Becker's Hospital Review

25 CMO / CARE DELIVERY 4 chief medical officers' core focuses for 2024 By Mackenzie Bean I ntegrating new technologies to reimagine care delivery and bolstering the clinical workforce are among chief medical officers' core focuses this year. Becker's recently connected with four CMOS to learn about progress made in these efforts over the past year and how this work will continue in 2024. Editor's note: Responses were lightly edited for length and clarity. Bharat Magu, MD. Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of Yuma (Ariz.) Regional Medical Center. In 2023, we launched a partnership with Arizona Western College to establish a new educational facility, aiming to educate professionals in 60 health-related fields, enhance institutional research, and further develop our Graduate Medical Education program. Additionally, we inaugurated a new psychiatric hospital and are looking forward to starting a psychiatry residency program in 2025. The year 2024 is set to witness continued growth in our services, along with the expansion of allied health and medical education programs under the hospital's auspices. Claudia Fegan, MD. Chief Medical Officer of Cook County Health (Chicago): We've been able to take greater advantage of technology to improve the access to care and the quality of care that we provide for our patients. And that's taken a lot of forms. Certainly, with virtual care, a lot of that came out of COVID-19. When we started standing it up in 2020, we were pretty naive about it and there was a lot to learn. A lot of the virtual visits wound up being just phone calls, because the platform didn't really support the tremendous volumes that we were dealing with. Now, we're adding more virtual care options for patients, so that's pretty exciting. We've taken greater advantage of technology in other ways as well. We've opened our neurocritical care unit and have new equipment that is able to measure the oxygen levels in the brain at a more sophisticated level. We are now able to save patients who we weren't able to previously — stroke patients, trauma patients and those with infections. We're also doing more major cardiac procedures in a minimally invasive way — that's something that our patients may not have had access to in previous years. F.J. Campbell, MD. Chief Medical Officer of Ardent Health Services (Nashville, Tenn.): In 2023, Ardent paid significant attention to workflows at the bedside — specifically for nurses and patient care technicians. We partnered with BioIntelliSense to automate the collection of vital signs and deployed virtual nursing and virtual technicians across several markets. Our virtual nursing program is aimed at improving load balancing of bedside nurses and enabling virtual nurses (remote RNs) to assist with tasks that do not require physical proximity. We look forward to complete multiple deployments of these initiatives in 2024, with the goal of improving clinical outcomes and workflows for clinicians at the bedside. Mara Nitu, MD. Chief Medical Officer of Indiana University School of Medicine and Riley Children's Health (Indianapolis): In 2023 most healthcare organizations experienced significant workforce challenges, thus underscoring the importance of talent retention and developments. We doubled down our efforts to invest in leadership development for our directors and managers, evaluated the span of control, and created individual roadmaps for professional development. Each individual member who expressed an interest to consider other career opportunities was offered 1:1 with HR teams to discuss concerns and develop a solution-focused roadmap. This approach was very fruitful. I expect this will continue in 2024. In addition, patient experience is also coming to the forefront priority for our organization. Throughput sems to be one of the main drivers for experience and a multitude of process improvements targeting more efficient patient flow are underway. n e third piece of the nurse staffing strategy is "hire more," which is focused on strengthening relationships with the roughly 100 schools AdventHealth works with to identify where future nurses are and build a pipeline. "Making sure our CNOs and nursing directors are on property at those schools, connecting with the students and showing them what's available at AdventHealth," such as opportunities for nursing students to work as nurse techs, Ms. Celano said. In that role, students get a few additional responsibilities beyond patient techs and familiarize themselves with the organization and units they're interested in working in upon graduation. e results In addition to the turnover improvements, the health system has exceeded hiring goals for experienced nurses and graduate nurses by more than 1,500 year to date, Ms. Celano said. External agency nurse utilization has also fallen from 2,700 24 months ago to less than 500. Advancements in turnover and nurse engagement rates have been "proof in the pudding" that the approach is working, Ms. Celano said. From 2022 to 2023, nurse engagement scores improved on the survey run by Press Ganey, which every bedside nurse completes, aside from nurse leaders. Specifically, AdventhHealth saw improvements in questions around nurse manager ability and staffing. "If you want something to work, keep it simple," she said. If it's easy to remember, then every hospital CEO can say "What are our use less strategies? I know there are four of them and let's see how they're working." n

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