The Healthcare Podcast
Ep. 09 How the skills gap in healthcare is leaving patients behind
It is no secret that organizations are struggling across the board. For temporal context the date is December 3rd, 2021. We have been dealing with the ups and downs of the Coronavirus for 2 years. While the economy has been hit hard, we seem to be in a new territory, faced with something many did not see coming.
The great resignation.
With millions of workers quitting, carrying the brunt of an exiting workforce are hospitals and healthcare settings that cannot stay fully staffed. Despite our desire to blame this all on Covid, the groundwork has been laid for years if not decades leading up to the staffing crisis we are now seeing in healthcare.
To talk about why that is and perhaps what we can do about it I am joined today by Geoffrey M. Roche.
Geoffrey is the Senior Vice President of Workforce Development at Dignity Health Global Education, where he works to ensure that healthcare professionals are equipped with the skills, knowledge, and education they need to thrive in their roles, impact the organizations they’re in, and make a difference to the lives of others.
He is an accomplished leader with steadfast commitment and passion for healthcare innovation, future-focused strategy, transformation, and workforce impact.
His professional career has included over nine years in hospital administration where he served as a strategic advisor to the President and CEO and department director of various departments, including Business Development and Planning, Government Affairs, Community Health, and Public Relations, for Lehigh Valley Hospital-Pocono.
Geoffrey also has served in senior leadership roles at two academic institutions where he led strategic partnerships, organizational strategy, and business development for both Lebanon Valley College and Harrisburg University of Science and Technology. He has significant experience creating high-impact partnerships.
He is also an Adjunct Instructor of Health Administration in the MBA/MHA Program at Moravian University, serves on the United Way of Lebanon County and United Way of Pennsylvania Board of Directors, IU 13 Board of Directors, Leadership Council for Moravian College, Patient Safety Committee for WellSpan Good Samaritan Hospital, and as an elected School Director of Annville-Cleona School District.
He holds a BA in Political Science from Moravian College and a MS in Public Administration from East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania.
Geoffrey Roche on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffreymroche/
Dignity Health Global Education: https://dhge.org/
Ep. 08. Philosophy, public utility, and why healthcare is much easier to save than we think
How do we define Healthcare? Is it defined as a set of moral imperatives that each person operating in a symbiotic system prescribes to in order to enable the care-taking of individuals in need of caring? Or is it more of a web of self-interested parties working to maximize their economic slice of the pie on the back of one of the most inelastic services there is? Maybe somewhere in between.
Regardless, I think it’s easy to agree that something or many things are not right in our healthcare system. Patients going bankrupt over bills, insurers denying lifesaving treatments, people rationing insulin, the highest spending with the worst outcomes compared to all peer nations.
Two questions are always worth asking. Why have we come to this? And what should we do about it?
To help answer those questions, today I am joined by Dr. John Silver.
Dr. Silver received his Associate degree in nursing in 1984 from Palm Beach Community College, his BSN from Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in 1998 and his master’s degree from FAU in 2000. He earned the Public Intellectual Ph.D. in Comparative Studies from FAU in 2010.
Dr. Silver started in healthcare in 1974 and became a Respiratory Therapist in 1978. After receiving his ADN nursing degree in 1984, he worked extensively in critical care, including medical and surgical ICU’s, trauma units, burn units, and neurological ICU’s. He spent the last 8 years of practice in emergency rooms while attaining his degrees, and then transitioned to academia.
Dr. Silver writes and speaks about political issues in nursing and healthcare. He has presented at multidisciplinary conferences both nationally and internationally on health policy, the restructuring of healthcare systems using the Public Utility Model, and the role of nursing in that process. He has also spoken to a variety of nurse practitioner groups on political tactics for prescriptive authority and independent practice. In 2004, he led Spectrum’s international on-line chat prior to the election. He also studied nursing theory, nursing leadership and has a particular interest in the political fracturing of nursing. In 2013, he published his book on political empowerment “just a union…of nurses.”
https://nursestransforminghealthcare.org/
Ep. 07. Is Digital Health The Answer?
