This is where health care leadership comes together.
Becker's sixteenth annual meeting brings more than 3,500
hospital and health system executives and nearly 800
speakers to Chicago
April.
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w Bush. For the agenda and event details,
visit beckershospitalreview.com
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upper right. We're looking forward to hosting you
in Chicago.
This is Laura Dierda with the Becker's Healthcare
podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by
doctor Erica Powell, vice president of medical affairs
at Welspun Ephrata Community Hospital. Doctor Powell, it's
a pleasure to have you on the podcast
today. Thank you, Laura. I am excited to
be here and share a little bit about
myself and WellSpan and and some of the
things that are facing health care in 2026.
Fantastic. Well, I I'm excited about this too.
I mean, I think there's so much in
health care. It's such a dynamic space, and
so I'm looking forward to spotlighting some of
the things you're doing. But before we dive
in, can you tell us a little bit
more about yourself in the hospital?
Yeah. So I'm an emergency physician by training,
but have been in a leadership role for
about twenty years,
in various positions. But my current role really
is
to oversee the quality and safety along with
the dyad partner,
at WellSpan Ephrata Community Hospital.
WellSpan is an integrated community based health system
that that serves Central Pennsylvania and Northern Maryland.
We have about 23,000
team members, eight hospitals, and a comprehensive network
of
ambulatory specialty and behavioral health services.
We're really here to provide exceptional personalized care
and inspire hope in communities.
Our real focus is on clinical excellence and
innovation
with the goal of delivering
high value health services,
to the community.
That's great to hear. And, you know, a
huge, huge and important responsibility that you have
within the community to, make sure you're having
that access to care and continue to providing
great outcomes. Now if you think back the
last
year or so, could you tell us about
the most important initiative that you led? What
did you do, and what were the result?
One of the big initiatives that we led
was around length of stay
and really how do we align clinical quality
and operational
across the entire cube care division
focusing
on patient flow, reducing variability,
and strengthening physician engagements. I mean, some of
the key components to that are interdisciplinary
rounds,
managing care escalation pathways,
and really improving documentation
accuracy to support the quality and financial integrity
of our system. And what that really has
led to is
reducible,
avoidable variation
in length of stay across multiple service lines,
better metrics,
in ED to,
admission, in
overall length of stay.
But the real
beauty of focusing in on this was the
strength in collaboration
between operations,
nursing, and medical leadership.
And this when you get sort of the
whole team engaged in this, it really helped
us to deliver
high reliable patient centered care
while managing our capacity
much more effectively.
That's helpful to understand and, you know, really
great that you've been able to make,
movement and measurable impact on some of those
things. I think especially,
having that overall length of stay be managed
closely is critical,
because capacity continues for many hospitals and systems
to be constrained right now. I think, you
know, when you were looking at,
those interdisciplinary
rounds, can you tell us a little bit
more about that, what really occurs during those,
conversations that has moved the needle in making
a difference on some of the metrics you
talked about?
One of the things that we sat down
as a health system to do is to
put together a playbook.
What are those best practices that are really
going to
help us move the needle? And by creating
that playbook for the health system, not just
the individual hospital I work at, we were
really successful
at creating standardized
processes and strategies.
One of those was multidisciplinary
rounds.
And so
at each entity, we have a standard for
that work
and what it should look like. And we're
really focused in on geometric length of stay
and how we are addressing that for each
patient
in their care continuum. And by doing that
with each patient
at every
one of our eight hospitals, we were really
able to identify what are the true barriers
to getting a patient through the system. And
so some key opportunities came up for each
of our hospitals that were similar, and then
we could solve,
to root for those barriers
and put new,
countermeasures in in place that help us to
be successful. And I'll just give you,
a quick example.
We realized that we had some delay with
processing
how we use our consultants.
And so we really worked hard to identify
how we
order the consultation,
how it gets completed,
and really streamline that streamline that documentation
so that now we have a
dashboard where we can sort of see how
our consultants are engaging with our hospital teams
in order to improve that that throughput.
And by adding an escalation pathway, that really
was the turbo boost
around making sure that the people who needed
additional resources
from other team members were able to get
them in the fashion.
That's helpful to understand. Thank you so much,
doctor Powell, for digging a little bit deeper
there. Now looking ahead, what are some of
your big priorities and headwinds that you're focused
on for 2026?
I think, like, every hospital workforce stabilization
and optimization are going to be key.
We need to ensure that we attract, retain,
support clinical talent while addressing burnout and the
complexities in clinical practice.
I think everyone's sort of focused on
how we can improve
the use of technology
to
stabilize,
and optimize our workforce.
The other piece that I'm really
interested in focusing on is value based care
performance
and really being able to deliver high quality
outcomes at a lower cost using data,
that supports care redesign. And I think between
these two things,
we're gonna put a lot of energy into
optimizing both pathways,
to get a different different product
without losing sight of
the patient experience. And and that always is
first of mine
is the patient.
Got it. That's helpful to know. And, you
know, I love the ability to keep focus
on what's happening with the patient, the patient
experience, those outcomes, and making sure they have
quality care. And to your point in looking
at the transition to more of the value
based care performance, looking at ways that you
can get the best possible outcome,
for the patients.
