In today's environment, long-term vision is essential for any hospital and health system. This is especially true as CEOs plan while navigating existing financial and workforce challenges.
Chris Durovich, president and CEO of Children's Health; Peter McCanna, CEO of Baylor Scott and White Health; and Sanjay Shetty, MD, president of Steward Health Care System, recently interviewed with D Magazine to discuss their Dallas-based organizations' growth strategies, among other issues.
Below is an excerpt from that conversation.
Question: Can you give us a look into what the growth strategy looks like for your systems?
Chris Durovich: Rough estimates say that there will be 150,000 more children in North Texas five years from now than there are today. What we have endeavored to do is to provide multiple points of interaction. We have our flagship, we have our hospital in Plano, we are part of the Redbird mall development, and we are in the process of opening another facility in Prosper. Through partnerships with two providers, Haven Healthcare and Perimeter Healthcare, we've gone from 12 psychiatric beds to 55 beds available. We've also moved into the technology space as an independent provider. We have a tele-school relationship with 250 school nurses and tele-mental health relationship with almost 300 school nurses. We've been able to train our team to deliver care virtually, and we have used apps to continue to engage on a business-to-consumer basis. Our opportunity is to use all of those outlets to reach children and, more important, their parents. The future is extraordinarily exciting.
Peter McCanna: We believe in building out the ecosystem both up and downstream from the hospital to give you what you need. We can't do that all by ourselves. We've got to develop partnerships. We have a long history with United Surgical Partners International and its ambulatory surgery centers, so we're used to doing this as a health system. We've also announced a hospital-at-home partnership with Contessa Health, which is considered the national leader in hospital-at-home, to provide that option to patients who need it. We'd like to think no one ever requests medical records for our patients because they stay in our system, but when I looked at a competitor's system, it was about 50/50. Patients in healthcare today, particularly if you break it down by generation, have much less loyalty than you might think. We believe if we are providing them with what they want, where they want it, when they want it, we can increase loyalty. And when we increase loyalty, revenue will grow.
Dr. Sanjay Shetty: We've been on this growth journey for a number of years, and going forward, it will probably look similar to what we've done in the past, which is looking for communities that have a set of hospitals with a paired set of physicians and an affiliate network that matches our model. We also divested a portion of our Medicare ACO business. It was described as a divestiture, but it's probably closer to a partnership with CareMax. We could do this ourselves, but we could partner with someone who's already good at it and has that access to capital to accelerate our journey. What we're going to see is some hospital growth but especially continued growth on the accountable care side. The Medicare model of a sole focus on seniors is something that's going to be replicated with Medicaid and eventually the commercial and employer space, where each of those populations can have specific needs. We believe that's where the future is going, and we want to accelerate our journey to pathways where we're being incentivized to deliver high- quality, lower-cost care.
To read the full interview, click here.