“I was actually in New York at the time, at Mount Sinai, but I’ve heard from the teams here about what was similar or different from what we experienced at Sinai,” said Robert Fields, MD, executive vice president and chief clinical officer at Beth Israel Lahey Health. “For our team — and especially for a young system — the pandemic brought an unprecedented singular focus on one condition. I hope I never see something like this again in my career, and even those older than me had never encountered anything like it before. The entire industry was intensely focused on one challenge.”
The system’s collective focus enabled staff to collaborate and develop solutions to address the immediate crisis.
“When you have that level of focus, it allows people to come together and problem-solve in truly unique and creative ways,” Dr. Fields said. “Because we were just a year old when the pandemic hit Boston, the crisis actually helped us integrate more quickly.”
However, the post-pandemic shift back to routine operations brought new challenges.
“The tricky part now,” Dr. Fields said, “is that the singular focus of the pandemic accelerated some of our integration efforts. But post-pandemic, as we return to what you might call ‘regular healthcare,’ which is inherently multivariate and complex, we’ve had to revisit some of the foundational work we might have otherwise completed in 2020 or 2021. While the pandemic accelerated some aspects of integration, it also delayed others. That’s OK, though. We’re addressing those needs now.”
Looking ahead to 2025, the system’s goals reflect the lessons learned during the pandemic.
“As a young system, we need to focus on getting our operations right — ensuring the right level of discipline, data integrity, and process consistency,” Dr. Fields said. “This need is especially pronounced for a system like ours, which was born from the merging of disparate organizations with what I call ‘Frankensteinian’ data sources and systems.”
The system’s 2025 priorities include refining processes across finance, revenue cycle and clinical operations.
“We need to pull from consistent data sources and use them to inform our work in a sustainable way, reducing variation across the system and driving meaningful results,” Dr. Fields said.
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