I I'm curious. How are you approaching,
that type of of,
transformation thinking through not only the technology that
you'll have to to get that in place,
but then also,
you know, having it be part of a
a broader,
shift in the way that you're thinking about
care and care models.
One of the things if you're gonna endeavor
to do this work is to understand what
your data's telling you
about your community,
about your hospital, about your practices,
and then really leveraging that data to different
outcomes.
Every hospital is going to have some unique
barriers in order to deliver
amazing
care at,
a good cost. And so
one of the things that I feel like,
needs to happen in this space is to
have good data analytic tools
to be able to understand where your unique
barriers are. And and, again, I'm an examples
person. So
one of the things that we've done in
this space is really to
understand
down to the DRG
how our physicians are diagnosing certain types of
illnesses
and where are the opportunities
to create standardization
in care pathways.
We need all of our physicians to speak
the same language,
to understand the impact,
of their documentation,
and how we leverage that to,
better outcomes for the patient. So we've really
worked hard to implement
ERAS,
COVD pathways, heart failure pathways so that everybody's
getting the same excellent
high quality care,
and we're also able to manage
those cost pressures
that exist
for all of us.
That makes a lot of sense. It's helpful
to,
kind of get additional detail,
around those things. I think it's something that
so many organizations are dealing with right now
and trying to wrap their heads around. So
thank you for some of the your insight
and perspective on it.
What do you see as being the hardest
thing you'll have to do in the coming
year? What do you think that will be?
I think for anybody in health care leadership,
one of the toughest things that we do
is balancing short term operational needs with long
term transformation work
that we can't afford to slow down. So
many of us spend time
working day to day on the small things
that are in front of us, but there's
a lot of real work out there and
the pace of change
is exceptional. And we need to be able
to lead people through that, support them, motivate
them,
and make some tough decisions about priorities, which
takes
a lot of communication,
clarity, and empathy.
And so
I would just sort of reiterate
that it's easy to get lost in the
day to day when you know that the
overall
opportunities for organizational
growth and stability lie in that longer term
transformation
work.
Well, doctor Powell, that makes a lot of
sense. And I I know there's a lot
going on right now in the health care
space to both think long term, big picture
strategically as well as getting things done on
a daily basis. Now from your perspective, as
you're thinking about
leaders in the health care space, emerging leaders,
and more, what advice would you have for
them to really be successful as they're going
throughout their own leadership journeys?
Laura, that's a great question. As I did
on what I need to get done in
2026,
one of the things is to lead with
clarity. People really are overwhelmed,
and ambiguity is the enemy. I mean, we
need to set fewer priorities,
communicate them consistently, and reinforce them relentlessly.
It's just getting back to the basics,
in a very real way. So
in other words, like, we need to go
slower in order to move faster. I think
sometimes the pace of change
in health care
is so exceptional that it just overwhelms
our frontline
team members,
and leaders
in order to get done. And then as
I sort of weave through this, we need
to prioritize
patient connection in every initiative. I mean, the
reason we went into health care,
really was about the patient. And we need
to ask ourselves, does it make it easier,
safer,
or more humane for our patients and families?
And if it really doesn't, then we need
to take a pause
and wonder whether this is the right pathway
to go down. And so
I just would say to anybody who's
going to be
leading, in health care in 2026
is we've gotta be more
transparent about the tough stuff
and really
protect
how we're doing things
in terms of
just being clear
and concise and to the point until we
build, you know, a new muscle in terms
of our leadership,
skill set.
Fantastic. Now where do you see some of
the best opportunities for organizational growth? I don't
think leveraging digital tools and virtual care are
gonna both help patients and clinicians.
As we know, particularly on the physician side,
there are multiple specialty
gaps
across the country in in various regions,
and we're really gonna need to
make work efficient for those individuals
who are in the specialty, who wanna be
able to help as many people as possible,
but may not be located
exactly nearby. So being able to start, like,
virtual dermatology
and virtual rheumatology, which are specialties that we
struggle with across the country in various
areas
are gonna be key to
being able to deliver those patient outcomes that
I talked about,
earlier. I also think that,
we're gonna need to focus on building strategic
partnerships,
to improve care integration and support population health.
As we know, the pace,
the population is aging,
at a significant rate, and I think we're
going to need to
be able to work with people outside of
our individual health systems
to make sure that we're able to support
those patient outcomes
both inside and outside of,
our organization.
And that whole community wellness
kind of lens is gonna be critical to
the success of health care.
I love that. Doctor Powell, thank you so
much for joining us on the podcast today.
This has been such an informative conversation.
You know, I I really appreciate everything that
you're doing and and the passion that you
bring, to health care, and I look forward
to seeing you as well at our annual
meeting. I know that you'll be speaking on
a panel there, and so it'll be great
to connect in person and and continue the
conversation.
That's awesome, Laura. I appreciate the opportunity to
be able to share some of my insights
here about what WellSpan is doing. I'm looking
forward to connecting with my colleagues,
at the conference in Chicago.
It's always an exciting time to be able
to hear and listen and learn from some
of the best in the in the country.