We have all heard the buzzwords. AI, blockchain, tele-everything, tech enabled, robotics, IoT, remote monitoring, wearables, machine learning, BIG DATA… DIGITAL HEALTH. There are probably some that I have missed.
But what does it all mean? What do all these buzzwords amount to? Are they bringing the revolution that many herald as their promise? Do they mean anything to the average patient?
To help us make sense of the emerging world of Digital Health, I am joined today by Dr. Benjamin Schwartz, a powerhouse in the Digital Health Space.
Dr. Schwartz, is a board-certified orthopedic surgeon specializing in the surgical and non-surgical treatment of arthritis of the hip and knee including total joint replacement and revision.
Dr. Schwartz is fellowship trained in adult reconstruction of the hip and the knee with over 13 years of experience in private practice. The focus of his career has been delivering high quality, evidenced-based musculoskeletal care with an emphasis on fostering the doctor-patient relationship. As a result, he has received awards for Excellence in Clinical care and was a top performer in the CMS BPCI-A program in 2019. As part of his commitment to quality and evidence-based medicine, he has served both nationally and locally on a variety of committees.
In addition to his clinical work, Dr. Schwartz has extensive experience in digital health, currently serving as Chief Innovation Officer for Healent, an early-stage healthcare technology company. His experience in health tech also includes several mentorship positions with incubators, accelerators, and hack-a-thons including MassChallenge, MATTER Health, and MIT Hacking Medicine and advisory roles with Osteoapp.ai, QuadrantEye, and Enhatch.
He is a LinkedIn Top Voice and a leader among physicians and the healthcare innovation space.
Find Dr. Schwartz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-schwartz-md/
And on Twitter: @BenSchwartz_MD
6. Is there a doctor in the house? A looming epidemic that’s already here.
As it stands 42% of physician report being burned out, 80% of those noted burnout began pre-pandemic. Not to mention a projected physician shortage of up to 124,000 physicians by 2034.
Nursing in hospitals is seeing the highest turnover rates in years, 19%. And some figures put nursing burnout as high as 70%.
What’s going on? What can be done about it? And why does it matter?
To talk about this and so much more, we have Dr. Hieu Bui.
Dr. Bui has been in the healthcare industry for close to 15 years. He is also an entrepreneur, investor and a human capital metrics and analytics consultant. As a certified Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives (FACHE), he also maintains his duties as an active board member for the western FL chapter of the American College of Healthcare Executives. His responsibility include networking and spearheading healthcare executive speaker educational events for his chapter.
He has been a keynote speaker at other engagements in the past which includes Innovator MD World Congress, physician leadership for residency program, and Ending Physician Burnout Global summit. His article on strategic human capital management has been tentatively approved for national publication with the HFMA, a CFO and CEO healthcare finance magazine later this year.
Dr. Bui’s interests are at the intersection of finance, human capital management, and data analytics. As Chief Medical Officer at 2daysmood, an employee sentiment analytics software company, he leverages employee data to provide insights into an organization’s employees’ mood and how it correlates to an organization’s KPIs. He believes that employees’ knowledge, skills, and abilities are an organization’s greatest assets and therefore to maximize the performance of an organization financial standing, it must practice a sustainable employability model with its employees. Lastly, he is also a strategic healthcare human capital consultant partner with HC Moneyball, human capital analytics consulting firm.
More From Dr. Bui:
5. Your people and your hospital. How you can decrease turnover, increase engagement, maximize your earning potential, and reduce your costs
The healthcare industry has become notoriously complex. As a patient, navigating the system can be overwhelming.
The same is true as a clinician or healthcare administrator. There are mountains of bureaucracy and administrative paperwork.
But if you ask anyone why they became a doctor or got into healthcare in the first place, the likely response would be – to help people.
Any business, any organization is about people. Made up of people, run by people, serving people. That people service is especially obvious in healthcare, where everyone exists to serve a patient’s health.
