“We are going to rise to meet the challenges of an unprecedented moment in health care. And we will do it by coming together to support each other.” That was Penn Medicine CEO Kevin Mahoney’s message to staff at the UPHS Systemwide Town Hall held January 31. Titled “Going Forward Together,” event kicked off a series of Town Halls across all Penn Medicine entities over the coming months.
The Town Hall illuminated the challenges that the Health System and the health care industry as a whole currently face due to financial pressures and market changes that have become permanent as the COVID-19 pandemic recedes. Joined by other health system key leaders, the team described the strategies UPHS is deploying to ensure we’re positioned to not only weather the changes we face, but also maintain our leading edge defining the nation’s best health care.
Nationally, hospitals are managing multiple economic changes: inflation impacting the price of goods and services, staffing shortages and labor cost increases associated with agency staff and overtime, supply-chain woes, changes in reimbursement patterns, and shifts in where and how patients want to receive care. Penn Medicine is not immune from these issues, although it is one of the few Philadelphia-area health systems to have a positive financial margin in the first quarter of the fiscal year, according to UPHS Chief Financial Officer Keith Kasper. To maintain our clinical, research, and educational missions – the elements which have helped place us in the vanguard of American medicine – leaders and staff across the health system must work together to offset increased expenses by finding new ways to be more efficient with resources and finding new avenues for savings and alignment of activities and services across the system.
Leaders emphasized that a core priority on the path forward is supporting Penn Medicine’s greatest resource – employees. “With an eye on the long game,” notes Chief Operating Officer Michele Volpe, employee experience is of utmost significance. Efforts to ensure pay and benefits are competitive have reduced turnover and aided recruitment. Several recruitment and leadership-development programs have been introduced with the goal of hiring ambitious employees and training future Penn Medicine leaders. Other important areas of emphasis are workplace safety, advancing “high reliability” organizational culture to drive clinical quality and safety, and giving staff greater access to programs that focus on their well-being (such as programs like On Demand, the employee assistance program, Cobalt, and Wellfocused).
Deborah Driscoll, MD, senior vice president for the Clinical Practices of the University of Pennsylvania and Chief Physician Executive for Penn Medicine Medical Group, outlined strategies for growth and care transformation that use the strengths of our whole system to meet patients’ needs. They include new efforts to reach patients in the northern suburbs, improving both outpatient and inpatient access, and delivering care when and where patients need it – ideally closer to home, and increasingly, in patients’ homes.
The Town Halls represent a two-way conversation with employees sharing their thoughts and submitting questions both before the meeting and during the live-streaming chat. During the Q&A, for example, Kasper addressed employee concerns about compensation, confirming that raises will be forthcoming this year, although timing and further details have not yet been determined. Answers to other questions – about topics from mask policies to employee safety to facilities plans – were posted with the Town Hall replay video online. Additionally, leaders addressed concerns staff raised about the transition of prescription benefits to Southern Scripts and announced steps to allay issues with prior authorization, co-pays, local pharmacy usage, and specialty drugs.
“This a special place,” Mahoney emphasized at the conclusion of the kickoff session. He remains optimistic that all of these efforts will help it remain special, for patients and staff alike. Mahoney left employees with one request, while so much is happening behind the scenes to support the organization as a whole: “Take care of each other, take care of each other, take care of each other.”