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:
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
Sessions focused on solutions to current public policy and financial issues unique to essential hospitals. Past topics have included Medicaid supplemental payments, waiver initiatives, telehealth policy, graduate medical education, and state-level 340B Drug Pricing Program policies.
Sessions showcased new and promising programs that demonstrate groundbreaking initiatives in caring for vulnerable populations and ensuring equitable access to high-value care. Sessions focused on innovative programs that integrate clinical practice into the health system’s overarching mission and goals, quality improvement, managing operations during a pandemic or other public health threat, and patient-centered care.
Sessions targeted the hard and soft skills necessary to lead complex and evolving hospitals and health systems dedicated to serving their communities. Sessions focused on lessons learned from leadership experiences and the importance of strategic partnerships, combating structural racism, culture change, reducing employee burnout, and climate resilience.
Sessions offered expertise on improving the health outcomes for a group of individuals by engaging internal and external stakeholders to serve community needs. Sessions focused on leveraging policies and procedures at the hospital, local, state, and federal levels to support community well-being; innovative financing models; cross-sector partnerships; and aligning community benefit investment with population health efforts. Programs and practices that address social determinants of health and ultimately aim to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care were highlighted.
Questions?
Contact us at events@essentialhospitals.org
America’s Essential Hospitals
401 Ninth St. NW, Suite 900,
Washington, DC 20004
202.585.0100