Memphis, Tenn.-based Baptist Memorial Health Care’s BestHealth Employee Well-being Program recently named two new leaders to the C-suite who are looking to take the program beyond hospital walls.
BestHealth is a wellness program designed to support staff in taking control of their health by providing a number of holistic programs. Since its launch in 2018, the program has reduced hospital admissions by 2.2% and 30-day hospital readmissions by 10.2%. It has also cut avoidable diseases by 29%.
With so much success, the program added two inaugural leaders in June: Lia Lansky was named chief well-being officer, and Jake Lancaster, MD, was named chief medical officer.
Becker’s spoke with Ms. Lansky and Dr. Lancaster to discuss their strategic vision for BestHealth in the coming years.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.
Question: What are some of your priorities for 2025 as you step into your new positions?
Lia Lansky: Since stepping into this role, we’ve really been focused on developing more strategic approaches to better connect our Baptist Medical Group with our BestHealth initiatives. One of our goals is also to get out into the community more and extend that support to our patients. Up to this point, we’ve really focused on our team members — more than 15,000 of them — and now we’re looking to broaden that reach.
Dr. Jake Lancaster: As the CMO for both our medical group and our well-being program, I’m really looking to integrate those two areas more intentionally. There’s a lot we’ve done for our team members that we can apply to our patients, and vice versa — things we’ve done in terms of quality and outcomes that could benefit our internal teams.
Q: What initiatives are you looking to implement or expand in the next year? What’s the strategic thinking behind those?
LL: One major goal is expanding our program to other organizations. We’ve had such strong metrics here at Baptist, and we want to share that success more broadly. We also just launched the BestHealth Virtual Clinic for Baptist Medical Group patients who aren’t Baptist employees. It’s embedded in our EMR via Epic, and it allows patients to choose services like nutrition, exercise support, or tobacco cessation directly from their login. This helps boost our quality scores, and it gives providers a new resource to offer their patients.
JL: I’m also really excited about our Dietary Transformation Program. We’ve been running it as a research study with a subgroup of our employees. It focuses on prediabetic and diabetic populations and explores how intermittent fasting and time-restricted eating strategies improve outcomes. Now that it’s wrapping up, we want to scale it more broadly. The early results are great, and we’ll be sharing more soon.
Q: What have been some of the most effective initiatives from the BestHealth program?
LL: BestHealth has been evolving over the last eight years, and we’ve worked hard to align our well-being efforts with broader organizational goals. We’ve focused on physical and emotional wellness and recently added financial well-being. That full integration helps us control costs and support a healthier, more productive workforce. For example, while national health plan costs were projected to rise by 6–9% last year, we limited our increase to just 1% in 2024. That’s a major win.
I’d also add that we’ve seen record-high engagement. Last year, 97% of our health-plan-qualified employees completed a biometric screening, and 92% followed up with an annual wellness visit. And for those who completed a wellness visit two years in a row, we saw a 9% reduction in healthcare costs.
Q: What else would you like to share?
JL: I’m really energized by this role. As the CMO for both the medical group and now in the well-being space, I get to help our providers from all angles, reducing burnout, improving physical and mental health, and ultimately helping them show up at their best for our patients. That benefits quality and outcomes across the board.
LL: I’m truly honored to work for an organization like Baptist that genuinely prioritizes wellness. It starts with our CEO and flows through to our vice presidents and key stakeholders. On our team, we have nurses, well-being specialists, and dietitians. It’s a complete population health model, and I feel very fortunate to be part of it.
