“It has been a banner year,” Baligh Yehia, MD, president, Jefferson Health, said during a Jan. 21 Becker’s Healthcare Podcast. “The year ahead is to continue to focus on our mission of improving lives and delivering exceptional care, but also on how do we integrate the system and really make sure that we march as one.”
The combined system created one of the largest U.S. non-profit health systems, bringing together more than 65,000 employees from both organizations.
To ensure a smooth integration, Jefferson Health did an assessment of the cultures at both Jefferson and LVHN. Dr. Yehia estimated that around 10% to 15% of LVHN’s medical employees had graduated from Jefferson, making the cultures already highly aligned.
“There was such camaraderie,” he said. “A lot of the doctors and the nurses already knew each other, having worked in the same or adjacent regions. That commitment to excellence, that commitment to quality and safety was [already] there.”
The system is also uniting service lines like cancer, neuroscience, heart and vascular, along with quality and safety, nursing, the medical group and patient experience.
“We really are leading with the people,” he said. “Now we’re thinking more broadly of how can we take the best of both worlds to deliver that to the communities that we serve across New Jersey and Pennsylvania.”
