Kevin Jenkins recently began serving as CEO of Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health's Utah market and CEO of Holy Cross Hospital-Salt Lake, and he brings years of leadership experience to the role.
Mr. Jenkins was appointed to his current job when CommonSpirit named CEOs to lead the five Utah hospitals added to the system earlier this year and renamed in honor of the Sisters of the Holy Cross.
Before assuming his current role, he held roles including president and CEO of St. Anthony Hospital and St. Anthony North Hospital, vice president of operations and interim CEO for St. Anthony North Health Campus, and vice president of ambulatory care for Centennial, Colo.-based Centura Health's Mountains and North Denver Operating Group. Centura has since folded into CommonSpirit. He also held leadership roles at CommonSpirit's CHI Franciscan Health, which has since combined with Tacoma, Wash.-based Virginia Mason Franciscan Health.
Becker's recently caught up with Mr. Jenkins, and he revealed a few of his priorities for his first year as market CEO in Utah and CEO of Holy Cross Hospital-Salt Lake. A few takeaways from the conversation:
1. Commitment to growth. Mr. Jenkins emphasized his commitment to investing capital dollars into the Utah market. "We have a lot of equipment and buildings and services that we need to really focus on," he said. "And bringing the latest technologies to these hospitals, to the communities, we're very committed to that."
2. Bringing in Epic. Epic, the nation's largest EHR vendor, will be rolled out across the Utah market's five hospitals. "We're going to upgrade and update our medical record for patient care across all of our hospitals," Mr. Jenkins said. "So our hospitals can communicate and talk to each other in our clinics, and it's integrated across the board to provide healthcare for anyone in any community that walks into our facilities across Utah."
3. Assessing staffing models. Hospitals in the Utah market are assessing how they staff the hospitals to best provide care. This includes completing staffing summits where workers provide input on staffing. "In the past, there's been a lot of competition among our hospitals in Utah," Mr. Jenkins said. "Now we're … going to focus … across our communities and then really grow and develop that moving forward. And that's led to our strategic planning process where we take this off as a market, as a whole and with input from our physicians and our key stakeholders and our partners and our community partners and then also at each individual hospital level as well." He estimates the work will be completed over the next six months.