Hello everyone. I am Ryan Mohammed, a writer for Becker's Healthcare.
Thank you so much for joining me today on Becker's Cardiology and Heart Surgery
podcast to speak with Gordon Wesley,
Vice President of Advance Health, Heart,
Lung and Vascular Institute. Gordon, it's so nice to meet you today.
How are you?
I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm excited to.
Talk. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, to jump in,
could you please introduce yourself, um,
and tell us a little bit more about your background?
Absolutely. I'm the Vice President at the Heart Lung Vascular Institute.
I've been with Advent Health for three years. Previously I was with Ascension.
I was actually one of the national cardiovascular service line administrative
administrative leaders with, uh, Dr. Edra,
who's coincidentally the president of the American College of Cardiology. Now,
I've had a extensive background in, uh, the medical field,
including every one of my families. Been in the medical field, and, uh,
one time I was in pre-med, believe it or not. And, um, ultimately I joined the,
the military of the Army and through that schooling was a radiology specialist
and had my, uh, uh,
fun and entertainment in Iraq and got into leadership, uh,
shortly after that, not only within the military itself,
but shortly after that and moved over to the, uh,
the fun side of cardiology and cath labs, special procedures.
And, uh, just moved, uh,
progressively moved up and through leadership management. And, um,
now I find myself in a,
a good spot and I just have the greatest enthusiasm and passion for, uh,
cardiovascular, uh, pulmonary long, all all that good stuff, uh,
relative to the, an institute and service lines that we build, uh,
within a health. So that's just a short snapshot.
Yeah. Well, you've had an interesting life already. Well, ,
thank you so much for sharing that. Um,
move into the topic for today's discussion. Uh,
what are the top three biggest issues in cardiology today that you're seeing?
The biggest ones that I don't think it's unique to Advent Health,
but to our cardiovascular service lines nationally, is really around access.
As we look at heart failure or atrial fibrillation, uh,
we just know those things are gonna increase. So the complexity and the, the,
the incidents of those chronic disease are really gonna bo down our clinicians,
um, our clinics, our inpatient beds, and, um,
as we look at different ways on how do we have the experts that take care of
those chronic diseases versus maybe proceduralists or other general
cardiologists, for example, taking care of those diseases.
We just gotta be smart about that.
And then just the complexity of the different diseases and how we build
subspecialty service lines around that.
And then I think very importantly is the, uh, disparities of care.
There's a lot of studies going on now just on the gaps of care, uh,
whether it's accessibility to it, um,
or just the incidence of disease and different, um, uh, socioeconomic, um,
genders. And so just be keeping a keen eye on that in ears and,
and making sure that we're doing the right thing for the communities and
individuals. Um,
probably secondly is really regulatory and just reframing
what success looks like for a cardiovascular service line. There's a lot,
a lot of payer dynamics that are occurring,
and whether it's incentivizing or, uh,
enhancing parity between sites of care, we have to be in the ready,
uh, for those shifts.
And also what happens when you move volume out of a hospital?
What happens in that backfill uh, strategy in those tactics?
And what takes its place really is you have a lot of investments
in, uh, traditional hospitals and, you know, multi, multi-level,
um, facilities.
And so just making sure that we're able to have sustainable organizations and,
uh, maybe the complexity to care, it looks different there as well, um,
along with the differentiation of that as well. So also, uh,
we have individuals coming out, uh, you know,
fellowship and they come into a market where, um, PCI is kind of on the decline,
uh, for most individuals.
And so making sure that experts are able to do what they do best and be able be
in those fields and, uh, operate, uh, with what they went to school for and,
uh, where their expertise lies. And then, um,
a lot of the employment versus the community physician dynamics depends what
part or geography of the, of the world or the nation you're in. Uh, but those,
that climate looks a lot different. And so making sure that we have, you know,
strong affiliations of partnerships, don't need to employ everybody. Um,
and that's strong with organization and, uh, what's the best,
best foot forward for, uh, both, um, you know, to have a win-win, uh,
design and a relationship. And then probably, uh,
I think that second one was a long winded one,
but the third one really is about integration and kind of goes, uh,
to the tail end of what I was just talking about. Uh, we have these episodic,
uh, chasms in our care continuity,
and whether it's pre-hospital or in the hospital or post or all the,
all the transitions in between that we gotta make sure that individuals, uh,
and our community members and patients are suited for a success, uh,
to navigate through all that. So, you know,
integrated EMR can only do some US but it definitely helps, uh, for sure.
So those are like the biggest issues. I see.
If I kind of step back and we're talking about cardiology or heart care, uh,
in general as of today.
