in the emergency department. As an emergency medicine physician, you are, at times, called into some of the most critical and difficult moments in a person’s and a family’s life. It is a privilege to not only provide care, but to be a part of those moments beyond just the medical care.
The truth is that when those kinds of hard things happened back then when I was practicing, the only way you got through it was to just get through it. Maybe I could take a minute or two, but I would just suppress it and finish my shift. It wouldn’t be until later on at the end of the day or in the middle of the night — in one instance, it was days later that I had to pull over on the side of the road and just cry.
That was very much a part of my life when I was practicing emergency medicine. One of the things that I’m honored we do for our providers and our teams here at Presbyterian is that when something like that happens, you can call a “Code Lavender,” and it leads to an immediate response for resources and emotional support to our teams.
Q: How has your background in emergency medicine and in other roles informed your leadership as CEO?
RS: I have a background as a physician, but there are a lot of other jobs I held at different points in my career. I’ve worked as a volunteer transporter for the ER and the hospital. When I was in college, I worked at the front desk in the reception of an eating disorder clinic one summer, and another summer, I worked in the finance department of an HMO.
That brings a couple different perspectives. It reinforces my profound belief that my job is to make others successful, and it is to make those who are providing care successful, and it is to make those who are supporting those who provide care successful. That embodies this notion of servant leadership, because I remember those days, and they are so much a part of who I am.
It’s also a reminder that it takes a system to succeed — it’s never just one person. With my background and experience, I also feel super comfortable walking into clinical environments, walking into our office environments, and being able to be very real with our people and hear their feedback, their concerns, and get them to ask me questions as well, in a very unscripted and informal, yet authentic way.
Q: What are you reading up on now to prepare for the next three to 10 years?
RS: It’s such a buzzword, but I’m spending time reading about artificial intelligence. I’m specifically reading about it within the context of all innovation that has occurred throughout history in the industrial revolution and beyond, and to understand this innovation in that context, about why it’s different, and particularly what has occurred in the past couple of years.
The reading is also focused on the amount of capital inflows and investment, and then the amount of utilization that we’ve seen. It’s to understand where the future and the pace is going, because the capital inflows are frankly unprecedented. And while certainly we have our use cases here at Presbyterian and in healthcare, there are other industries that are much, much further along than healthcare — that is definitely an aspect I’m reading about.
While AI does have the ability to transform how we deliver care, the other big reason that I’m reading about it is that for the workforce that we are going to see in the next three to 10 years, AI is going to be native to their personal and professional experience. That has really profound implications when we think about workforce planning and development. It’s not just about the transformation of care; it’s also about how the workforce of the future is going to be interacting and the environment we need to create.
Q: Picture this. It’s the first day of your retirement. What do you hope your legacy will be?
RS: There’s this beautiful line at the end of “Hamilton” that I love: “Legacy is planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.”
When I think about that garden, and what I hope my legacy will be, is that there will be a group of leaders that I will have coached, mentored and led, and that group of leaders will take things to an even higher and more profound level in the organizations that I’ve served. For me, there is no greater legacy than developing other leaders to carry on further and, frankly, surpass one’s own work.
