Peter Banko became president and CEO of Springfield, Mass.-based Baystate Health in June 2024, leading nearly 13,000 team members and overseeing four hospitals. Nearly a year into the role, Mr. Banko is focused on improving provider-driven access to care.
Becker’s connected with Mr. Banko to learn more about what makes the Western Massachusetts community unique and what he is focused on in 2025. He also shared the most difficult decision he has had to make as CEO — and reflected on the “intense loyalty” of Baystate’s workforce.
Editor’s note: Responses were lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: What’s something the healthcare industry is not talking about enough?
Peter Banko: The industry isn’t talking about access enough. We’re really shifting to be a clinically driven, physician-led system. Baystate, as an integrated system, has a health plan, and we’ve been looking at access there. We have patients in our hospital and physician groups’ backyard with our health plan, and about half of our commercial and Medicare population are leaving the market for care because we’re not accessible. They’re going to have to drive at least an hour and half to Boston.
We’ve got to create less friction between our health plan and our physicians, and we have to be more consumer-driven in our accessibility. When I talk to colleagues, I know that some systems are looking at it, but very few have solved it.
Q: What’s the most difficult choice you’ve had to make for your organization this year?
PB: I arrived at Baystate in June 2024, and it was an organization that had intense loyalty. Our chair of emergency medicine was born here, his wife was born here, he practices here — and you don’t find that in a lot of places. Because of that, there’s a strong commitment to mission and community. In Western Massachusetts, there’s a rugged independence — we like to do our own thing, and we’re a little bit stubborn.
When I talk to our nurses, they describe Baystate as “the neighbor that knows you.” My assistant has worked here 40 years, her mom worked here and her two kids work here. Baystate is community, and generations have turned to us.
For us in the past couple of years, we lost our way in many different ways, but most visibly in our financial performance. The most difficult choice I’ve had to make is that our workforce is 7% less than it was last year. We’ve had to reduce a lot of contract labor and reduce our workforce, whether it be management or corporate services. But we were able to accomplish over half of that through attrition, so the impact on actual people was less than 3%, and the rest were vacancies for open positions.
Our team did a really conscious, deliberate job over several months, and that has been impactful for the organization, for me in my first year and for our community. We’re the largest employer in Western Massachusetts, and because we want to be independent and growing, we’ve had a lot of support leading those difficult choices.
Q: What are you reading up on now to prepare for the next three to 10 years?
PB: Artificial intelligence. I think if you ask 20 people what artificial intelligence is, you’d get 20 different answers. I’ve been following the work of Eric Larsen, who has a white paper on the myths of AI in healthcare.
We talk around it or say things like, “Oh, we can solve that with AI.” The clinical applications are really cool, but I’m not a clinician, so I’ve been reading up on how we can use AI to transform our business, whether it be revenue cycle management, contact center, creating appointments or medication refills. There are a lot of ways where we can service our customers better and do it at a lower cost using artificial intelligence. For the last six months, almost exclusively, my reading has been around AI.
Q: What was the biggest thing you learned in your first job?
PB: My first unpaid job was in junior year of high school. I was a candy striper — a volunteer. I fed patients, worked in sterile processing and delivered papers.
My first paid job at the same hospital in New Brunswick, N.J., was as a patient transporter. I knew every nook and cranny of the 400-bed hospital, which really emphasized how every team member is interconnected. If I didn’t deliver someone to radiation therapy on time, they weren’t getting the treatments they needed. It emphasized that we’re all in this together and we’re all dependent — regardless of what your job title is — we’re all part of the system and work together.