Roundtables

Q: When was the last time you found yourself really, genuinely excited about something? Why was this moment particularly thrilling? SA: Diseases caused by genetic abnormalities are very common in pediatrics and impact a large portion of our patients. Over the last 15 to 20 years, we've been working on gene therapy technol- ogy that uses viral vector to re- place a defective gene in a certain part of the body and restore func- tion. One particularly exciting area of this work has focused on a congenital form of blindness. You use an attenuated virus and basi- cally engineer this virus to carry the corrective gene. You place the vector with the corrective gene in the retina and restore the patient's sight. at's pretty exciting in its own right. SS: Montefiore is a special place and I've been lucky enough to spend my professional career here. Every day brings something new and exciting. I'm particularly looking forward to the upcoming opening of our new ambulatory center, the Hutch Metro Center. is "hospital without beds" is certain to be a model for the fu- ture delivery of care. "e Hutch" will have a beautiful, patient-cen- tered space featuring multidisci- plinary approaches to primary, specialty and sub-specialty care. WT: I was genuinely excited just last week at Ochsner's Power of One Employee Experience meet- ing. e Power of One is Ochs- ner's communications platform and our Employee Experiences bring together hundreds of em- ployees from across our system together in one place. In one day, I got to spend time with 2,000 fantastic employees, educating them on developments in the healthcare industry and also en- ergizing them for the future. It's so exciting to see how committed they are to our patients. It is re- ally upliing and exhilarating to have the opportunity to lead such a great team. It gives me great energy. DW: e last excitement was probably just a month ago when we concluded our fiscal year, and it wasn't that we hit an all-time record financial performance, but that six of our hospitals went a whole year without a serious safety event. We set out in 2006 to become the country's first high reliability [healthcare] organization. We wanted to emulate other indus- tries where we caused no harm to our customers. We studied other industries that are highly reliable, like commercial aviation and nuclear energy. Instead of trying to reinvent what we do, we ad- opted many practices from those industries and applied them to healthcare. When you look at our performance on hospital-ac- quired conditions, serious safety events — whatever you want to pick — we're clearly in the top 5 percent if not 1 percent across the board. We want to be the first health system to achieve zeroes across the board on all hospital acquired conditions and serious safety events. Q: What should we in health- care spend more time solving, discussing or investigating? What is most in need of innova- tion? SA: If you look at where health- care is going, everyone talks about value-based healthcare: the notion of high-quality care at an appropriate cost. But when you really take a close look at it, I think the industry has been focused solely on cost, with qual- ity really being an aerthought. e big move among insurance companies now is the creation of narrow networks, which is in effect saying, "We'll offer you a less expensive insurance product if you sign up for a much narrow- er scope of providers." is issue is critical to pediatric healthcare. You may have heard that in Seat- tle, there were a number of health insurance exchange products offered in the state — and all ex- cluded Seattle Children's Hospi- tal. Seattle Children's is now suing the state health commissioner. Are we really moving toward value-based healthcare, or are we 6 Top Priorities, Challenges & Innovation in Healthcare

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