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Welcome to the Becker's Healthcare podcast. I'm Mariah
Taylor, assistant editor, and I'm thrilled to interview
Shlomit Shaul, chief physician executive at Houston Methodist
and president and chief executive officer at Houston
Methodist Physician Organization
on the podcast today. Doctor Schall, thank you
so much for joining me. I'm so excited
for this conversation because you're one of our
upcoming panelists at our CEO CFO conference, and
we're really excited to get a sneak peek
into some of your thought leadership.
But before we dive in, I'd love if
you could introduce yourself and tell us a
little bit more about your background.
Alright. Thank you so much for having me
today.
I'm Shlomi Chal. I'm a chief physician executive
here at Houston Methodist. I'm also the CEO
of our physician organization here at Houston Methodist.
And, as a background, I'm a clinician scientist.
I'm a retina surgeon.
I've been in academic medicine my entire
lifetime.
Maybe you can hear a little bit of
an accent in my voice,
maybe a lot. I, made a journey all
the way from Israel to Kentucky
through Massachusetts
where I was the chair of the Department
of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences
at University of Massachusetts.
And then,
that was
really
recent
a year and a half ago
and
also was the President
of the Medical Group at UMASS Memorial Medical
Group. I moved to Houston, Texas about a
year and a half ago
and to take this job.
And I'm really enjoying my time here, especially
now that we're talking in August, which is
the hottest month of the year here and
the most human humid one in Houston.
Oh, I can only imagine.
Tell me a little bit about your most
successful project or initiative from the last year.
What did you do and what were the
results?
So in my role here, I am responsible,
for everything to do
quality and patient safety in our entire organization.
That means all our hospitals and our clinics
in our Greater Houston.
I'm also
responsible,
for our physician organization.
So I'm new to the organization, relatively new
to the organization
and it's a great organization.
I'm sure you know that Houston Methodist is
really a leader in quality patient safety. We
are really leading also in
our employee engagement.
So we call ourselves leading medicine and as
an executive, when you join such a strong
team,
and your job as an executive is to
make the organization
even better than it is,
because really in healthcare, we always
are on a journey to keep improving and
getting better.
How do you do that?
And what I did together with my team,
my excellent
new team that actually I inherited
when I started here,
we went on a listening and learning tour
through the entire organization. At the beginning, we
did it
with focus on quality and patient safety.
And then
this year,
this 2024
year, we actually focused on something that is
very close to my heart,
which is
wellness and physicians, specifically physician well-being
physician and clinicians. So it's physicians and APPs.
And what we wanted to know is really
how are we doing here at Houston Methodist
and what could we do possibly better
to make our physicians,
clinicians and care providers
better because I truly believe that this is
in high correlation
with quality of care. If you have a
highly engaged physician, highly engaged clinician, they're going
to deliver
better quality and safer care to our patients.
So this became a high priority
in our physician organization
this year.
And what we did, we went on a
tour and we call it a JIMMY tour.
We're very proud of the name. JIMMY is
Joy in Medicine
Initiative.
We went on that JIMMY tour and we
started we focused on our primary care physicians.
And
you think about why are we focusing on
primary care, because primary care physicians are really
the door
to our organization.
A lot of our patients
door
to our organization. A lot of our patients
are referred to our specialty physicians through our
primary care providers.
And I wanted to take a chance to
take the opportunity and get to know them
better.
And together with my team and our executive
team at the physician organization,
we went
from site to site
and met
in person
with
all of our primary care providers.
These are both physicians and APPs and we
really asked 3 questions. We asked,
what are you doing here? Who are you?
Get to know them. The second question is,
what's good here at Houston Methodist?
And then the third question is, what could
we do better?
And this was really a humble tour. I
came from a place that I thought even
though I'm 30
years in medicine and in academic medicine and
I'm a clinician and a surgeon,
I came from a place of I do
not know anything about Houston Methodist.
Tell me how it is to be here
and help me
make your life better.
So it was really,
a wonderful
tour where people told us what's good about
us and what could
we do better.
And that helped us devise a
strategy for our physician
organization in terms of wellness.
Now we just didn't only
we're not only satisfied with these person, because
these are group meetings, sometimes it was small
group, sometimes it was bigger groups, our smallest
group was maybe 14 people, the biggest group
was more than 80.
So we didn't
just settle for these in person meetings. We
also used
a press gaining tool called
crowdsourcing
where we could get ideas
from our own
physicians
and APPs
of how to what to focus on in
our strategy
to make their
lives better here
as clinicians in Houston Methodist.
And now we are in the process
of getting information
from Jimmy Tour, from our crowdsourcing
and also from
surveys that we distributed.
And this is a survey
out of PWAAC. PWAAC,
I'm sure you know, but PWAAC is a
professional well-being and academic consortium
that is led
by
Stanford, but many
healthcare systems and academic healthcare systems in particular
are part of PWAs because physician well-being
is a national
priority, I would say. We are not the
only ones who are focusing on it.
And there is no silver bullet that can
solve
the situation. So we
aligned ourselves with PWAC. We
distributed their survey
as really a site in a national survey
that is distributed
every year
in many academic healthcare systems. So
to devise the strategy,
we are taking input from this 1 on
1 meetings in person,
from the
crowdsourcing
and also
from
the
PWAC
survey.
And we are going to have
a big first inaugural
Jimmy Symposium
on November 1. If you want to come
to Houston, Mariah, I'm inviting you.
And we will
really
unveil
what our strategy is. What I can tell
you as a preview
is that we are focusing on really 3
major things.
One big thing is efficiency
of practice.
