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This is Laura Ddo with the Becker's Healthcare Podcast.
I'm thrilled today to be joined by Matt Premack,
president of Advocate Conde Medical Center.
That's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
Thank you, Laura. Pleasure to be with you.
Now. I know we've got a really great, uh,
talk today to talk a little bit more about leadership and some of the things
that you're doing at Advocate Condel Medical Center.
But before we dive into our discussion,
can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background?
Sure, Laura. Uh, appreciate being here. Uh, I have been, uh,
the president at Condo Medical Center now for four years.
I've been within the Advocate Health System for just about 16 years.
Started my career as a physical therapist and have been in healthcare now for a
total of about 25 years.
Fantastic. Well,
could you talk to us a little bit about what your big focus is at Advocate Condo
Medical Center this year? What are the things that you're most excited about?
Sure, Laura. Y it's so interesting,
as we've spent many years now talking about our focus areas in healthcare,
we come back to some of our basics. And this year we've broken our,
our priorities into two different categories.
Number one is what are we doing inside of the hospital?
And we've taken this into three very distinct buckets of effort.
Number one is we've gotta be more efficient, whether that's in throughput,
whether that's in scheduling, whether that's in,
in the things that we do every day,
efficiency has become the absolute priority because we know the financial
headwinds that we're facing are like never before,
and we've gotta be delivering on a very efficient model. Secondly,
we've gotta retain and we've gotta recruit some of the best talent that we can
find. Uh,
staffing crisis has been an issue in this country now for at least the last 24
months, and we all know there's a agency issue and a,
and an open role issue.
And so we are really focused on making sure that we create an environment
where people want to come to work here,
where they feel recognized and they feel celebrated, and more importantly,
that they have the tools and the resources where they can be successful and
develop in their career journey. And lastly, a big focus, and I think Laura,
we may be talking about this a little bit later, is the patient experience.
We know that healthcare is transitioned really into a customer,
into a retail based service where patients have choice and they can go
to one hospital, they can go to another hospital.
And so we focused on the patient experience, and that's from top to bottom,
ambulatory to inpatient to our diagnostic imaging, to our rehab.
The patient experience is a, is an absolute priority for us in 2023.
The second area is really our growth area.
And so we've been focused on our physician development.
We've actually seen Laura, uh, up in the northern Illinois area,
a bit of an attrition of physicians. We've seen some early retirements.
We've seen some folks, uh, leave the state and, and move out of state. Uh,
we've seen folks take, uh, a different career path.
So we are on a mission to regrow our physician platform and
with that also grow our ambulatory infrastructure.
So whether it's ambulatory sites,
whether it's services that we offer out in the community. When we were in Covid,
we spent two to three years focusing really on taking care of the patients in
our four walls.
But we realized the future of healthcare is really on an ambulatory and also
virtual platforms. So those are,
I think what we're most excited about in 2023 is really getting out into the
community and bringing services out into these areas of, uh,
potentially underserved or, or, uh, or, or, or the, the,
the areas that need us to come out to them with the services instead of coming
to the big hospitals.
Absolutely. Wow, that's fascinating.
And I love how you talked about really that patient experience.
I know that that's top of mind for so many different, uh,
organizations and trying to figure that out. Um,
especially with the presence of more, uh, companies getting into healthcare,
non-traditional entrants and,
and then patients too expecting a different type of experience like they do, um,
in the retail sector.
So that's fascinating to hear about and definitely seems like a really great
areas to focus and, um, spaces to be innovative as well.
Yeah, Laura, I mean, this is, this is,
I think the future of our industry is making sure that we are delivering on the
expectations that our patients and Al Paz and our families have
for what we do, uh, and how we can support them every day. We are in a service,
uh, industry. Our,
our role and our responsibilities is to serve our communities and serve the
folks that need us. And now that we're seeing also our payer, uh,
be very, uh, um, uh, sensitive to our, uh, to our patient experience scores,
and we've seen Medicare start to transition an emphasis now on patient
experience. So it's, it's not only critical that we,
we do this for the community,
but we also do this because we know it's the right thing to do.
Certainly. And, and, you know, I,
I love that perspective and in thinking through what that means internally for
your organization, I know at the Becker's annual meeting last month,
you spoke on a leadership panel about instilling a culture of Yes.
Throughout the hospital.
Could you tell us more about what that means for you and what the shifts that
you had to make, uh, in order to make this a reality with your team?
Yeah, thanks, Laura.
Thi this cut on a little bit more than I thought it was gonna cut on, catch on.
I, I've received calls and emails from, from, uh, leaders across the country.
So we had an opportunity to talk about patient experience at the last Becker's
conference and had a, a wonderful response to that panel discussion.
We've introduced something called get to Yes.
And when we had looked at the patient experience,
and this is both on the inpatient, the outpatient, the ambulatory side,
one of the things that we saw was a bit of a frustration of navigating
healthcare. We've, in the industry,
it's become almost so complicated for our patients and our community members and
our families, sometimes even our own staff,
to navigate care that patients are often met with a,
well call this number, or, no, we can't, or, that's not something we do.
You've gotta go over here.
And that can create an incredible amount of frustration.
And for somebody who's going through an injury, an illness, uh, going to, to,
to schedule a screening, they want to be taken care of,
they want to feel like somebody is looking out for them and be on their journey
with them.
