Thank you to our title sponsors at the Becker's Hospital Review 6th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable!
Roughly 1,300 healthcare leaders from across the country gathered in Chicago this week for the sixth annual Becker's CEO + CFO Roundtable. Executives from hospitals and health systems joined with payers, consultants and politicians to share many innovative ideas over more than 40 hours of panels, workshops and roundtables.
Here is a selection of 33 memorable quotes from the conference, arranged in no particular order.
1. "Achieving quality isn't one person's job. It's not a department's job, not a committee's job, not a doctor's, not a nurse's job. It’s everyone's job, and it starts with the CEO." — Nancy Howell Agee, president and CEO of Carilion Clinic (Roanoke, Va.)
2. "Fee for service is dead and will never come back. It cannot. It will not. The checking account is empty." — Dr. Josh Luke, healthcare futurist, author, closing keynote speaker
3. "These are 1,000 shades of gray where there is not a clear-cut answer. One day you are competing and one day you're collaborating because you want to come together and improve care within the state. These are the kinds of things that are potentially going to continue to occur, not only in 2018, but in the future as well. There are not going to be clear, demarcated lines between who your partners are and who your competitors are. And we may have to be a little schizophrenic with some of those partners and competitors at the same time." — Imran Andrabi, MD, president and CEO of ThedaCare (Appleton, Wis.), on the blurring of collaboration and competition among health systems
4. "Imagine you're in Starbucks and they made your drink wrong. The barista sips the coffee and says, 'No we made it the right way, so you have to drink it' — that's what we do in healthcare." — David Feinberg, MD, president and CEO, Geisinger Health System (Danville, Pa.), on Geisinger's ProvenExperience initiative, which refunds patients and helps them feel "dignified" in their experience when they are dissatisfied with the care received
5. "We aren't seeing any movement on part of the big payers toward seeing the value in being a provider in the community setting and not just in an academic medical center." — Jill Batty, senior vice president and CFO, Cambridge (Mass.) Health Alliance, on the biggest challenges when negotiating with large insurers
6. "A deal can happen too fast or can drag along for a long time. Being too far on either end of the spectrum is not good." — Mark S. Martin, vice president of development, Adventist Health System (Altamonte Springs, Fla.)
7. "In terms of strategy, we need to continue to evolve. You need to avoid going after the shiny light in the sky or the shiny rock, whatever that may be, and instead stay focused on what works in your organization, communicate your strategy extensively and be inclusive. Get the data, have the facts and make decisions off of those." — Cheryl Sadro, executive vice president and chief of business and finance officer, University of Texas Medical Branch (Galveston)
8. "Data analytics is really important and automation is exciting. We spend so much time collecting data, if we could have a single source of truth and have it be automated, we could spend more time analyzing it and using it…We spend a lot of time getting data, but not looking at it." — John Kurvink, vice president of corporate affairs and CFO, Brant Community Healthcare System (Ontario, Canada)
9. "We have bills now the size of mortgages. For the average American family, where bankruptcy is still driven by healthcare bills, that's a big problem. Engaging patients is critical. Educating them about the cost of care so they can plan on how to pay [is important.]" — Robert Mittendorff, MD, partner, Northwest Venture Partners (Palo Alto, Calif.)
10. "What we often find is disparate governance and bylaws, documents and credentialing policies across various hospitals. This is an area that makes infinite sense to systematize. We often deal with systems, whether it be two hospitals or a hundred hospitals, with the prevailing thought that each hospital is unique and special. But they're not. What makes a hospital unique and special is the services that they offer." — Steven Bryant, president and CEO of The Greeley Company (Boston)
11. "There's nothing guaranteed to increase volatility more than growing expectations beyond a sustainable level." — Tucker Carlson, polital commentator and host of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News
12. "Sometimes you can get more done outside of politics than in politics. Republicans and Democrats aren't allowed to work together in Congress because the leadership fights against it. You're not allowed to have bipartisan cooperation any longer, and people have to overcome that." — Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City and 2008 presidential candidate
13. "Combining providers with insurance companies gives you actuarial expertise, reserves and reinsurance all under the same roof. As providers eventually get rid of fee for service medicine, that's the apttern I think you're goint to see and I think people in the private sector are going to be the ones who do it, not Congress." — Howard Dean, MD, former governor of Vermont and presidential candidate
14. "Relationship building and collaboration has elevated to a new level both within organizations and outside of them. It's relationship building on steroids." — Mark Madden, senior vice president of senior executive search for B.E. Smith (Kansas City)
15. "Team building is vital for cultivating a cohesive culture. You can control the culture but if somebody isn't fitting in, no matter how good of a performer they might be, you have to make that tough decision [and let them go]." — Philip M. Kambic, president and CEO of Riverside Medical Center (Kankakee, Il.)
