Joon Sup Lee, MD, has served as CEO of Atlanta-based Emory Healthcare since July 1, and he brought with him experience as an executive, as well as an understanding of the patient perspective and the value of research at academic medical centers.
As CEO, Dr. Lee leads one of the most comprehensive academic health systems in Georgia. Emory Healthcare, part of Emory University, includes 11 hospitals, the Emory Clinic and hundreds of provider locations.
Before joining Emory Healthcare, he served as executive vice president at Pittsburgh-based UPMC and president of UPMC Physician Services.
Dr. Lee told Becker's he's committed to improvements and initiatives that will help Emory Healthcare navigate today's industry challenges. He shared initiatives he's particularly excited about, discussed a few of the top challenges facing health systems and offered his take on future expansion and development plans.
Note: Responses been lightly edited for concision and clarity.
Question: How has Emory adapted to the changing healthcare landscape, especially in response to recent global events like the COVID-19 pandemic?
Dr. Joon Sup Lee: Our hiring practices are very different. Our staffing and those components are different. The other thing that's really changed is that the recognition that the healthcare landscape has permanently become more fluid. Because of all the changes, we have focused on our leadership, management and our culture because we have to be much more nimble as an organization. It's not even only about the pandemic. We know there are going to be continuous changes economically. So it's a recognition that we, as an organization, to be as successful as we need to be, have to have a leadership and a management structure that is constantly evaluating what is happening much more in real time than we had been doing traditionally. Especially with a large academic health system, we fundamentally have to be more nimble in terms of our decision-making. We can't be making decisions on a multi-year scale for everything. And, again, recognizing that we are living in a fluid environment. It's not necessarily the COVID-19 that created it, but COVID-19 was the trigger that exposed a lot of these trends and then sped up a lot of these changes. And, fortunately or unfortunately, I think the speed of change will continue, and unless we're an organization that can proactively handle and proactively stay ahead as well as react to these changes, we're not going be as successful as we need to be.
Q: What initiatives or innovations in healthcare delivery, research or education are you particularly excited about at Emory?
JSL: There is a strong tradition of innovation at Emory. It has been the epicenter of interventional cardiology in America when it first started. And there have been a lot of other innovations in terms of robotic cardiac surgery. It was also the discovery site for one of the more famous antiretroviral agents for HIV treatment and one of the new agents for treatment of even COVID-19. Those innovations will continue. But our focus has been looking at how we value the innovations and delivery of care, not just necessarily new small techniques, but the continuum of care, looking at what is happening with the patient experience. We focus on the clinical outcome, the overall patient and family experience and then economic efficiency. But we've added a fourth factor, which is the impact on our workforce. That's everyone from physicians to the clinical nurses, the advanced practice providers, the medical assistants.
We're focused very much on so-called ambient technology. For example, technology that listens to the patient-doctor conversation but has the capacity to change the workflow, because it can take that conversation. Instead of giving us a simple transcript, the audio is embedded into the EMR. We know other processes can be automated and allow us to invest much more in the clinical workforce. Instead of focusing on the piecemeal solutions, we're looking at solutions that enhance the professional life of our nurses and other clinical professionals. We need to do better. We need to minimize the burnout. We need to minimize the professional dissatisfaction of nurses. And to recruit and retain more nurses and have them spend more time on the activities they really want to do from a clinical standpoint.
Q: Emory recently created two new leadership positions to enhance alignment of patient care throughout its hospitals. What role does this decision play in the organization's short-term financial goals and its long-term strategic planning for sustainability and growth?
JSL: The intent is much more of a consolidated management structure because we believe that the different hospitals that are within the system have to function in a much more coordinated manner. And this is simultaneously happening with an aggressive move toward a service line management system where the campus location and campus walls are less important from a management standpoint. The intent is coordination and consolidation. These new leadership positions have responsibility over multiple campuses. And my charge to them and what I am holding them accountable to is making the different campuses in each region function more as a coordinated system, whether we're talking about capital distribution or other matters. The two people elevated to the new leadership roles, Heather Dexter and Matt Wain, are proven leaders, and they have shown that they can innovate, and they have shown that they can create connections between what are traditionally disparate silos in healthcare. And that's what we're going to need going down the line. If health systems don't function in a much more coordinated systematic manner, as more of a singular organization, we can't achieve the efficiency that we need.
Q: What are the future expansion or development plans for Emory, including new facilities, services or partnerships?
JSL: The advantage we have is a bustling, diverse and growing metropolitan area. But ultimately, for us to sustain and continue with our mission, we're going have to grow our primary care, and we have to do that as rapidly as possible. We don't have enough primary care physicians as a whole, much less within the healthcare system. We also have to aggressively increase our capacity to perform outpatient care, whether that's in a formal ambulatory surgery center or a multispecialty center. And third, we are still pretty heavily concentrated in the greater metropolitan Atlanta area, and we need an ability to spread geographically. I don't think that it is practical for us to continuously build hospitals. Those imperatives for us to grow the outpatient component of primary care, as well as the geographical spread, are definitely going to require some different types of partnerships that will allow us to grow with the speed that's needed and the complexity in terms of coordinating that care.