And so we instilled a get to yes model where we take a patient
who asks any question, say, how do we get to a yes?
How do we get to answering their question?
How do we get to escorting them to the next phase? That could be physically,
that could be philosophically, that could be logistically,
how do we shepherd them, escort them, navigate them to the next agent?
We've found that as we get to yes, on any of their questions or concerns,
we find that positively impacts not only by the patient experience,
but also the quality of the care and the results that we get from the,
from the service that we provide. Patients are more engaged,
they feel taken care of, the families are engaged.
They feel like they're part of the process. And so this get to Yes,
has been very powerful for us as an organization.
I love that. I think that's such a great example of, of one,
just simple way that you can embrace, uh, a,
a different mentality and make a huge difference.
And I can imagine it didn't cost billions of dollars to bring something in or
something different, but just a mindset switch that, um, really makes a a,
a a difference. So from your perspective, how does that get t yes.
Mentality add value to the organization and impact patient care?
Yeah, it's great. You know, Laura, when we,
I wanna go back to it to sort of that initial question is how,
how did this happen and why did we do this? Is we in the industry have,
have protocolized everything. We've created algorithms for everything. We've,
we've, we've built ourselves into a standardized model, which,
which we really have to do to create some standardization.
And back to what we're focused on is efficiencies. But what some of us,
and and this is just sort of the nature of the,
the trajectory of our org of our industry,
is we've sometimes lost that personal touch,
that moment where we just stop and look into a patient's eyes and say,
how can I help you? Not, your three answers triggered this response,
and now this is the next step for us,
but how can we just take a moment and pause and say,
how can I help you? What are you looking to achieve today?
How can I be your escort along this path of recovery or along this,
this, um, challenge of finding out what a diagnosis is,
or I just need a simple MRI or a CT scan or an x-ray or, or,
or a screening. How can I help you get there?
And that moment of pause sometimes deviates from a
protocolized or an algorithmic model, and just that time to say,
I'm gonna help you and I'm gonna be your yes,
I'm gonna figure out how to deliver on you.
That inherently lowers blood pressure, it reduces anxiety,
it increases compliance,
it engages patients to be along this with us. And,
and so we've seen not only that it, that it improves the, the,
the overall patient experience,
but that it improves quality of care because people feel engaged,
i i in their care itself. So, uh,
we've seen tremendous benefits to this early on. And, and like, we always,
I think many of my colleagues always say, this is a, this is a journey.
We're not done. We, we've started this probably two to three years ago.
We're still learning. We're getting feedback from our own teammates to say,
we're trying this, but we're, we're,
we encounter these barriers or these challenges,
and we bring that back to the team and say, all right, here's a new challenge.
We, we wanna go this route, but maybe we can't. How do we find a way?
And it's back to the principle, how do we get to Yes.
Absolutely. I love that.
That's just fascinating and thank you so much for talking through how that came
to be. I think it's, um, you know, really awesome that, you know,
you were able to kind of work with the team to have such a creative and
interesting way to go about all that. Now, looking ahead,
where do you see workforce trends headed in the future?
Where do you see some of the patient engagement, uh, trends headed?
I guess what's next on tap for you? What do you really have your eye on?
Yeah, let's, let's, let's take that in pieces. So you ask about workforce. Uh,
I, I dare say,
and I'm knocking on wood and hitting my head and biting my tongue right now,
but it is looking a little better. Uh,
now I know some of our colleagues in rural areas are still having incredible
challenges with, with finding good staff, re retaining good staff.
We know that the agency is, is still part of what we do every day,
and we've gotta solve our staffing issues as quickly as we can. Uh,
we are located in more of a suburban area.
We are seeing a reduction in our agency, in our traveling nurses and our,
and some of our staff like respiratory therapy, physical therapy. Uh,
we've even seen some central sterilization team, uh,
some gaps needing to be filled by our agency and our, our travelers. However,
we are seeing a, a, a decline in that.
And now we have less open positions.
We are finding folks to be part of our family.
We talk about this at condel often on a daily basis. It's, it's a condel family.
And like we talked about earlier,
when we create an environment where people have the resources to be successful,
where they feel recognized and celebrated for the work they do every day,
we've even have travelers and agencies shift out of that model and become
full-time employees. So we're working hard at it,
as I know we are working across the entire US market.
We're working hard on bringing in folks to do great work every day.
We are seeing a, a, a bit of a shift in the positive right now.
Let's talk about where else we're headed in the future. I,
we've talked about this now a number of times.
I o Becker's does a phenomenal job. I think the future, uh,
is really into virtual and ambulatory. We know that,
that patients are looking for, uh, quick access.
We're lo they're looking for the ability to,
to navigate healthcare in the problem of their hand,
whether that's a mobile device or whether it's online. And so we at,
at Advocate Health are really looking towards what's the next step,
two steps and three steps beyond of where patients are receiving and wanna
receive healthcare. And, uh, we feel very good about where we're at.
We know we've got a long way to go, but that's really our future.
So we're gonna start to showcase a lot more innovation to our patients.
How do they access us from wherever they are and however they want? And that,
and that's gonna be the focus of us 2023 and beyond.
I love it. Matt, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.
This has been a really fun conversation and we look forward to having you again
in the future and always at, at our live events. I think, uh,
your sessions are can't miss. So thank you.
Excellent. Thanks Laura. Always a pleasure to support backers.