Becker's Hospital Review

90 THOUGHT LEADERSHIP The lone creative CEO in healthcare wants company: Dr. Stephen Klasko on the industry's most underrated skill By Leo Vartorella S tephen Klasko, MD, president and CEO of Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health was the only hospital executive named among Fast Company's Most Creative Peo- ple in Business for 2018, which he at- tributes to a fundamental problem in the healthcare leadership pipeline. Dr. Klasko wants to not only change the way healthcare is delivered and paid for, but alter the industry's DNA through a number of innovative research, educational and clinical initiatives. Dr. Klasko spoke with Becker's Hospital Re- view about the lack of healthcare representation on the Fast Company list and what he has done at Jefferson to be consid- ered among the most creative people in business. Editor's note: Responses have been edited lightly for length and clarity. Question: What does it mean to you to be included on Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business list? Dr. Stephen Klasko: My inclusion on the list is really a testa- ment not as much to me but to Jefferson as a whole. I always say we want to be a 195-year-old academic medical center with a start-up mentality. I think Fast Company was impressed with seeing a university healthcare system taking a no-limits approach to taking risks and being innovative. Systems like us tend to be so risk averse. We changed our vision from the classic goal of being the best healthcare center with the most National Institutes of Health funding to re-imagining health- care education with our own parallel values. The fact that the preeminent publication about innovation would honor our collective efforts to create change in healthcare and design is great. Q: Do you think creativity is properly valued in health- care? SK: I absolutely believe it is not. One of the studies I'm doing now is looking at what health systems say about their future compared to how the hospital's CEO is incentivized. This may not surprise you, but they're not the same. The websites and billboards say the hospitals are all about quality, community engagement and creativity, but how does the CEO get incentivized? Usually the incentives are more aligned with EBITDA, patient census and whether you have a bigger MRI than the hospital across the street. In Philadelphia, a place with fantastic academic medical cen- ters, we have one of the greatest discrepancies in life expec- tancies across zip codes in the country. I challenged the board chairs of the nonprofit health systems here to say, "You know if that's what you care about, then 25 percent of each of our incentives ought to be determined by what's happening in Philadelphia — not what's happening in our hospital." I don't think boards look for creativity when they search for CEOs, and that is going be increasingly important and will change healthcare a lot in the coming years. Q: What about your experience or perspective do you think sets you apart as a healthcare leader? SK: I'm not afraid to take risks. I fly planes, I jump out of planes; I've always been more of an instinct than an op- erational person. I started out in a very different way than leaders of most academic medical centers. I started out as a private practice OB-GYN in a relatively small town in Pennsylvania. And I built a private practice from six births a month to almost 60 births a month just by doing some cre- ative things that frankly didn't seem that creative to me — like seeing people when they wanted to be seen. It's now called patient-centered care. And I actually went into academic medicine for a really un- usual reason. The most performed surgery in the country in the 80s was the hysterectomy. I was at a conference listening to an academic physician talking to students about hysterec- tomies, saying that taking out a uterus is no big deal after a woman passes her childbearing age. I happened to be at a bookstore that night and four of the top 10 non-fiction best sellers were about how terrible hysterectomies were, and I realized what we were teaching these students was wrong. I went into academics to do some of the work around psycho- logical and emotional effects of hysterectomies, and from there I moved up in my academic career. Q: Of the Jefferson Health patient engagement initiatives mentioned by Fast Company, which are you proudest of? SK: In some respects, the achievement I'm most proud of is that we started something called Digital Innovation in Consumer Experience, which is a group of about 45 app developers. They're young folks that come from all sorts of industries that aren't outside contractors, they report to me. They're there to solve our problems in a way you would solve them in other consumer industries. That led to the vir- tual rounds team, which started when we decided it doesn't make sense if you have a mom or dad in the hospital in 2018 that you still must call them later that day asking what the doctor said. The technology's there, it's not a technology problem, so we sent video conference software out to fami- lies and they are now part of rounds. We usually talk about patient-centered care like it's a mar- keting campaign, but figuring how to use technology to ac- tually be more human is what I'm most proud of. We have 36 hospitals that use us for neurosurgery and, because of a partnership with InTouch Health, we can do many of those post-op checks at home. Using robotics, we can actually get a more human experience and the patient doesn't have to drive for three hours to get care. n

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