Health systems implement diverse strategies to uncover opportunities for growth. At New York City-based NewYork-Presbyterian, which operates over 4,000 beds across its network of hospitals, these strategies can span a variety of areas, such as ambulatory care, workforce development and digital transformation.
Burak Malatyali, senior vice president of enterprise growth strategy and network development, shared with Becker's his insights on how NYP is advancing its mission through focused growth initiatives.
Editor's note: Responses were lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: How do you each define "strategic growth" for your organization, and what unique opportunities or challenges are you focusing on to drive that growth in today's healthcare environment?
Burak Malatyali: As with many of the academic medical centers across the nation, we face several headwinds, which makes it critical that we try to grow our enterprise in order to be able to sustain and enhance our tripartite mission: patient care, education and research. It is absolutely critical that we can support that mission alongside with our medical schools in the long run.
When we look at growth from a health system perspective, we continue to make programmatic and capital investments to grow our clinical programs in our academic campuses. Usually, that's really where the innovation happens. Growth in those tertiary and quaternary programs are critical to serve more patients in our communities as well as patients from across the country and around the globe. We also have a wide network of our community hospitals and ambulatory network. Since we merged with the number of regional hospitals, we made significant programmatic investments to bring high-quality care to those communities. As for ambulatory, in partnership with our medical schools, our efforts have been really focused on doubling down on that — to make sure that we have a cohesive network that's positioned to serve our patients well, and at the same time be the place for community-based providers who want to practice medicine in a high-quality setting.
Q: NewYork-Presbyterian is in one of the nation's most competitive healthcare markets. Can you share some of the growth strategies you are leading at NewYork-Presbyterian, particularly in areas like network expansion and partnerships with other healthcare providers?
BM: We are certainly in a very competitive market with several providers, ranging from academic medical centers to large health systems and smaller investor-backed provider groups. We provide [a] full continuum of care and may be able to complement other health systems and providers in the market who are also committed to same-quality and patient care standards. As such, we have identified a number of health systems and provider groups in our markets and the region where we partner on expanding our collective care continuum. Coupled with our inpatient and ambulatory expansions, these partnerships are key components of our network expansion.
Q: With the rapid advancement of telehealth and digital health technologies, how is your organization incorporating digital transformation into your strategic growth plans?
BM: Way before COVID, our CEO made a significant investments to make sure that NYP has a very proactive digital health strategy so that we can serve patients and enhance experience. While much of it is face-to-face today, we have expanded our care to digital platforms. So we were ready way before COVID happened, thanks to the proactive strategies and investments deployed previously.
Proactively investing in technology is one of our key strategic priorities, so we continue to double down on investments in technology, not only in digital health but also in bringing technology and digital tools to improve care, improve the experience of providers and improve the experience of patients.
Q: Given the ongoing workforce challenges in healthcare, how are you addressing staffing issues to support long-term growth? Are there any specific new workforce development or retention strategies you are implementing?
BM: We're partnering with schools in our communities to have joint degree programs to create a workforce to address talent shortages, whether it's lab techs, nursing or other areas. We continue to invest and train our own workforce and skill them up. We have comprehensive benefits and resources for our staff to further invest in their education and continued growth.
Q: What insights or takeaways would you share with other healthcare executives about identifying strategic growth opportunities for their systems?
BM: Healthcare is local. The strategies we deploy — whether it's partnerships, programmatic investments, ambulatory growth, growing in different regions, or digital — may be similar, but the order and pace and steps that you follow is different based on each market and each enterprise.
Each organization has different levels of growth opportunities based on their market. It's hard to say there's one single blueprint, but I think it's very critical that you stay true to your mission, understand what tools you have, and figure out how you can enhance or implement those tools without falling too far away from your core mission.
We are very, very particular about not trying to be anyone else. We know who we are, and we know what we want to do. Our mission is never going to change. We're always going to be an integrated academic medical system that innovates, educates and cures. So for us, we try to be balanced where we try to grow and uphold this mission. We don't try to do things just because someone else may be doing it.
What I believe is that while strategies may be similar, but which ones you do, how much you invest in each one, and how aggressive you get needs to be aligned with the system that you are, communities you serve and what you want to achieve in the short and long run.