16. "Every patient not only has the legal right to [get an electronic copy of their records], but they have the right to have it delivered ... in any format they want. It's like Burger King: 'Have it your way.'" — Aneesh Chopra, president of CareJourney (Arlington, Va.), on patients' right to access their medical data
17. "We take a page out of the hospitality business. Whether it's Ritz-Carlton or Disney World — whatever you want to tailor this after — they don't ask you, 'How would you like your sheets?' They do it for you, and if you'd like it a different way, they'll tailor that, as well." — Ed Martinez, senior vice president and CIO of Miami Children's Health System
18. "Recruit, don't conscript. Ask who wants to do it; don't tell them they're going to." — Bruce Rosenthal, MD, medical director of consumer telemedicine services at UPMC (Pittsburgh) on engaging clinicians in telemedicine programs
19. "As leaders we are responsible for so many things. Healthcare is such a tough business, that it literally never ends. But out of all our priorities at the top is making people feel like they matter." — Kevin Vermeer, president and CEO of UnityPoint Health (West Des Moines, Iowa)
20. "One of my biggest pieces of advice is, rather than sit and watch it happen, try to be proactive. If [disruptors] are coming into our space, which we know Optum and Amazon are, why not partner with them? We are partnering with Optum as an example on a pharmacy benefit management program through a virtual alliance we have with three or four other health systems. I think there are opportunities to partner with Amazon as well. We partnered with CVS, Walgreens and CityMD on the managed care side. All of these are threats on the care side and I do worry about it, but listen — healthcare has changed. The market has changed and we can't do it all ourselves anymore. I think having strategic partners is going to be the key to our success." — Robert Garrett, co-CEO of Hackensack Meridian Health (Edison, N.J.), on partnering with non-healthcare organizations
21. "Whatever changes you make, you have to make sure your staff also sees the benefit themselves. You're probably working at facilities where some of the nurses are stressed, some of the physicians are stressed and there is a lot of burnout. Make sure for any lean initiative you are doing, you take into account whether it makes things better for them as well and whether they can see it and feel it." — Ramsey Hasan, MD, CEO of United Family Intermed Hospital (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia), on employee engagement
22. "Where lean is not different, regardless of the industry it's applied to, is the fact that it's driving to value. If you want to interpret 'outcome' as clinical quality or clinical outcome, it's still value in the eyes of the primary customer, that primary customer being the patient. But frankly, whether I'm in the supply chain, manufacturing or service industry, it all starts with the value equation." — William Owad, senior vice president of operational excellence for Cardinal Health (Dublin, Ohio), on lean management in healthcare
23. "Precision medicine will be boots-on-the-ground care management. That's what precision medicine will look like. This will take into account who you are, what you want, what your medical history is, what the literature says, what the payer says, and they'll put it all together for you. For me, as I look down the road, that's care management of the future." — Kevin Ban, MD, Executive Director of Managed Care and Population Health Services at athenahealth (Watertown, Mass.)
24. "Somehow we managed to get a horse trailer, bring the horse to the hospital and bring our patient to the horse. Our patient was able to say goodbye the day before he died. Bringing a horse to a hospital stretched us a bit, sure, and there was nothing in this significant exercise we could measure. But it was the right thing to do." — Nancy Howell Agee, president and CEO of Carilion Clinic (Roanoke, Va.), on the distinction of being mission-driven and patient-focused, as illustrated by her team accommodating an ill patient's request to say farewell to his horse
25. "It amazes me how uniform the problem is. And uniformly bad. Our problem is not lack of knowledge, but implementing it at the bedside." — Steven Berkowitz, MD, founder and president of SMB Health Consulting (Austin, Texas) and interim CMO of Eastern Maine (Brewer) Health Systems, on the opioid epidemic
26. "When we think about technology, we encourage our clients not to think about it as just an enabler. It's actually going to be increasingly doing the work." — Tracey Malcolm, global future of work leader at Willis Towers Watson (Chicago)
27. "If you tell your consumer how you want them to engage you, they're going to respond back with how they want to engage with you, and the more restrictive you make it the less likely they're going to use you." — Alan Roga, MD, president of provider division, Teladoc (Purchase, N.Y.)
28. "There is a general recognition in the market that things are going to get worse. No one in this room expects reimbursement to increase or more coverage for self-pay patients. With that general recognition, what we are seeing is selective offense as being the best form of defense." — Mukesh Gangwal, president and CEO of Prism Healthcare Partners (Chicago)
29. "The one thing I truly worry about is the lack of concern and empathy by legislators for the people we serve. That worries me a lot." — Sue Turney, MD, president and CEO of Marshfield (Wis.) Clinic Health System
30. "I must admit on a whole, we have not taken these areas as seriously as we can and should. I'm embarrassed to say in my own home state of Minnesota, only 24 percent of hospitals had a recognized antibiotic stewardship program in place." — Michael Osterholm, PhD, professor at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, on the role hospitals play in antibiotic stewardship
31. "In my healthcare career, I can't remember a time when politics played such a large role. Who's coming in and who's coming out of office greatly affects healthcare policy. What's scary is that people making the decisions don't have the knowledge of the complexity of healthcare." — James L. Robinson II, PsyD, president of Presence Saint Joseph's Hospital-Chicago
32. "Long-term success is based on how quickly you adapt to the market changes that are constantly happening. Our business is full of organizations that are too big to fail, so we decided to reorganize our model to emphasize adaptability." — Akram Boutros, MD, president and CEO of The MetroHealth System (Cleveland)
33. "When I think about leadership, I continue to redefine the definition because of all the challenges we face. I don't think I follow any rules. I kind of try to adapt and be flexible about the things that are really in front of me every single day." — Jose R. Sanchez, president and CEO, Norwegian American Hospital (Chicago)