Atlanta-based Emory Healthcare increased revenue 16% from fiscal year 2023 to 2024 under the leadership of Joon Lee, MD, without mergers or acquisitions. Instead, Dr. Lee and his team grew services, increased efficiencies and improved collections.
The system also restructured its leadership to eliminate hospital presidents and unify as a single system with regional leaders. The system is becoming more integrated, cohesive and accessible with two hospital divisions: one for the university hospitals and one for regional hospitals. A president of each region reports to Dr. Lee and each campus hospital has a COO to run daily operations. The new structure streamlined operations and empowered the hospital COOs to adjust staffing based on need.
The system achieved a $400 million turnaround with improved collections and achieved nearly $7 billion in revenue for the 2024 fiscal year despite the impacts from Change Healthcare's data breach, the CrowdStrike youtube and IV shortages.
"We were still able to implement the plan we had in place to weather those financial challenges and move forward with great results," said Dr. Lee on an episode of the "Becker's Healthcare Podcast." "Having a high performance leadership team gave us a little bit of a window into what it meant for the organization to come together and function more as a system versus a hospital."
Dr. Lee said the health system was functioning like a holding company with hospitals and physician practices when he arrived at the system in July 2023; the leaders at each entity weren't able to see the big picture.
"We made a concerted effort to both change the structure and interaction between the various operating units, or business units, which are the hospitals or the practices," said Dr. Lee.
The restructure aligned and consolidated the physician division so the health system could execute more coordinated actions and overcome challenges together.
"That type of integration occurred between finance and the operations team in terms of dealing with challenges like the Change Healthcare breach," said Dr. Lee. "It let us do a lot of things that were quite challenging before, including load balancing. We shifted some of the patients from one emergency room to another campus, which may have had more available beds, freeing up the university hospital beds for more complex patients. None of this is necessarily rocket science, if you will, but it's critically important for us to function efficiently and be agile."
These foundational changes positioned Emory for long-term financial stability through continuous improvement and interactive processes; clinical outcomes; efficiencies and hardwiring the culture and structure of continuous performance improvement into the organization.
"We were able to create a financial turnaround and achieve a much better financial state not by taking advantage of one-time changes but really foundational changes in terms of how a system works and how the workforce relates to the system," said Dr. Lee. "Our focus is very much on continuing the performance trajectory and really making it a long term continuous trajectory instead of like a stock market up-and-down. We very much want to avoid that."
The C-suite culture has been built with content knowledge experts equipped to deal with the big challenges of today as operational leaders. Dr. Lee said it's important to have a culture of communication so the system's top C-suite leaders can work well together.
"We have a tight knit team with very different backgrounds and types of deep expertise in terms of content, but most importantly, very focused on working together and the concept of a singular system," said Dr. Lee. "It's what we talk about every day, every week. How do we help each other maneuver and navigate these challenges. That's hard to quantify, but I certainly believe it's really important."
In the next year, Dr. Lee plans to continue evolving the leadership team as the system grows. He is also leveling up after spending the last 18 months building trust and a positive relationship with leaders throughout the organization.
"I tell people if I'm the same leader that I was a year-and-a-half ago, then I'm really failing the organization," said Dr. Lee. "That's certainly the expectation from myself to our core leadership team and beyond, that we are still evolving to meet the needs of the organization, which is evolving, but also the whole healthcare economic system as well as the components that are shifting rapidly."