Hi, everyone, and thank you so much for
joining us for this episode of the Becker's
Healthcare Podcast,
where we're joined by doctor Eric Summers, chief
medical officer at Wake Forest
Baptist Medical Center.
Doctor Summers, welcome, welcome. We're so excited to
have you on and thank you for taking
the time.
Yeah. Thank you for inviting me.
Doctor Summers, can you just start off by
telling us a bit more about yourself and
your background at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center?
Sure. Yes. I,
I came to HRM Health Wake Forest Baptist
around 14 years ago as a hospitalist.
And within 2 years, I was section head
of hospital medicine and
gradually progressed
from associate CMO to CMO
here at Wake, and I've been CMO for
6 years. And
to be honest, I had no
aspersions to be CMO or to be an
administration. But,
as a hospitalist,
seeing
opportunities
to fix things in the hospital, help patients,
I realized that was a passion of mine.
And
I had the ability to to make change.
And when you do that, people notice and
they give you more responsibility
and more titles, and that's how I got
here. And,
but I've really enjoyed
the opportunity to work with all
the different groups in our hospital
to make our patient care better. It's been
tremendously
satisfying.
Yeah. Doctor Summers, thanks for saying that. I
think it's interesting to hear from
a lot of what we hear from physician
executives is that what you mentioned of really
not not having it have been something on
your radar in terms of that CMO role
and pursuing a path to the c suite.
So
just building off that, can you can you
share a piece of advice for aspiring CMOs
or maybe people
who younger physicians who maybe don't have a
c suite track on their radar, but are
are thinking or considering leadership down the road?
Yeah. I would say a couple things. 1,
being a physician, a practicing physician is very
different from being in administration.
You know, as physicians, we,
you know, making decisions,
quickly,
it tends to be just us ourselves making
these decisions.
And administration
is very much about relationships
and it takes time to build processes. But
you have to move forward, you have to
constantly move forward and you have to know
how to implement. But I think the key
to any success that I have and which
I think is very important for young CMOS
or aspiring CMOS to be aware
of is the value
of the relationships throughout the hospital. And I
don't mean
just in the c suite. I mean the
nursing,
I mean
therapists,
nursing assistants,
the people in the cafeteria,
everywhere,
you need to have relationships. And,
that builds your
your brand,
that builds your sentence, what do people say
when you're not there
is critically important.
And you want to be seen
in the CMO role as someone who cares,
who gets things done and who listens.
So relationships is the foundation in my opinion
of being a successful CMO. You have to
have that piece and then you build off
of that.
Yeah. Absolutely. And I'm and kind of going
off what you mentioned there as being someone
who who gets things done and that being
just such a core
aspect of the role too. Can you share
a bit about your most successful project or
initiative
from the last year
including
kind of what you did to get there
and what some of the results were?
Yeah. So, I mean, you know, just expanding
off of relationships
and and and patient centered care.
We have when I first got here 14
years ago, Wake Forest was one hospital in
and of itself.
Now we're 67. We're part
of advocate health and a larger group. But
we also have a market
and by that I mean we have 4
hospitals surrounding Wake Forest and that's kind of
our
core group that we interact with daily.
And
what we have really worked on is the
proverbial systemness, how to work together as a
system.
And so that takes relationships
and that takes working with each other and
getting to know each other and
driving out to our market hospitals, Wilkes, Davie,
Lexington, High Point,
establishing those relationships. And
the benefit of that is that when you
want to build a project, a system project,
you have those relationships,
it makes it that much easier. And so
we have really been working on
right patient, right place, right time.
I helped build an operations center, patient flow
operations center about 6, 7 years ago.
That group has been expanding and doing a
great job.
But one of the
things as with
many hospitals out there,
we're at capacity,
more people want to see us,
we're without good patient flow and throughput,
ED boarding
goes up, will increase.
So
we looked at
what are the opportunities
for patients
in our emergency department at Wake, what are
the opportunities for our inpatients at Wake
to potentially go to our market hospitals.
And if a patient is in their hometown
of
Lexington
and they need a GI procedure that cannot
be done in Lexington,
how can we
perform that procedure,
at Wake and bring them back to their,
home community
if clinically appropriate. And so
those moves
are all for the greater good of maximizing
our resources to help as many patients as
we can.
To do that took a lot of
conversations and relationships with
the leaders, the C suites of all 5
of those hospitals.
But we have
really
worked hard on this. And
as an example, last
month we had 52 patients
that were transferred
from Wake to one of our market hospitals
to
either continue their care or a round trip
procedure.
And those are patients that historically
all 52 would have been admitted at Wake.
