Matthew Walsh serves as executive vice president and COO at Danville, Pa.-based Geisinger.
Mr. Walsh will serve on the panel "Can Health Systems Have Value and Volume?" at Becker's 10th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the roundtable, which will take place in Chicago from Nov. 7-10, 2022.
To learn more about the conference and Mr. Walsh's session, click here.
Becker's Healthcare aims to foster peer-to-peer conversation between healthcare's brightest leaders and thinkers. In that vein, responses to our Speaker Series are published straight from interviewees. Here is what our speakers had to say.
Question: What is the smartest thing you've done in the last year to set your system up for success?
Mr. Walsh: If the pandemic and the industry-wide labor issues have taught us anything, it’s that now, more than ever, it’s important that we focus on building strong teams that are highly engaged and invested in our mission of making better health easier for our communities. To achieve this, we’ve focused heavily on building strong communication and trust at all levels of the organization – especially between clinical staff, administrators and support staff.
In the past two years, we’ve stepped up our efforts to hold town halls and other events to keep our staff informed and engaged. In fact, we’ve launched a completely refreshed communications framework for leaders including making communication a key competency for anyone in a management role. A major initiative underway is also a system-wide communications workshop to ensure every single Geisinger employee understands our strategy and how their work contributes to our goals. What we’ve found through this effort is that it helps connect the dots for everyone, teams are more collaborative, people are more engaged with our mission and there’s generally a stronger sense of trust among various areas of the organization.
Q: What are you most excited about right now and what makes you nervous?
MW: In recent years, there have been tremendous advancements in automation across the industry, freeing our staff from administrative burdens and allowing them to focus more on delivering the best care to patients. For example, we implemented a clinical digital assistant that uses a context-aware voice recognition and harmonizes EHR, genomic, claims and social determinants of health data to provide evidence-based, patient-tailored care recommendations.
We also recently implemented facial recognition technology for patient identification to expedite the registration process. We also quickly stood up a lot of automation throughout the pandemic to deliver test results and educate our patients on how to manage their results. Whether it’s in response to a timely issue or strategically planned and implemented, the main goal of automation is to use technology where it makes sense and allows our clinical staff to spend more valuable time with their patients. Automation initiatives are also a key response to the significant labor shortage and supply cost challenges affecting the industry. Finding the right opportunities and implementing solutions quickly enough to address the challenges facing us as an industry is daunting. Fortunately, we’ve made some great strides but there are more we need to make as we adapt to the new reality of the labor market.
Q: How are you thinking about growth and investments for the next year or two?
MW: Despite the current economic environment in healthcare, we can’t stop making investments that make our staff and communities’ lives better, but making the right investment decisions becomes even more critical. When we look at our investment priorities, we look at the local dynamics. In central and northeastern Pennsylvania, the key demographics that are growing are in the 65-plus age range. This means we need to address capacity-constrained inpatient facilities, expand private room access and prioritize moving more care out of the hospital wherever we can with growth in programs that keep people healthy and mobile. Automating processes that take our providers away from their patients helps to ensure their time is spent on the work that has the greatest impact on achieving those goals.
In the past year or so, we’ve announced projects like our Orthopaedics Center of Pennsylvania, an expanded cancer center in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., a new cancer center in the Scranton, Pa., area, two new behavioral health hospitals and dozens of community medicine facilities projects that all work toward helping our patients get appropriate care outside of the traditional hospital and freeing up space in our hospitals for topnotch inpatient care when that’s what is needed.
Q: What will healthcare executives need to be effective leaders for the next five years?
MW: As mentioned previously, labor shortages have created challenges across the industry, so we are focused on developing better strategies to not just attract and retain talent but also engage staff to help them understand organizational strategy so their day-to-day decisions align and ladder up to our overall goals as an organization.
We’re also looking at strategic partnership opportunities to better address our communities’ needs and play to our own strengths as a health system. We’ve found in recent years that strategic partnerships with other like-minded organizations can make healthcare easier, more accessible and more affordable for our communities. We have examples like Franklin, Tenn.-based Acadia Healthcare, which is helping us bring two much-needed inpatient behavioral health hospitals to the region.
Q: How are you building resilient and diverse teams?
MW: Our teams do a lot for the health of our communities, but in the healthcare profession, sometimes we lose sight of how important it is to take care of ourselves. We’re big believers in the Covey principle of sharpening the saw – and the value it brings by encouraging our staff to step away and attend to their well-being which often helps us discover new solutions to challenging problems.
One way we do this is with our Center of Professionalism and Well-Being that offers support and self-care programs that support the specific needs of our frontline staff – because building healthy communities first requires healthy teams. We also work to make sure that we never lose sight of how times of crisis can be both learning experiences and catalysts for transformation. We did this in a number of ways during the pandemic, but now we can look at things like fuel prices and how we can use that challenge as an opportunity for things like converting our fleet vehicles and generators to electric power.
Finally, as we look to recruit and retain top talent. This means making sure we are prioritizing a diverse workforce that highlights the value various perspectives and experiences create for our patients and communities. It’s important that all people in the organization like physicians, employees and patients, see themselves in others and feel like they belong. We have a number of employee resource groups with volunteer members whose sole focus is on making sure we are building a welcoming and accepting environment for patients and employees alike.