Thank you so much for sharing your top three issues. Um,
I've also kind of heard the same thing talking to other people, um,
and I think of it more broadly.
How do you see heart care evolving over the next 18 months? If you could say.
We just got out of a long period of a worldwide pandemic,
and a lot of organizations are in that stabilization mode or, or recouping,
whether it's, uh, procedural losses or, uh, just getting back to,
to business and getting back to caring for individuals and communities so
that, that stabilization work, whether it's now or into the short future,
uh, or as we're framing this question, the 18 months,
what does that standard of care look like?
We talked about having those meaningful relationships with physicians,
and I think the pandemic really showed,
especially those that are not tied to an organization, uh, or, or, or, um,
financially tied to an organization, whether through employment or others,
maybe, uh, uh, cardiologists and surgeons, they're,
they're thinking differently now as they kind of seen firsthand what pandemic
does to a practice and how hard it is, you know, to navigate through that.
So I think the federal and state governments can only do so much,
but I think it's, it's also, as we kind of talked about coming back into that,
that stabilization is how do you reestablish the competition that you're in?
And, um, you know, a lot of us we're kind of focusing internally and,
and even externally to take care of the communities,
but now we're back into that competitive spirit and, um, that, you know,
before it was about survival,
now it's back to differentiating ourselves from our competitors and, uh, um,
all those,
all those sub service lines and those specialties like imaging and the
artificial intelligence on that, or CCTs or wellness prevention, uh,
moving further into the critical car care, cardiology models,
geriatric cardiology, Um, you can think about virtual and the digital platforms,
um, for, for some of the acute sites, the interventional heart failure,
maybe the niceties like sports, cardiology, you know, all, all these are,
you know, well underdeveloped. They,
they kind of got to a point and then covid happened and they were kind of nice
to have.
And now it's really how do you differentiate yourselves from your competitors.
Yeah, absolutely.
And to kinda end our discussion with a
two part question, what are you excited about today?
And also what does makes you nervous?
Sometimes it's a mixture of both,
but I am extremely excited about the opportunities to
deliver care and new and innovative ways leveraging
technology. Technology's cool innovation's. Cool.
So sometimes there's a organizational nervousness or anxiety about the adoption
of that.
Is this gonna disrupt the fast quo or is this our fee for service model?
And now it doesn't look like that.
So making sure that you can navigate the organization, um,
influence the organization to move into ways that are gonna be extremely
beneficial, Uh, setting yourselves up for the future and delivering care, uh,
where consumers, where patients are,
and not necessarily where our parking garage is. Uh,
and our campuses are also, what do our partnerships look like and our future,
our partnerships with individuals that have a lot of expertise,
subspecialty expertise in heart care,
and how do we get into the wellness?
How do we get into the prevention space? I mean, I,
I talked about that earlier about things that even ourselves at Advent Health
we're working on, um, in a,
in a good fashion is how do we take care of that primorial,
that genetic genomic, uh, heart disease patient, family members,
How do we get into primary prevention for before folks are ever on a cath lab
table or, or table?
And then what do we do when those individuals are ready to go home and they
had an event? So that secondary prevention,
how do we take care of our community? 365 24 7,
How do we talk about our underserved populations? We talked about that, um,
you know, quickly in the beginning. And then, uh,
there's so many new frontiers and electrophysiology, uh, with, uh,
pulse field ablation. Um, there's new frontiers and structural heart,
and I mean, every week there's new technologies coming out in research studies.
Uh, just really, really excited about that. But I'm also, uh, temper that down.
Just, I'm not gonna say nervous,
but just cautious and anxious about def frantic changes to a lot of our
experts, high, high level end experts. So if you have, uh, folks,
you know, in the, in their prime of their career or, you know, wind it down,
how do we take care of those individuals? And, uh,
also how do we have succession planning, uh,
to make sure that they can leave on a high note and we can continue on our high
notes. So just be smart about transition and such. Uh, give 'em good avenues.
And then, um,
we talked about a little bit of those sites of care nuances causes the
traditional CEO of a hospital, a little bit of anxiety.
I think in our organizations, we've, we've had a very open mind about that and,
and a very proactive,
but how do we continue high standards at these ASEs or,
or the practice cath labs? How do we keep those high standards? So those things,
um, add a little bit of anxiety in our,
in our workflow and our kind of clinical thoughts about things.
Absolutely. I will definitely agree with you on, you know,
what things you are excited about today. And Gordon,
that's all I have for you today.
So I wanna thank you for taking time outta your busy schedule to come and speak
to me. I really appreciate it. And to hear more about Becker's Healthcare,
please visit our website, becker's hospital review.com. Thank you again, Gordon.
Thank you very much for having me.