CEOs have navigated various challenges and changes in the healthcare industry throughout their careers. Whether related to the workforce, budget, leadership, or technology, these experiences have provided valuable lessons that continue to resonate with them today.
As part of an ongoing series of conversations with health system leaders, Becker's asked: If you could go back in time 10 years, what would you tell yourself to start doing or learning about? What ended up being a bigger deal than it seemed at the time?
Below are their responses, in alphabetical order.
Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity. This story was updated on Sept. 26.
Larry Antonucci, MD. President and CEO of Lee Health (Fort Myers, Fla.): The transition from volume to value. We've been talking about that for more than 10 years, and if you look back and you look at the surveys of CEOs back then, they all predicted by this time that we would be well into a value-based arrangement. And we just haven't seen that because it is so much more difficult than it appears. Trying to align the delivery system with the payment system is a real challenge because if you let one get ahead of the other, you could put a system in deep water very quickly. So I think the complexities related to value-based care are something that we entered into without fully knowing and understanding how difficult it would be.
Lourdes Boue. CEO of Coral Gables, Fla.-based Doctors Hospital and Miami-based West Kendall Baptist Hospital: I don't know that it's a bigger deal, but it's important. I think as you grow up in an organization and you're very focused on performance, and getting that performance with people and creating the right culture, I think what we forget is that as you rise within an organization, the need to build external relationships, the networking becomes important.
I spent a lot of my career in operations at the COO level. The COO is the doer, to get the performance done. And so I would say that those individuals who are aspiring to grow into that higher C-suite level like CEO need to take the time to build the networking within the industry and outside of the industry, to build relationships that will support them in the need to be much more outward-facing the higher you go in an organization. And I wish somebody had told me that 10 years ago.
E.J. Kuiper. President and CEO of Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System (Baton Rouge, La.): I've always been people-centric and always understood the power of a highly engaged workforce. But I believe if I could go back 10 years in time, I would tell myself to never cut the budget for leadership development. At the end of the day, whether you have 18,000 team members like we have in our system, or you have 1,800 or 180,000 people, it's really the leadership team, the managers, the directors, that drives your success. Sometimes during economic downturns, you tend to want to or you have the need to cut the budget, and leadership development sometimes is high on that list. And really it should, at all times, be protected. Without a highly engaged, highly educated, highly mission-centric leadership team, we wouldn't be successful here at FMOLHS. So I would tell myself, no matter how big the need might be or the temptation to cut dollars there, I would advise myself to never do so.
Todd LaPorte. CEO of HonorHealth (Scottsdale, Ariz.): Ten years ago, I had a heart attack. I was only 52 years old. I recognized I needed to be in better shape. So I was in the process of concluding a workout and had been in a series of workouts preceding that. I probably overdid it that day. But suffice it to say, I was driving home from my rigorous workout and ended up having a sensation that turned out to be symptoms of a heart attack. I actually pulled into a parking lot at a Home Depot that was on the way to my home, and, after stopping, and I had light rushing in faster than I could process it, I leaned on my driver's door and fell to the ground onto the 120-degree pavement in the parking lot. And I had the good fortune of being seen by a physician who came over, attended to me and then, of course, emergency services all kicked in.
What I learned from all of that is that my attitude of selfless service to others had to start with, ironically, taking care of myself. It's a lesson in servant leadership in that you can't be a good servant leader unless you're first taking care of yourself. As I was sitting in the hospital the day after, I declared to my daughters that I was going to view that day as the best day of my life. And the quality of my life the last 10 years has been exponentially better than the previous 10 before that attack. It's because I have been living a healthier lifestyle. I've become better educated. I've felt empowered to make a difference with my health. And it's amazing how it's translated into a higher quality of life on so many fronts.
Pete McCanna. CEO of Baylor Scott & White Health (Dallas): If I could go back 10 years and start doing or start learning about something more than I did, it would have been agile management methods, which is a new way of management compared to the historical hierarchical approaches to management. [To be] agile is to be adaptable. It is notable for its speed. It's notable for how it empowers a broader set of professionals and employees. It's very collaborative. And it leaves a lot of room for creativity. So that speed, that creativity, that adaptability are hallmarks of agile management that are not present in historical hierarchical management. And I would have learned more about that method and applied it more extensively over the last 10 years knowing what I know now.
What ended up being a bigger deal than it might have seemed at one point is clearly artificial intelligence and its potential. Every bit of what we learned since the announcement of a workable generative AI model really points to another revolution in American business and global business. I think that's a far bigger deal than we could have ever anticipated 10 years ago.
Bill Robertson, CEO of MultiCare Health System (Tacoma, Wash.): If I had started this 10 years ago thinking about it, my organization would be in an interestingly better position today relative to the nursing shortage than we are. My team has been working over the last year or year and a half to redesign the clinical model used for nursing. And if I could go back 10 years, when we could relatively easily recruit nurses, and nurses were not choosing to go off and be agency staff, I would have been way more focused on redesigning the nursing care model. I would be working with people to do that.
It was really clear we were going to have to do that at some point. And it took a global pandemic and nurses dramatically changing how they thought about their roles at hospitals to get us to the stage where we're redesigning the nursing clinical model. My team's done a great job and has done great presentations about the success we're generating. But if we had 10 years under our belt, we'd be in a way better place.
[On what ended up being a bigger deal than it might have seemed at one point]: Toward the end of the pandemic, there was a massive set of legislation at the federal level that pumped billions of dollars into the economy. And at the time, I had a lot of anxiety, because it felt to me that that was priming us for inflation. But a lot of pundits of the time said it's not going to do that. Then we had transient inflation, which clearly has not been transient. The political class and the business class, we probably underestimated the overheating of that massive influx, combined with the legacy issues of COVID, and we're dealing with that in healthcare. So, a much bigger deal than people probably thought things like infrastructure bills were going to create in the general economy.
Todd Suntrapak. President and CEO of Valley Children's Healthcare (Madera, Calif.): Learning to be open to outside-the-healthcare-financial-box thinking is paramount for me. I've tried to manage Valley Children's Healthcare for long-term financial stability. It's challenging, as the here-and-now can distract from the what-we-need-later.
Predicting what patient needs may be in 10 years also is risky. For example, who envisioned the global pandemic occurring? Nonetheless, however healthcare needs evolve, it's clear that generating new and reliable funding sources to achieve financial stability is critical for U.S. hospitals. We're moving forward on an expansive housing, retail and entertainment development that, when completed, will provide Valley Children's Hospital with the independent and diversified revenue we can rely on beyond patient income.
Embracing a passion for what 10-years-out looks like is fundamental to what we need to do and no longer an outsourced nice to have.