We heard so many times from our physicians
that a good day is a day that
starts on time,
that all the patients show up, that our
physicians
are able to work at the top of
their license and deliver care and everything is
running smoothly.
And as we know
an integral part of our work as physicians
is really technology.
So
we in the physician organization are
here at Houston Methodist, we are focused on
acquiring
and piloting technologies to make
the life of our physicians better. Something like
some technologies for example
like ambient listening
where you don't have to document while you're
with the patient.
There is
an artificial intelligence
voice recognition
software
that really documents
for you. And we have already
piloted that and are piloting different
companies and so far it's been a tremendous
response
from our physicians, but not only from our
physicians,
all of the teams that are taking care
of patients.
And there are other examples, but this is
one efficiency of practice.
The other thing is
personal resilience.
And when we talk about personal resilience and
you read the literature,
personal resilience is not only delivering
yoga lessons
and community events and book clubs. We are
doing all this, but this is also something
that we discovered during our tour.
Personal resilience is also to teach our physicians
how
to delegate
and trust others
and feel that they can let go when
they are on vacations, when they are using
their time off from their organization
that they feel that it's okay to trust
somebody else
to take care of their patients while they're
gone.
And
it's very telling that our physicians take their
laptops everywhere and they really can't feel that
they can't
really connect. So we are going to help
with that
and
it's really a priority for us to teach
these behaviors, so they can recover,
because our physicians are human beings like all
of us. We are all human beings and
we all need to unplug
sometimes. And then the third thing, we said
efficiency of practice, we said personal resilience. The
third thing is really the culture of wellness.
I really want everybody to know that here
at Houston Methodist Physician Organization,
we care
not only about the patients and their family,
which is obvious, this is why we exist,
but we also care deeply about
our people, the people who work for us
at the physician organization. And this is including
physician, but not only physician, everybody that is
our employee,
we care about them because caring for our
employees
translates into good care for our patients. So
this was a long way of answering your
question
about a successful project
from the last year.
Excellent. Looking ahead, what is the biggest challenge
you're expecting to face in the next year
and how are you preparing?
So one thing that is,
really,
important to me personally because I have experienced
this on my,
my own skin if you will, is really
preparing
the leaders of the next generation, specifically physician
leaders.
A lot of time
when we choose physician leaders,
we just take the most experienced one,
maybe the most dominant ones, maybe the one
who speak louder or care the most.
But to me,
physician leaders can come
from anywhere in the organization.
They don't need to be the loudest. They
don't need to be the ones that are
close maybe to the
senior executive team. They can come from anywhere
and they can really make a big
difference in our organization.
But
usually
when somebody finishes,
graduates from medical schools, go through internships,
fellowships
and then becomes an attending,
they don't they're not trained
we as physicians are not trained to be
leaders.
And
once we are looking to identify
a leader within our organization,
it may be
a hit or miss.
Usually, they are very good people, but there's
a difference between being a good person or
a good physician or a good surgeon
and a good
leader. Really leadership, I truly believe is something
that can be learned, that should be learned.
It's an expertise
like every other profession.
And so
in this
year 2025,
we're going to focus on physician leadership
development. We're going to do it in really
3 different
avenues. 1
is focusing on our employed physicians,
physicians who are employed by the Houston Methodist
Physician Organization
and identify
people who want to become leaders or who
are already
leading in some capacity. They may be chief
quality officers. They
may have a responsibility as medical directors.
These physicians come from all over the Greater
Houston, from all
over our
healthcare system
and they come from different specialties.
They can be primary care, neurology, neurosurgery,
orthopedics, everything.
And we developed a nomination
process
and we're going to select
the best ones and this is a program
that we developed in collaboration
between
us
and Jones
Rice Jones Business School here in Houston.
We did
one
iteration of this
physician leadership program
this past year
and now we are improving it, enhancing it
and putting it into motion and we're going
to start another cohort of physician
leadership development
here in Houston starting in January 2025. So
very excited about that.
But not only that, we are
also
investing
in our existing leaders all the way up
to the level of department chairs
and also
department administrators. So we developed something that is
called
the Chair Academy and the Administrator
Academy.
And these
are really sessions
that are tailored
towards
our really senior
leaders. Department chairs are not
are not new in
their experience in this organization
or in their journey in medicine.
But we think that they still need to
learn and they can still develop. And also
perhaps most importantly,
we're going to give them the basic education
in parallel to their department administrators,
so we can align everybody
to become the best leaders that they can
be. And this is very important because
the entire organization
is inspired and moved forward
by leaders. And in order for the organization
to move straightforward
like a vector in one direction,
we need all our
leaders to be aligned. So last year, we
had 3 topics that we discussed in this
chair and
administrator academy. The 3 topics were leadership,
philanthropy and communications.
This was last year.
And this year, we already designed the 3
topics and these are going to be everything
that a leader needs to know about
human resources,
the art of storytelling,
how to give a presentation that is engaging.
And
the third topic is diversity, equity and inclusion.
And I have to say that these topics,
they came to us by the
our own leaders.
This is our own leaders, our own chair
saying I need more education and I need
more training
to know about these topics. So very excited
about this, and I think it's,
I'm looking forward to this in 2025.
Absolutely.
So many exciting things happening over there in
Houston. This has been such a great discussion,
and thank you for joining me on the
podcast today.
If you wanna catch more of doctor Shahl
at our upcoming
clinical leadership forum, you can join us at
Becker CEO and CFO roundtable November 11th through
14th in Chicago.
We have limited space available for attendees and
sponsors, so contact us at agenda team at
beckershealthcare.com
to learn more.