But there is a people problem in healthcare.
Healthcare has the second highest employee turnover rate of any industry. Nurse turnover was 17% in 2018.
Physicians are burning out at an unprecedented rate. According to a national physician survey, 42% of physicians are burned out, meaning they have a long-term, unresolvable, job-related stress that leads to exhaustion, cynicism, feelings of detachment from job responsibilities, and lack a sense of personal accomplishment.
What can you do about it? How can we reverse the trends, for the health of our organizations, for the health of our people, and for the health of our patients?
The episode’s guest is an expert in organizational transformation, Mr. Alastair Steward.
Alastair is currently an organizational transformation consultant at The Ready, where he helps teams and organizations realize a more adaptive, meaningful, and human way of working.
Alastair has held leadership positions, developed teams, and cultivated organizational change along the way. He has coached people at every level of organizations, including CEOs, on the people side of strategic decisions, cultivating true leaders capable of fantastic organizational transformation in the process.
Book recommendations
1. Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux – https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/
2. The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge – https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/163984/the-fifth-discipline-by-peter-m-senge/
3. The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier – https://boxofcrayons.com/the-coaching-habit-book/
4. Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan – https://www.bravenewwork.com/
Other notes
Buurtzorg and self managed teams – https://www.buurtzorg.com/
Daniel Pink – https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_the_puzzle_of_motivation
Misty rock climb – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wep1cKBNzCk
Squeeze the Trigga rock climb – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWbJddoD3B4
Alastair on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/alastairsteward/
Alastair on Twitter – https://twitter.com/AlastairSteward
4. The Telehealth Revolution: How you can get on board and transform your practice, your business, and your patients’ lives
Telehealth got its start in the 1950’s when a psychiatric hospital created a video link with an acute care hospital to treat a patient 112 miles away. Flash forward 70 years and we are witnessing the explosion of Telehealth into the mainstream.
Largely driven by the global Coronavirus pandemic, As Seema Verma, the administrator of CMS, said in April of 2020, “the genie’s out of the bottle on this one… there’s absolutely no going back.”
However, there is a lot of work to be done in order to institutionalize Telehealth, capitalize on its opportunities, and operationalize its upside.
Sure, we all see the benefit of Teledoc or Doctor on Demand – where you may be lucky enough to have an employer-sponsored plan that covers these services at no cost to you, or you are free to shell out $45 per visit. Teleradiology and Telestroke services have also been relatively stable for years now and can help hospitals reduce overhead, resolve staffing issues, and deliver care faster and more effectively.
Despite many of the upsides, we still do not – though the pandemic has changed things some – seen universal adoption. Some impediments remain including, reimbursement, qualifications for Telehealth, belief in its efficacy, liability (or perhaps perceived liability), operational complexities and challenges, and more.
To talk about the state of Telehealth today and how you can take advantage of this rising movement is the inimitable Joseph Ebberwein.
Joe is the Co-founder and Chief Financial Officer at Corstrata, a Telehealth company that is re-imagining the way wound care is delivered to the 7 million people in the U.S. suffering with a chronic wound and the 1M people living life with an Ostomy.
After working at PwC early in his career, Joe moved into corporate healthcare and has spent 30 years in various leadership roles in the post-acute industry, working in innovative home-based care models such as home health, hospice, and private home care. Joe was fortunate to work with a team that successfully integrated Telehealth and remote patient monitoring into home health when remote patient monitoring first emerged in the early 2000s.
Joe has published and presented nationally on topics specific to Telehealth in wound care, chronic care cost management strategies, and the transformation of care delivery models from volume to value.
“There are more than 9,000 billing codes for individual procedures and units of care. But there is not a single billing code for patient adherence or improvement, or for helping patients stay well.” -Clayton Christensen
Joe’s Top Books
· How Will You Measure Your Life? – Clayton Christensen
· Being Mortal – Atul Gwande
More on Joe and Corstrata
· https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-ebberwein/
Best fired chicken in Savannah
· Paula Deen’s Lady and Sons
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