Becker's is touching base with healthcare chief operating officers to illustrate what the job means to different health systems. Read more here.
Kurt Koczent, RN, does not lead his 1,900 employees from an ivory tower. He's well aware of the hardships frontline workers face: he has experienced many himself.
Mr. Koczent — now the executive vice president and chief operating officer of Canandaigua, N.Y.-based Thompson Health, a member of University of Rochester (N.Y.) Medicine — began his healthcare career as a nurse's aide. He became a registered nurse in 1995 and decided to move into leadership after a decade as a trauma nurse in the Army Reserves.
Mr. Koczent told Becker's he wanted to "figure out how to make a difference to my community," and that meant taking on greater responsibilities. He stepped up when the county jail needed a healthcare administrator, ascended the ranks from practice manager to vice president of outpatient services at Thompson Health, and rose to the occasion when a neighboring health system was searching for a chief administrative officer to grow its physician network.
He decided to return to Thompson Health as chief operating officer, in part because of the familial environment fostered by the 113-bed community hospital, he said. Mr. Koczent's role takes him into the deepest corners of the organization's operations: ones he knows well from his wide range of past healthcare roles.
"When somebody wants to come and talk to me about an operational issue, I can speak from a place of experience — not from an accounting perspective, not from a textbook perspective," Mr. Koczent said.
Mr. Koczent works closely with various positions across the enterprise as COO. He leads a daily safety huddle, conducts rounds on a regular basis and hosts meetings with different disciplines to ensure they are meeting targets and determine ways to improve.
One unique focus of the COO role at Thompson Health is its emphasis on quality initiatives. It is easy to claim to be the best on a billboard, but how do you prove it?
"It was very clear early on that our CEO and board of directors wanted to have outside stamps of approval of our institutions that would come in and review our services and say, 'Yes, you are doing great,'" Mr. Koczent said. "It's not just saying that we're great, we're actually able to prove that we're at the top of our game for everything that we do."
To determine the most useful, feasible certifications for Thompson Health, Mr. Koczent must stay in touch with clinicians and the patient population. For example, the health system noticed its number one readmission by volume was patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, so Mr. Koczent led a multidisciplinary team to obtain chronic obstructive pulmonary disease certification from the Joint Commission.
"We've been able to see that impact," Mr. Koczent said. "And the skillset transfers not just in primary care, but in the hospital, in our pulmonary division."
In the past 10 years, Mr. Koczent has seen the health system grow from around 25,000 annual visits a year to 150,000 and more than double its primary care practice locations, all while focusing on quality alongside momentum. Currently, his number one focus is recruitment and retention. Along with flexibility and growth opportunities, the health system offers a community where senior leaders know every frontline worker by name and take their concerns seriously, according to Mr. Koczent.
"I've actually worked nearly every position in a hospital like this, from an aide to a nurse [and from] a nurse leader to the executive director," Mr. Koczent said. "And that really lends itself well when I have frustrated people within our institution because they know I know."