Becker's Hospital Review

24 24 CEO/STRATEGY AHA CEO Rick Pollack: How to Redefine the Hospital for the Future By Emily Rappleye I t is time to redefine the "H," according to American Hospital Association President and CEO Rick Pollack. By redefining the "H," Mr. Pollack is referring to consciously deciding how hospitals can best serve modern communities, so that when pa- tients see an "H" sign on the highway, it sum- mons notions of health and wellbeing. "We have the opportunity to build a future where hospitals are as much associated with health as they are with sickness, more close- ly aligned in the minds of our patients with the joy of living than the fear of dying," Mr. Pollack said at a December summit on the so- cial determinants of health. e meeting was hosted by the Root Cause Coalition, which was founded by the AARP Foundation and Toledo, Ohio-based ProMedica. is call to define the role of a hospital is al- most a rite of passage, according to Mr. Pol- lack. As society's needs change and medicine evolves, so too does the role of the hospital. Today, two key forces are pushing structural shis in healthcare: chronic care management and consumerism. "Redefining the 'H' begins with developing new approaches to both of [those forces]," said Mr. Pollack. Here is how he envisions hospi- tals grappling with those forces. 1. Chronic care management. Turning the tide in addressing chronic health challeng- es is essential to the work of tomorrow's hospi- tals. e number of Americans with multiple chronic conditions is rising quickly, from 149 million today to 171 million by 2030, accord- ing to Mr. Pollack. He estimated 24 percent of all Medicare spend- ing by 2040 would be allocated to treating Alz- heimer's disease in the absence of a research breakthrough. On top of that, the obesity rate among American adults is currently 38 percent and an additional 31 percent are overweight. "We recognize that the key to achieving our vision of being a society of healthy communi- ties means working outside the proverbial four walls of the hospital," he said. Tomorrow's hos- pital is one that will be more focused on con- tinuous patient engagement through nontradi- tional, community-based partnerships. 2. Consumerism. e second force — con- sumerism — is less medical and more social and economic. "Today's consumers — they don't want to wait for anything," Mr. Pollack said. "And when you think about it, why should they? Healthcare aside, no other as- pect of modern life demands patience, with perhaps the exception of airline travel." Consumerism is redefining how hospitals in- teract with patients, from same-day appoint- ments to telemedicine to house calls. Con- necting with patients in ways that make sense in the digital age and providing easily accessi- ble information and services will be essential as hospitals continue to adopt value-based care models, according to Mr. Pollack. "Re- defining the 'H' means meeting the challenge to move from episodic to continuous patient engagement," he said. However, Mr. Pollack recognized hospitals face major challenges on a daily basis that demand attention, oen at the expense of ad- dressing long-view, big-picture issues. "While we focus on the needs of the future it's really important that we don't forget the needs of the present," he said. As hospitals begin to reach out into commu- nities and strike non-traditional partnerships dedicated to addressing social determinants of health, they must not forget the importance of what goes on inside the four walls of the hospital. "No matter how much we move out- side our buildings, we are always going to be providing trauma care, sophisticated surgery, diagnostics or therapeutics that are on the cutting edge of scientific development, that are very oen inside those buildings," Mr. Pol- lack said. "We are going to need your help to make sure — in the midst of all these changes that we are experiencing — that we continue to have the resources necessary to meet this part of our fundamental vision." n Why People Skills Matter Again By Emily Rappleye S ocial skills have made a come- back in the labor market in the 2000s compared to the mid- 1980s and 1990s, according to a new working paper published by The Na- tional Bureau of Economic Research and featured by FiveThirtyEight.com. The paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, shows that jobs with high social skill requirements grew 10 percent from 1980 to 2012, while more math-intensive, less-social job opportunities declined by 3 percent over the same time period. Many of the jobs in decline included STEM jobs, according to the paper. The paper uses a model that shows social skills can help "reduce coordi- nation costs, allowing workers to spe- cialize and trade more efficiently," the author wrote. This may explain the shift in growth of jobs requiring high social skills. An analysis of the paper by FiveThirtyEight.com suggests this growth may also be because many mathematics-related jobs can be au- tomated, while those requiring peo- ple skills often cannot. "[C]omputers aren't good at simulating human in- teraction," the paper's author, David Deming, PhD, an associate professor of economics at Cambridge, Mass.- based Harvard, told FiveThirtyEight. Luckily for those in the healthcare field, the paper suggests the best jobs are those that require both cog- nitive and social skills. Those types of jobs experienced strong employ- ment and wage growth over the study period. One other interesting finding: Wom- en tend to fill the jobs requiring more social skills. As jobs requiring people skills have grown, so has the breakdown of the type of tasks women perform at work — while men's tasks have remained relatively unchanged. n

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