Speaker 0: Welcome to the Becker's Healthcare podcast. I'm Chris Sosa, your host. And I'm very happy today to be joined by Hillary Smith Shea. She's chief marketing experience officer and senior vice president of communications for Children's Minnesota. Hillary, thank you for joining us today.

Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 0: Yeah. So glad you can make time. Before we get rolling into the meat of the podcast, Shirley, could you just please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your organization?

Speaker 1: Sure. You did a great job, but I am Hillary Smith Shea. I am the senior vice president of communications and the chief marketing and experience officer here at Children's Minnesota, one of the largest independent pediatric health systems in The United States. We care exclusively for children from routine care to the most medically complex conditions. Our work is grounded in a simple belief, and that is kids deserve care designed specifically for them.

And that's why we call it, we're the care experts.

Speaker 0: Perfect, Hillary. So we're a little bit into 2026, and I do wanna look ahead at what Children's Minnesota has coming a little bit later. But for now, I do wanna look back at 2025 a little bit. And, specifically, what would you say is the most important initiative that you led in the last year? Just take us a bit through it and how it evolved and what the results were.

Speaker 1: So, you know, the most important initiative I led was was really developing, our experience strategy from an enterprise perspective. And so I will let you know that that we're calling it total experience. But it really did look at the actual domains that we can control of someone's experience here within the hospital. And so that includes, the digital domain, the human domain, the clinical domain, the environmental domain, and then delivering on our brand promise, which really, experience is, you know. We are firm believers,

Speaker 0: or

Speaker 1: at least I should say, I'm a firm believer in that my role and the creation of my role really supports the strategy of making sure people feel what we promise.

Speaker 0: That's certainly a worthwhile goal, and I'm sure it manifests itself in any number of ways. So let me ask you this then. So when you walk into Children's Minnesota, which is pretty much every day, How does that manifest itself in in just making your way through the halls of your your organization?

Speaker 1: So a couple a couple things. And and I guess this is why this is the initiative that I started. It wasn't. I wasn't feeling everything that we could do. We do amazing work, but we weren't really talking about it.

And we weren't really making sure that we were following through on it. And part of that is because we we didn't really have leader standard work and weren't really using continuous improvement. And we put together a strong strategic plan that actually blends continuous improvement and equity and inclusion work, and embeds it into who we are as a culture. And so I realized, you know what? We're not gonna be able to differentiate on experience if we don't embed that into the culture.

And so we need to be able to function as if creating a good experience is what we are actually here for because at the end of the day, these children are coming to us, and they're still kids. Right. You know, their their lives are literally not stopping, but all of a sudden, they have to actually spend time in a place where it we can make our own bit of magic magic here. And I think that sometimes people think, well, isn't that, you know, aspirational and no kid wants to go to the hospital. And I said, but what if you're a kid who has a chronic condition and you have to continuously come back and forth to the hospital?

Wouldn't you want it to be some place where you still felt like your child was growing and thriving? Wouldn't you want to be excited to go where you are? And so being here for those who need us and creating an experience that allows them to continue to be children and to continue thriving should be everybody's aspiration. And so putting parameters around that and building that strategy and then helping to operationalize it over time is is exactly why, I was promoted into this position. Because before I was the VP of marketing communications, I worked on an experience strategy, was able to develop it, and develop a a core road map for how we build that capability in the organization.

And fortunately, at the end of doing that, for my organization, they asked me if I would lead it. And so I am grateful.

Speaker 0: Oh, well, brilliant. Congratulations on on your promotion, Hillary. Certainly, it's well deserved. And you make a great point about wanting to create an experience that people want to come back to even though no kid, no patient really wants to go back to the hospital. You can look at any organization and say, you know what?

I remember I like my experience, so that's where I'm gonna continue to go. And I'm sure it's, no different with Children's Minnesota or any other, health care provider organization. So thank you again for that, Hillary. I love looking back at what organizations have accomplished over the past year. Next, let's look ahead to 2026 as we teased earlier.

So what would you say are the biggest priorities and headwinds you're focused on, for 2026 and any tailwinds you might have, pushing you ahead?

Speaker 1: Absolutely. That's such a great question. So we have the momentum of of thinking through our strategy. We created a ten year strategic an aspiration, a ten year aspiration, and we are moving the strategic plan forward in that. So this is year two of the first three year strategic plan, in service of our ten year future state.

And so what we're doing is implementing a new EHR. We are moving to Epic, because we understand that that is where we need to be to be what our customers need and to be easier to, work with. When you look at, the people who would be referring to us, when you look at the patients who would be coming to us, and the ability to affect those experiences and make working with us extremely, much easier. We knew that that was the foundation we needed to build. And so as we implement Epic, our, implementation team is called Eclipse.

And that is, a a fun way of, you know, getting to make spaceships and starships and talking about, the future and all the places we'll go, with the right technology. And so, EPIC is going in, and we should launch in October. And so that's really kind of our main focus. But we have some other experience things following along. You know, I'm not, the IT person, but I definitely wanna make sure people understand that having the right EHR system is core to our belief of being able to be every family's essential partner in raising healthy children.

There's no way to say, hey. We can make it seamless when you're in my chart for yourself and your care with our partners, our adult partners in the in the region, and you can't then manage your kids' care in in Epic and in MyChart. And so that is an experience. It's just how do we simplify and make sure people's lives are going to align. And so I love that we're doing this transformation, but we also work on we're working on the building that culture of experience alongside that.

