Many front-line staff at essential hospitals come from communities with limited or no access to health care due to financial circumstances or insurance status and have either experienced or know someone who experienced housing instability, poverty, crime, and other hardships. Essential hospital workers also experience a high rate of burnout and stress. Attendees learned how one association member worked to create a workplace culture addressing these staff challenges and used a systematic approach to improving employee engagement and patient experience.

Speaker(s):
Iliana Mora
Chief Administrative Officer
Cook County Health

Harris Health System serves the nation’s fourth-largest safety net population. Through an innovative partnership to address emergency department high-utilizers, this essential hospital developed a sustained partnership with leaders and front-line staff at competitor hospitals; leveraged technology and data to identify high-utilizers; supported bidirectional note sharing. Attendees learned how to build consistent care plans to help high-utilizers obtain the care they need while decreasing avoidable hospital use, partner with community-based organizations to support high-utilizers across the continuum of care, and assess the long-term impact of such efforts.

Presenter(s):
Rachna (Priya) Khatri, MBA, MPH
Administrative Director, Strategic Initiatives and Population Health
Harris Health System

Greg Buehler, MD, MBA
Vice Chair, Emergency Medicine
Baylor College of Medicine

Chief health equity officer is a new position for many health systems aiming to eradicate health inequities and mitigate disparities in care delivery. This role is a great addition to many C-suites but requires thoughtful preparation to implement. This session chronicled the steps for setting up a new health equity office to:

• expand the value proposition of health equity to an organization’s vision, mission, culture, and strategy;
• demonstrate a significant and quantifiable impact on patient care and clinical outcomes; and
• enable operational and fiscal sustainability.

Additionally, this session offered practical and tactical insights into establishing an advisory council, integrating data from various sources, developing a strategic plan, and disseminating key messaging from the health equity office.

Presenter(s):
Yolanda Wimberly, MD
Senior Vice President, Chief Health Equity Officer
Grady Health System

Health care workers are nearly four times more likely than other professionals to be assaulted in the workplace, and mental illness plays a large role in these incidents. Emergency department care of behavioral health patients is on the rise, underscoring the need to examine how we deliver this care. Attendees learned how one essential hospital implemented a customer journey map identifying opportunities for interventions to improve workplace safety, leading to the creation of a multidisciplinary response team for escalating events. This has resulted in a decrease in workplace assaults and has helped to raise the profile of workplace assaults with our hospital leadership

Presenter(s):
Malini Singh, MD, MPH, MBA
Professor, University of California-San Francisco School of Medicine
Vice Chief, Department of Emergency Medicine
Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center