Cindy Hundorfean serves as president and CEO at Pittsburgh-based Allegheny Health Network.
Ms. Hundorfean will serve on the keynote panel "Building a Resilient, High-Reliability Organization With Accountable Leaders" 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 Ms. Hundorfean'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?
Ms. Hundorfean: A key focus over the last year has been implementing efforts to “right size” our system to match the current patient demand while remaining flexible to respond to market changes. We call our efforts “optimization,” and we have well over 30 initiatives that are focused on doing the same things that most health care systems are doing such as consolidation of services, programmatic reviews, focus on increased clinical productivity and footprint reduction. We’ve learned how to be nimble and we’re not afraid of trying new ways to provide care to our patients. Access is a huge focus. Fortunately, we have centralized scheduling, so we are able to provide near immediate access for our patients. We’re also relentlessly asking our caregivers what more we can do to help them.
Q: What are you most excited about right now and what makes you nervous?
CH: I am most excited about how we are positioning ourselves to transform healthcare delivery. In a provider-payer partnership, we are encouraged to innovate and accelerate the path to value. We have a strong clinically integrated network that has facilitated primary care transformation. We have evidence-based care pathways that create consistent care delivery. We focus on the total patient by addressing their social and behavioral needs.
What makes me nervous? I don’t think any of us fully understand how and when the inpatient volumes will fully return. And how dependent is that volume on the availability of nurses to open our unstaffed beds? For us, we see the backlog of OR cases that need to be scheduled, but it’s fully dependent on adequate OR Nurse staffing, PACU staffing, ICU staffing, etc.
What we are doing is relying on real-time data, showing where we have capacity within our network of 14 hospitals and moving both patients and providers to take advantage of staffed ORs and beds.
Q: How are you thinking about growth and investments for the next year or two?
CH: Last year, AHN put the finishing touches on a five-year, $1.7 billion capital investment campaign with the opening of a new 160-bed hospital north of Pittsburgh. We certainly don’t expect to continue growing and building at that pace. That said, over the next few years, AHN will continue to invest strategically in the areas where our services are in highest demand, ensuring that modern facilities and cutting-edge care will be available for the next generation of patients. In coming months, we will be opening a new health and sports complex, a new multispecialty outpatient facility west of Pittsburgh, a new outpatient facility south of Pittsburgh and a new melanoma treatment and research center, among other investments.
As a nonprofit, our goal is to be careful stewards of community resources while enabling our current and future health teams to deliver the best care possible. And like all providers, we need to align our growth and investment strategy to the evolving economic realities of our industry and our specific market dynamics. Fortunately, AHN is part of Highmark Health – and our enterprise’s collective financial strength and stability allows us to plan for the long-term as we respond to shifting patient expectations and needs, and build the capabilities that we’ll need five, 10 and 20 years from now.
Q: What will healthcare executives need to be effective leaders for the next five years?
CH: Healthcare executives will need strong and diverse teams around them. That’s a must for any effective leader, in any industry. We need a willingness to take risks and challenge the status quo – the way we’ve been doing things for the last 50 years isn’t going to cut it. We need to listen to our doctors and caregivers and put them in positions of leadership because our clinicians are the ones who ultimately live with the decisions we make and the risks that we take.
Q: How are you building resilient and diverse teams?
CH: At AHN, we have strong groups working on both issues, and I think the two go hand in hand. A resilient health care workforce is able to adapt to adverse circumstances, manage stress, and maintain empathy for patients and peers. To cultivate those skills and behaviors, you need a culture that helps team members to feel secure, included and connected to each other. And when workplaces are more accepting and inclusive by design, they become more diverse too. A sense of belonging and a sense of security is key to both diversity and resiliency.
We’re working hard to create just such a workplace. Caring for the caregiver is always a challenge, of course, and the last few years have obviously created additional difficulties. But we have an outstanding team working on clinician wellness. We are also growing our Equitable Health Institute and empowering our diversity, equity & inclusion leaders to innovate and excel in driving diverse talent retention, recruitment and professional development, and in being proactive and responsive to community health equity issues and improvement opportunities.