Michael Fosina began serving as president of Calvary Hospital in New York City in January, bringing decades of healthcare experience to the role.
Prior to his current position, Mr. Fosina served as COO of Calvary, which provides care for terminally ill adults with advanced cancer and other life-limiting illnesses. He is also a past chairman and Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives and has held senior executive roles at NewYork-Presbyterian in New York City, where he oversaw Lawrence Homecare, Jansen Hospice, the Bereavement Center of Westchester, NYP/Lower Manhattan Hospital and NYP/Allen Hospital.
Mr. Forsina told Becker’s he’s excited about Calvary’s mission as the organization celebrates its 125th anniversary. Recently, the hospital integrated services with its parent organization, ArchCare, the healthcare ministry of the Archdiocese of New York. Mr. Fosina shared his perspective on Calvary’s role in New York and its future in meeting patient needs.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: As you lead Calvary through its next chapter, how are you approaching the integration with ArchCare to ensure both organizations remain mission-aligned while meeting the evolving needs of patients?
Michael Fosina: Calvary Hospital and Hospice has been part of ArchCare for many years. And so, what we’re doing now is completing the entire post-acute care network. ArchCare has all of the components of post-acute care when you include our end-of-life hospital and our hospice program. The integration allows us to accept patients, move patients around, have them stay connected with the physician — the team physician. So the transitions of care are not as dramatic as if you’re going from one organization to the next organization. If they go to our home care agency, or then have to go to our nursing home, or then have to come to our Calvary Hospital, it’s all the same group of people who are managing it, so it makes it easier for patients and ensures quality.
One of the unique things about Calvary is that in New York City, we have multiple large academic medical centers, and we don’t compete with them, but we complement and partner with them. Because we do end-of-life care that the acute care hospitals are not designed and built for — and we are — and so they’re all interested in working with us, which is great. And it allows us to partner with them, and allows us to start to develop a strategic plan for expansion, because as the baby boomers age, there are more and more elderly patients and demands for our services.
Q: Calvary has a strong legacy in end-of-life and palliative care. How are you working to innovate or expand these services in today’s healthcare environment, where patient preferences and care delivery models are shifting?
MF: The reputation of Calvary in the New York City metropolitan area is incredibly strong, and it’s a special person that works here. So, who we hire is important. When we look at our workforce, the right person with the right characteristics and the right empathy has to be able to work here. You want somebody who is sensitive and empathetic to our patients and families, and who really does the little things that are so important to patients and families — and the staff here do that.
Everybody in the New York area knows Calvary and talks about how special of a place it is. And I’ve been a healthcare executive for over 30 years, and I always knew how special Calvary has been, but you don’t truly understand how special it is until you’re here, and you see what the staff do on a daily basis for patients and families. You don’t have to tell them to do it — they automatically do it to try and relieve pain, suffering and give emotional support to families and patients at a very difficult time, and they are phenomenal at doing it.
That said, patients are getting to us later than they historically have been, and that’s unfortunate, because we provide a tremendous amount of care, kindness and compassion to the patients and families. And the thank-you letters, the calls we get about the difference they see when they come from one institution to another institution, or they were at home being managed by somebody else — it’s heartwarming, and it’s the reason we do what we do, and that’s why our reputation is so strong. The demand for us to expand is so strong, and we’re going to help residents in the state of New York by expanding into those local communities, because that’s part of our mission and being part of the Archdiocese of New York, and that’s what we’re going to do.
Q: Given your background in health policy and aging populations, what do you see as the most pressing challenges or opportunities ahead in caring for older adults, and how is Calvary positioned to address them?
MF: We need to expand our services. The demand for our care is extremely high. We run at a high census, and we are growing both our inpatient census and our hospice-at-home program. And so we’re bringing our care to the local geographies. We’re bringing the care closer to where the family is. Families don’t want to travel an hour a day to go see their relatives, so we are bringing our care out to them.
We’ll expand beds into different parts of New York. We’re expanding our hospice-at-home program. We’ll continue farther up north into the Hudson Valley region and down through the remainder of the New York City area. We continue to have a high demand, and that gets back to the workforce and hiring staff to both work at home and work in the hospital. We’re constantly on a recruitment drive to do so, and right now, we’re successful in our ability to hire staff in different geographical regions.
Q: With your experience at NewYork-Presbyterian, how has your approach to leadership and resilience shaped your early priorities as president of Calvary, especially as you look to the hospital’s long-term future?
MF: There are a lot more leaders out there than you think, and some of them are very quiet. And what we learned during the pandemic was the ability to let everybody know they can speak up, they have a voice, they should tell us what they’re thinking, and come up with some creative ideas. Being able to manage that way, you get the best of everybody’s thinking. You get them committed to their job. And we have that here.
My job is to bring in the right people and provide them the support they need to get the job done. The important work is done on the patient floors and in the patient homes, and the administrative team needs to support our providers taking care of those patients.
