Divya Joshi, MD, MMM serves as Chief Executive Officer for OSF Healthcare Children’s Hospital of Illinois and OSF Healthcare System Children’s Services.
On April 11th, Dr. Divya Joshi, will speak on a panel at Becker's Hospital Review 9th Annual Meeting. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place April 11-14, 2018 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Dr. Joshis session, click here.
Question: As a leader, what is the best investment you made in your own professional development in the past five years?
Dr. Joshi: Taking on a new position that stretched me! Moving into a new position that was just created, at a new organization, that required skills I had not tested (or developed) yet, was the best thing I could have done. I received the right balance of support and challenge to push myself and succeed. Nothing is a better teacher than a new opportunity that is meaningful and extends just a bit beyond your current skill (and comfort) level.
Q: How do you see the barrier between competitors and collaborators changing?
DJ: Too often, we compete when we truly should be collaborating. We are all aligned in our mission to alleviate suffering, heal, educate and advance the science; we all understand that to provide quality care and be financially solvent, not everybody should do everything. Yet we open up cardiovascular surgery and proton beam programs in neighboring organizations. While this model might work in an open market, I am not at all convinced that it works in healthcare.
Until the incentives focus on prevention versus treatment, quality versus quantity, outcomes versus processes, competition for market share for lucrative services will continue... and contribute to the spiraling healthcare costs nationwide. In the end, it will likely be the unsustainability of healthcare costs that lead to the need to collaborate.
Q: Please share a new consumer-centric capability your organization has built or tapped into within the past 18 months.
DJ: Disadvantaged families in our community have very low immunization rates. They also have high ED visits.
We deployed our Care-a-Van, a mobile clinic, to a housing development where we organized a pumpkin-painting event with free pedometers (followed by a free flu shot) to anybody who came. More than 200 people came (200 pumpkins, only 14 shots) and we were able to create a rapport with the community living there: they invited us back. We were also ale to understand the population’s barriers to immunization – which we will address when we return!