Eric Dickson, MD, embraces a leadership philosophy that is focused on continuous improvement. At its core, his approach centers around a simple yet meaningful question: "What ideas do you have?"
Dr. Dickson follows this philosophy today as president and CEO of Worcester, Mass.-based UMass Memorial Health, where the health system's Innovation Station — a digital platform for sharing and implementing ideas — empowers employees to improve workflow processes and patient care.
His commitment to this approach was shaped during his time at the Iowa City-based University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, where he held various clinical and senior management roles from 2003 to 2009, including his final position as interim COO from 2008 to 2009.
After earning his medical degree and completing his residency training in emergency medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Dr. Dickson struggled with the notion that, as a leader, he was supposed to have all the answers.
"I tried to apply the way we [practiced] emergency medicine in the Boston market to the rural area of the University of Iowa, and it didn't work," he told Becker's.
Sarabdeep "Sabi" Singh, now executive vice president and COO of Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., helped change his mindset.
"He taught me this concept that leadership is not about knowing the answer," Dr. Dickson explained. "Leadership is about setting the goals for an organization — or a piece of the organization, like the emergency department — and asking the people doing the work for their ideas on how to achieve the goal."
Guided by Mr. Singh's advice, Dr. Dickson began asking his team members for ideas and helping them implement those solutions. He described this approach as "transformative" and applied it both as head of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine and later as interim COO for the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.
"I was clear about what the goal was and what we needed to achieve," Dr. Dickson said. "But instead of saying, 'And this is the way we're going to achieve it,' I was taught to say, 'And I don't know how we're going to achieve this. What ideas do you have?'"
He applied this philosophy when he returned to the University of Massachusetts. Before taking the top leadership role at UMass Memorial Health in 2013, Dr. Dickson served as president of the UMass Memorial Medical Group and senior associate dean at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
"I used to almost feel like I'm not really that good of a leader; I just help people implement their ideas," Dr. Dickson said. "But then I figured out that there are so few leaders that believe that — the solutions to all their problems exist within the ideas of the front-line workforce. And so when I became CEO, we were already doing this in the medical group. I had already done it in Iowa, but this was my chance to crank it out, to take it to the next level."
As part of that next level, Dr. Dickson meets with all 900 managers annually. He discusses Innovation Station with them, expectations related to the platform, and expectations for them as managers of their teams. The goal of Innovation Station, as he puts it, is to engage all employees and implement their ideas for organizational improvement.
Today, UMass Memorial Health encourages teams to engage in biweekly internal huddles to identify processes and areas most in need of innovation. New hires are also trained to develop and document ideas using Innovation Station.
Additionally, each week Dr. Dickson draws 10 names out of a "digital hat" of people who implemented ideas and gives them a $250 bonus. He also draws a team name out of the hat weekly and gives them a celebration dinner. And, annually, UMass Memorial Health holds a celebration where Dr. Dickson gives away $250,000 in prize money to the innovators of the year.
"Every year, we implement more ideas than the year before," Dr. Dickson said. "Now we're at 135,000 ideas implemented. Small little improvements that have added up to an enormous improvement in terms of the performance of this organization."
He noted that one of the 135,000 ideas put forth since the program's inception has particularly stood out. came from a nursing assistant who had been asked by the head of transplant surgery to think of ideas to help transplant patients walk sooner, or more to improve outcomes.
The nursing assistant told a transplant surgeon, "'Can we put numbers on the floor so the patients can measure how far they've walked, and then they can come back to their room and chart it?' And it almost became a contest," Dr. Dickson said.
"Nobody had ever thought of asking the nursing assistant for an idea that was going to change the outcome for the transplant patient — for some of our sickest patients we have. And lo and behold, as soon as we did that, the patient outcomes improved. The patients were walking more. The families would come and say, 'Hey, look, you only walked 20 feet today. You need to do 40.' And so the patients, the families, were more engaged, the outcomes were better."
Another benefit, he noted, is the nursing assistant would walk by the numbers on the floor and take pride knowing the organization heard and implemented an idea she had to improve outcomes for transplant patients.
For Dr. Dickson, these and other benefits outweigh the $5 million yearly investment the health system makes in the initiative.
"I keep focused on this: your employees have lots of ideas about how you can improve," Dr. Dickson said. "For a long time, what they didn't have was a standardized process for collecting those ideas and making sure they're executed upon.
"Whether it's an idea board or an Innovation Station, an electronic system, the key is not that it's stimulating ideas — because your employees already have all those ideas. It's having a system to make sure the who, what, when [of] following up on implementing those ideas."