After years of leading complex operations within the system, Chad Tuttle was appointed COO of Corewell Health in April with a clear priority: people.
Prior to the permanent COO position, he served as senior vice president of clinical shared services and interim COO at Corewell, a 21-hospital health system based in Grand Rapids and Southfield, Mich.
Mr. Tuttle told Becker’s that he is focused on collaboration and ensuring a healthy culture and alignment across the organization. He discussed his top priorities as COO, successes from the system’s shared operating model, and his perspective on innovation and collaboration.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: As COO of a newly integrated health system, what are your top priorities for strengthening alignment across Corewell Health’s regions?
Chad Tuttle: It starts with people. It starts with keeping our patients at the forefront, but really supporting our team members. As COO, I fully recognize we’re not going to be able to accomplish anything else unless we have a healthy culture in the organization. It’s about understanding the needs of both our front-line team members as well as our leaders, and making sure that they have the support, the tools, the resources, and that ultimately, we are listening to them and that they feel listened to. We do that via some engagement surveys with patients. We just implemented a new Qualtrics patient engagement process, and we pay close attention to that data and make sure that we’re listening to — and supporting — that.
Q: You’ve helped implement a shared operating model systemwide. What has been key to that effort’s success — and where are the biggest challenges?
CT: The end goal is about getting our team rolling in the same direction and making sure that we’re delivering consistently best outcomes and practices across the organization. Key to that model is starting with having clear goals as an organization, making sure that our strategies and our goals are well understood, that they’re measurable, and that we’ve got a way to communicate both what they are as well as our ongoing performance against those. And then ultimately, in a large organization like Corewell Health, making sure that we have tools and processes that allow our teams to work well together and drive best practice across the organization.
For example, looking at our imaging team who runs all of our radiology equipment. We went to them, and we found across the state and across our legacy hospitals and health systems, we had different practices when it came to things like patient appointment times — how long did it take for an MRI appointment or a CT appointment? We got many of our team members in a room, had discussions about why those variations existed, discussed what best practice was with our provider leadership, made decisions about what the right approach would be for, as an example, a CT appointment slot, and agreed that we would standardize around a 20-minute appointment slot.
As we standardized that, that allowed us to make the scheduling process easier for patients, resulting in increased self-scheduling. Currently, about 25% of our patients are self-scheduling into imaging. And it allowed us to see more patients and improve access for patients. And for team members, it allowed us to ultimately streamline workflows across the organization as a whole and get to a single operating model within our imaging team that allows us to standardize training. It allows us to share best practices, and ultimately, we see the outcomes in terms of improved patient experience and access to imaging overall.
Q: What role does innovation play in your approach to operations, especially in balancing system efficiency with patient-centered care?
CT: We see innovation and the drive toward efficiency as being interwoven. Innovation is an important part of our future and how we approach the continued evolution of healthcare. As an example, one of the tools that we’ve implemented in our medical group practices is Abridge. The ambient listening tool incorporates into the medical record — that while a provider is having an encounter with a patient during that visit, they have a device like a cell phone that is listening. And while the provider is talking with the patient, it’s preparing the provider’s note in the patient’s chart. And when the provider is done, they go to the medical record, review the note, confirm it for accuracy or make any changes that they feel are warranted, and then they’re done.
It has given our providers back time that used to be spent administratively in documentation — that now they’re able to either spend that time with patients or, in some cases, our providers were finding their days were extending into the evening for documentation purposes, and we’ve given them back that time with their family. And that’s been incredible for our providers.
It’s technology, it’s support, it’s innovation — but the outcome is we’re giving our providers back their time. And frankly, for many of our providers, they told us we were giving them back their joy in medicine.
Q: Corewell Health emphasizes collaboration with other systems and community partners. How do those relationships shape your strategy as COO?
CT: Collaboration is one of our core values at Corewell Health. We’re looking constantly for ways that our patients or teams could benefit from either expertise we have or expertise that others have that can be done in partnership with us. For example, when we look at things like community health needs assessments and all of the communities we have hospitals, we’re focused on meeting unmet needs in the community. Those could be behavioral health, transportation, food access. Some of those, we’re really good at. Other needs, community partners are really good at. And where others are really good at it, we look for ways to collaborate and partner with them.
Sometimes that means partnering with them through formal joint ventures. Sometimes that means partnering with them informally through referral relationships or navigating patients into their services. We try to be very good at looking in the mirror and understanding: What are the things that we’re really good at? What are the things others are really good at? And where we find opportunities for synergies, we value collaboration.
