But to offer a window into the future, Ms. Sanford mentioned a defining moment from her past. In her early career as a nursing leader at a smaller, regional health system, Ms. Sanford briefly left nursing to take on a strategy role. It was during that time she made a key discovery.
“A while before I came to CommonSpirit, I worked in a smaller system in the strategy area, and one of my jobs was to go out and go to the Lion’s Club and Rotary Club and all the local community clubs and ask people what they wanted in healthcare,” she said in a recent episode of the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast.” “It was fascinating to me. I wouldn’t call it a true research study, but it was fascinating how many people said what we are missing is coordination. We’re looking for someone to coordinate our care.”
Ms. Sanford pushed back. Didn’t their primary care physician’s office have someone to coordinate care for them? The answer was a resounding, “No. That’s not what we’re looking for.”
Instead, she found her community desired someone to coordinate care across the continuum, managing all the different offices they visited and services they received. The message still resonates with Ms. Sanford today.
“When we talk about growth for the future, I think the work that we’re working on is all about that: about how we are going to coordinate,” she said. “We have opportunities to figure out how we’re going to coordinate that care and give people what they want.”
That discovery led Ms. Sanford to create a dyad partnership model between nursing and physician leaders at CommonSpirit across the country to improve care coordination and delivery. The nurse and physician executives are equal partners in the organization and work together in decision-making for their clinical teams.
“We’ll start with all clinicians coming together around the care of the patient and to coordinate our care,” she said. “That’s going to help us a lot with growth. We also know that we’re going to be having more and more technology to work with, and we think that some of that technology will help us grow. But we need to be careful because we don’t want to get too excited about the new technology.”
Healthcare teams, including Ms. Sanford, are bombarded with technology vendors touting their latest and greatest artificial intelligence-driven products. She warns her team not to lose track of their goals when going after new technologies.
“What we need to do is know what our goals are and then figure out what technology and AI will help us get there,” she said. “That’s a big area of growth, as long as we remember to keep an eye on what our goals are. We are also going to be adding more with our virtual nursing. We have some areas of growth where all kinds of virtual clinical activities can happen, both to make care better for patients and to make the work of clinicians better as well.
