The Chief Healthcare Executive Roundtable: Wrestling with costs, change, and the need for innovation

Healthcare leaders are accustomed to dealing with changes, but even top executives marvel at the pace of the evolution of the industry.

Recognizing such a critical moment, Chief Healthcare Executive® hosted a virtual roundtable with leaders discussing the pressing issues in the industry and how they are tackling them.

These healthcare leaders participated in the roundtable.

• Robert Garrett, CEO, Hackensack Meridian Health
• Benjamin P. Levy, M.D., clinical director of medical oncology, Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center
• Deepak L. Bhatt, M.D., M.P.H., M.B.A, director, Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital, Icahn School of Medicine
• Kevin Beiner, chief operating officer, Northwell Health
• Stephanie Wierwille, moderator; EVP, strategy and innovation, BPD

Healthcare leaders agreed that the cost of care for patients is a critical issue for health systems. Garrett says affordability is on the minds of patients, and it merits the full attention of healthcare leaders.

“We have a real responsibility to tackle it, to get the various stakeholders together and make healthcare more affordable, because it's reached a crisis point in a lot of ways,” Garrett says.

The panel talked about the need to focus more on preventing illness to help reduce costs for patients and the mounting financial pressures on health systems.

“One thing that would improve outcomes and ultimately help reduce health care costs for everyone is to do a better job with prevention,” Bhatt says. “Hospitals have historically focused on the sick patient coming into the emergency room, and many times we're optimized to provide care once a patient is in the system. The bigger challenge is reaching out to the community to keep people from getting sick.”

Garrett says he’s heartened to see more hospitals and health systems moving beyond just treating illness and looking at ways to help people avoid the risk of chronic diseases.

“Traditionally health systems haven't done that, but what encourages me is that many systems today, including Hackensack Meridian, are taking a different approach,” Garrett says.

The panel sees great potential in AI and other new technologies to transform operations and improve care delivery.

But they also see the potential for innovation to be disruptive to health systems.

“Innovation will be either an ingredient of the answer to the affordability challenge or a threat to our traditional business model,” says Beiner.

Executives see great potential in the ability to utilize AI to ease pressures on doctors and nurses, such as ambient documentation tools that record and summarize patient conversations. Levy pointed to AI capabilities that can help with documentation and help physicians see accurate, relevant information more easily.

“We have to be careful about this, but if we curate and categorize it, we can create a template that's symmetrical across the health system, and I think that's a win for patients,” Levy says.

He also called for a deliberative approach to the growing use of AI in supporting clinical decisions.

“It's a complex world, and my hope is that we can do this carefully and iteratively,” Levy says. “This is where I see huge impacts. It's going to change how fellows are educated and how trainees come into the system.”

The healthcare leaders pointed to the need to take care of their clinicians, as they struggle to manage patient care, academic research, education, and coping with sweeping changes.

“A lot of the time those are competing demands, and balancing them is one of our greatest challenges right now,” Bhatt says.

The roundtable is being presented in a series of videos over the next several weeks. We’re releasing the first three videos today and more will be released in the coming weeks. Each video features lively conversation on a key theme in healthcare, and they’re also designed to meet the needs of busy leaders who are pressed for time.

The videos are free to watch, but you will be asked to fill out some information to access the videos.

Don’t miss the chance to gain valuable insights, ideas and perspectives from some of the leading voices in healthcare on the most important issues of the day.

You can find all the videos on our “Roundtable” page.

Here are the first three videos from our roundtable.

• Introductions and the one burning issue for our leaders
• A "perfect storm" of change, and AI's emergence
• The financial squeeze: Prevention, affordability and care beyond the hospital