So we've established the experience council, which I love because we've basically taken our experts who align with all of the five domains I told you about. So our clinical experts, our human experts, our digital experts, and our environmental experts, and even our brand experts. And we we literally brought together members of those team into what I like to call a cohort. And it is a twenty four, month cohort of learning and becoming experience experts, but also taking the time to learn what it means to be an expert in environmental experience or human experience or clinical experience and what all of those things need. So really building a core group that understands and that's spending time in each of those domains over the next twenty four months, and or should I say, we're we're halfway through.

So it's only got they've only got 12 more. But to to really understand and help the ambassadors and, ultimately, the the system governance, for what it means to have the kid expert experience.

Speaker 0: Thank you, Hillary. I do wanna follow-up on this. When you speak about the EHR experience, and I I don't want you to do necessarily PR for Epicure, but I am curious as as to how you and the organization came to the conclusions. Like, okay. And you mentioned the synchronicity, aspect with other, adult partners.

So but how did you know it's like, okay. This is the one we need to go with, and this is what's going to make our customers experience better?

Speaker 1: Really, we looked at who's innovating. We looked at who's innovating in this space, but we also looked at what our customers need. Because at the end of the day, we are the only stop for tertiary, quaternary care that's continuous, here in the in the Twin Cities, but also in the the regional area. We have over 60 specialties. We really are a comprehensive pediatric health system.

And so we serve many, many audiences. And one of our audiences was consistently telling us, I really wish you were easier to work with, and those are, our physician partners and our care providers. And so we took a strong look at that. And then we looked at all of the evidence based data that shows that Epic has improved the the experience of patients and families across the organization. And so the fact that we would now be able to not only define our experience domains, but then actually be able to improve upon them, create our own data, and then be able to analyze and measure how we're doing, really forced us to take this this total experience approach.

And so I'm excited because, a, I get to lead it, but but Epic is clearly the right tool, and it's the right foundation. Because if you don't build something on a good foundation, it will fall apart. We've all seen that.

Speaker 0: You are absolutely right. As you look ahead, Hillary, at not only the epic implementation, but any other project that you have coming up here in the next year, what do you think is the hardest thing you'll have to do? And I don't mean to ask that to say it's something you're not not looking forward to. You can very much be looking forward to it and excited about it, but it might just require an extra, ounce of focus. Right?

You know? So so what would you say is the hardest thing you have to do?

Speaker 1: I think the hardest thing is is predictability in our organization. Right now, health care is is in a very transitional period. There are lots of factors playing into the the state of, how health care is being, administrated, how health care is being paid for. A lot of people don't actually understand how much Medicaid, affects children, and that we are a a Medicaid service provider, who who really still only receive 70¢ on the dollar for everything that we provide. And right now, that 70¢ per dollar is already being threatened, with with cuts, etcetera.

And so it really makes us have to think about how do we continue to provide excellent care differently. And then if we want to differentiate on experience, what are the investments that we need to make so that we can actually make working with Children's Minnesota the easy button, if that makes sense. And so I say that we look at what's going to happen with health care, what's happening with reimbursement, how we'll be able to, invest in our organization, because we are really here for the kids, and we want to be what the kids need. And so I think the most difficult thing is not knowing what's around the corner, that's also going to affect health care. And, I would be remiss to not say that we we notice changes in our community and how they affect even the way we provide care.

And so as we have dealt with this metro surge here in Minnesota, we have noticed that we had a significant drop, in our ED visits, but we had a significant increase in our percentage of admits, which meant and indicated that people were not seeking the care when they needed it, but when it was absolutely emergent. And that created a higher likelihood of those patients visiting the ED and then going home to those patients finally getting to the ED and then needing to be admitted. So our we do monitor our percentage of admits based on our ED volume. And so while the volume was going down, the people who were coming to us were much sicker. The children were much sicker and, and needing more care.

And so we don't like that. We don't like anything that affects the health of children, that gets in their way of thriving, and getting them the care that they need because what could have been simple turned into far more complex and dangerous, and, and nobody wants to see that when it comes to children.

Speaker 0: No. Not at all. And here's hoping that, Children's Minnesota and and everywhere else is at the worst of that, and it's only going to improve from here. And I'm sure your organization will do the best it can to to make that happen. Lastly, Hillary, my question for you is looking even, further ahead here.

So and this timeline can be a year, eighteen months, two years, whatever you see as appropriate. But where do you see the best opportunities for organizational growth investment, however you wanna quantify that as far as Children's Minnesota is concerned?

Speaker 1: So I'm glad you asked that because three areas stand out for me. First, I think that our digital integration, if we execute Epic and our digital front door strategy well, we can dramatically reduce friction for families and clinicians. Second, thought leadership. There's a national hunger for credible pediatric voices. We have the expertise to shape conversations about child health, policy safety in ways that are principled and evidence.

And then third, experience as a strategic differentiator. Many organizations talk about experience. Few operationalize it at scale. If we continue building the government's measurement, discipline, and and leadership accountability, experience becomes a competitive moat, not a marketing slogan. And that's important to me because, a lot of people might wonder, why would you put experience in marketing?

And I would say, why wouldn't you? Because to differentiate on experience, that only happens when what we promise and what we say and what people live are intentionally aligned. You can't it doesn't happen by accident. So, frankly, pediatric health care needs organizations willing to lead with both confidence and courage right now.

Speaker 0: I think that's a perfect place to end, Hillary. Thank you so much for dropping behind and giving us all your insight as far as how Children's Minnesota is handling challenging situations and really looking forward to, how it improves in the years to come. And we'll see you very shortly here in Chicago. Can't wait for that too. Yes.

But so

Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to it. I'm hoping it'll be springtime by then. We still have snow on the ground.

Speaker 0: But we all hope the same for sure. And regardless, we look forward to, the next time our paths cross, Hillary, whenever that may be.

Speaker 1: Oh, love lovely. Good to talk to you. Thank you.