And
that's okay too, but when you have high
capacity and you don't have
the infinite bed space, you want to utilize
all these tools
to maximize what we do. And so couldn't
be prouder of the new leadership in our
patient flow and everyone working together getting on
board
to,
like I said, really put patients in the
right place
at the right time.
So that's what I'm that's what I'm really
proud of, this year, was the great work
of that team.
Yeah. Doctor Summers, thanks for sharing that. And
I think
kind of the progress there and being able
to actually do that and create some of
that systemness
that you mentioned with this effort to to
transfer patients
to those market hospitals really goes all back
to what you were mentioning about those relationships
and that's kind of where it all started.
Just to give some context to you, I
know you mentioned 52 patients transferred from Wake
to one of the market hospitals,
within the last month.
So I know this is something that kind
of got off the ground within the last
year. So say like, going back a year,
was that something that really
wasn't happening? There really wasn't necessarily, like, a
system
process there yet?
So it's it's,
how to put it? 7 years ago, we
started PatientFlow and we slowly built
this over time. And so we
the first step was strengthening the relationships and
that
was years ago that we got the relationships.
And that
to really get there so that you can
build projects off of
that, the system needs to know that we're
part of a team. It's
not Wilkes versus Wake or versus Lexington. We're
all on the same team. We're working together.
So we did the we started with the
ED transfers, then we built the inpatient transfers.
And really, in the last year, where we've
had,
the the additive component. But this is yes,
this is not something that we built in
9 months and we went from 0 to
52.
We've been steadily building this over time, but
it's the round trippers have been
that took time to build that and,
it's complex.
It takes many pieces to put that together.
You've got transport, you've got collegiality
between the teams
coordinating all that. So really that piece is
what we've built and grown
in the last year, but it's all part
of a greater
project that we started
when we broke ground 7 years ago opening
the operations center.
Yeah. Thanks, Doctor. Sonos. It's interesting to hear
how it's really kind of
piece by piece, like things to build off
one another after having started with the ED
transfers.
Looking ahead here, what do you foresee as
as the biggest challenge, or what are you
really,
expecting, bracing for over the next year? How
are you preparing?
Yeah. I think I think the biggest challenge,
even though we have done some great things
in patient flow and length of stay here,
is
build a challenge with
meeting the needs of our patient population
and obtaining staffing
to help meet those needs.
And so we need to continue to grow
and build off of what we've done from
a system perspective,
talking about moving
some of our specialties to our market hospitals,
potentially
some surgical
specialties doing more in our
in a High Point or a Lexington instead
of Wake.
We philosophically
when I first came here Wake, everything comes
to Wake, everything comes to wake and
we absorb everything. But we really can't do
that anymore. So
we have to continue to think outside the
box
because the last thing we want
is ED boarding.
We don't want patients to
that need to be admitted upstairs to sit
in an emergency department,
Not the best thing for them. We know
the we know the studies, the morbidity, mortality
increases.
So,
we still have work to do off of
that. It's still
a challenge. And and with our staffing,
there have been, you know, since
COVID and and during COVID, there have been
staffing challenges. And we're
steadily coming through that, but we
need to continue to work
on having appropriate staff to meet the needs
of our our patients. That's what it's all
about.
Doctor Summers,
building off that,
can you talk about how you see the
CMO
role evolving
over the next few years or maybe how
the scope of work may grow or change?
Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I I doing
this a while, I have a lot of
CMO colleagues
out there and and, you know, each CMO
job is a little bit different.
But
I can say for myself, I think there's
2 areas
where I can see the CMO role evolving.
Number
1, playing
more of a role in leadership development
and growing.
We need to grow our new leaders. That's
an initiative that we're very much focused on.
I see
CMOs have such a pulse
on really the entire hospital
from
the floors to medical staff to peer review
to credentialing
that,
I can't help but think that
they will play more of a role in
the financial aspects of the institution,
establishing budgets,
controlling
departments
and working through those finances. I think that's
a natural transition.
And for that reason,
I really,
I didn't
6 years ago,
somebody asked me if I needed an MBA
and I said, I'm not sure, maybe, maybe
not.
Now I think you do in this position,
because I think
we're going to get to the point of
more
responsibility
from a, like I said, from a financial
standpoint. I just see that
as a natural
evolving aspect of this.
Some CMOs already do that. We don't do
that as much here, but I but that
would be something I see for the future.
Doctor Summers, thank you so so much for
talking with us today. Learned a lot about,
it was great to hear about the improvements
made there with,
patient flow and
being able to work more closely with with
market colleagues to to reduce some of the
ED boarding
issues and capacity challenges that we see so
many hospitals
continue to deal with and and try to
wrap their arms around. So so appreciate your
time,
and for listeners
to tune in to additional episodes of the
podcast,
please visit the podcast page on our website
at beckershospitalreview.com.
Thanks all.