It has been just over a year since Jim Molloy took over as executive vice president, CFO and treasurer at New Orleans-based Ochsner Health. Since then, the 46-hospital health system has shifted its focus from external to internal growth in an effort to primarily focus on better serving its existing patients.
In the past, Ochsner had placed a heavy emphasis on acquisitions. Now, the health system is looking to mold what it has created.
"When you go through a lot of growth, you have to absorb and make sure that those entities are all integrated, well integrated," Mr. Molloy told Becker's. "We've been spending a lot of time on that. A lot of time on making sure that we're also taking all the lessons we've learned from the things we've done from the past and integrating them into how we'll go about things in the future."
This type of growth highlights the need to focus on employees and workforce retention.
To tackle worker shortages and attract new employees, the health system has leaned on assets such as its joint medical college partnership with Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans.
The partnership aims to grow a physician pipeline and improve health and education equity.
"Partnering with them is both going to help us from the perspective of increasing our access to providers and hopefully having more providers in our system, but also to increase the diversity of our providers," Mr. Molloy said.
In the short term, Ochsner has invested in automation to help ease providers' burdens with tedious tasks like heavy paperwork loads to improve their work life balance.
Communication has also been an important tool in getting to the bottom of additional challenges faced by healthcare workers.
From Mr. Molloy's perspective, ensuring that employees are content is the key drive to nearly every aspect of an organization.
"I don't think there's any issue more important than our workforce and having our employees engaged, happy and feeling part of our mission and what we're trying to do through a CFOs role," he said. "We can speculate but there's nothing better than getting direct access and encouraging people to tell us about the things that are bothering them or the things that are hurdles to them enjoying their job and then working on removing some of those barriers."