← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Advancing Nursing Leadership, Workforce Stability, and Value at Trinity Health
00:18:13
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- [00:02]
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This is where healthcare leadership comes together. Becker's 16th annual meeting brings more than 3,500 hospital and health system executives and nearly 800 speakers to Chicago, April 13th through the 16th. This year's event includes keynote conversations with Dallas Cowboys legend Troy Aikman and former President George W. Bush. For the agenda and event details, visit Beckershospitalreview.com and click on the Events tab in the upper right. We're looking forward to hosting you in Chicago.
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This is Laura Dardel with the Beckers Healthcare Podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Dr. Tim Kerrigan, Regional Chief Nursing Officer for Illinois and Indiana at Trinity Health. Dr. Kerrigan, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
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A
Yeah, thank you, Laura. It's a pleasure to be here.
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B
Absolutely. Now, I'm looking forward to our conversation because I know it's such a transformative time in healthcare right now. And truly, Trinity is at the forefront of a lot of the major trends in caring for some really important communities. So I'm excited to learn a little bit more about what you've been doing in the last year as well as how you're thinking about the future. But before we dive in, can you introduce yourself and just tell us a little bit more about Trinity Health?
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A
Yeah, sure. So Laura, as you mentioned, I serve have the privilege of serving as the regional Chief Nursing officer for Trinity Health Illinois and Indiana region. And in Illinois that includes Loyola Medicine, which is a three hospital academic health system. And in Indiana that includes St. Joseph's Health System located in Mishawaka and Plymouth, Indiana. Our larger company you mentioned, Trinity Health. Trinity is one of the largest not for profit faith based health systems in the country. We employ over 130,000 colleagues. We have 90 hospitals across the country and really a mission driven organization that despite those challenges you mentioned, our mission and vision and values really stay at the forefront of what we do.
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B
That's incredible to hear. And you know, such a widespread region that you're caring for. But also I can imagine a lot of great, great opportunities to continue to grow and develop access to care there too. When you think about the last year or so, what was the most important initiative that you led? What did you do and what were the results?
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A
Yeah, well, Laura, it's hard to narrow that down to just one. So if you'll, if you'll indulge me, I'll maybe list two. One first is the chief nurse for our organ. One of the initiatives that really lives squarely in my wheelhouse is our focus on quality safety and experience. And, you know, those are just really fundamental to what we do. And we often talk about if we can't deliver on those three imperatives, everything else is really secondary. And so over the course of this last year, we have taken a renewed look at how we're achieving those outcomes. We've rebuilt regionalized teams so that we can achieve consistent quality, safety, and experience outcomes across all of our sites of care. We're using consistent approaches to data management. We're embedding levels of accountability that are again, consistent across the region through performance management expectations, balanced scorecards of how we measure that. And some of the outcomes of that are that we are beginning to see improvements, externally validated data sources. So, for example, leapfrog. Leapfrog is certainly an organization that we value how they are rating our health system. And over the course of the last year, we've seen all of our hospitals actually improve in leapfrog standings. Another area that's a bit tried and true to nursing is the magnet designation. And I'm particularly proud of that. In Illinois, all three of our hospitals are magnet designated. In fact, our Indiana hospital is launching their journey to become a magnet hospital. That's one major initiative that me and the clinical teams lead or have led over the course of the last year. The second really is how we create value in healthcare. Sometimes clinical leaders focus on clinical outcomes and leave some of the financial and strategy initiatives to other executives. And I think that's flawed. I think we need to be at the table and helping to lead that. And, you know, our cost structure in healthcare is not sustainable. And so what we need to really do and what we've been focusing on is how we become more efficient, how we optimize the services that we're offering. I gave an example earlier of how we regionalize things so our structures don't necessarily need to be different across our hospitals in Indiana versus Illinois. And so as the more that we can do those things, the more that we are able to drive cost, in some cases unnecessary cost out of our health system to improve value for the populations that we serve.
- [05:20]
B
I love that. And I think that's such a great point in terms of looking at the clinical outcomes, how you can strengthen those. But understanding the financial realities of healthcare today and learning how you can really drive out the unnecessary cost to put yourself in a better position for sustainable care delivery in the future. I'm curious, you know, looking ahead, what are some of the big priorities and headwinds you're focused on for 2026?
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Yeah, 2026 is going to be a challenging year for I think, all health systems. And there's a couple things that are front and center on our horizon. One is we've really got to be good at running, running our business. And what I would say is that the COVID 19 pandemic, which turned into a multi year pandemic with a lot of repercussions that really carried through real frankly from 2020 all the way through 2024 and in some cases into 2025. And so one of the initiatives that I and my colleagues are now laser focused on is continued focus on, on how we stabilize our workforce. Our workforce is fundamental to how we operate our hospitals and clinics and really everything we do. And there's a lot of focus on recruitment and retention of a limited workforce in the market. But it's actually more than that. It's not just recruitment and retention. It's about providing both physical and psychological safety for our colleagues, resiliency for colleagues that are often faced with very stressful situations, and frankly embedding joy into the workplace so that colleagues are happy and finding meaning in the work that they're doing. So workforce stabilization, a big, big audacious goal and much more than simply recruiting colleagues into our organization. The second focus is on technology. Now I mentioned earlier that our cost structure is not sustainable and we need to improve the value of health care. And one of the ways to do that is to better embrace technology. In fact, across Trinity Health, we are in the process of implementing one of the, if not the largest instance, single instance of EPIC as our system wide electronic medical record. And what that will allow us to do is to use the most cutting edge technologies to communicate with patients, to communicate between providers, to use artificial intelligence, ambient listening technologies, data collection, and really, really focus on population health. So across our three Loyola Medicine Hospitals, we're implementing that instance of EPIC in about, in February of 2026 and really looking forward to that. And that will bring us up to the really state of the art platform that will leverage Trinity Health as an industry leader in the use of the EPIC platform. The third thing, and I would probably can't go without mentioning our proactive planning and actions that we are taking to respond to recent changes both in government policy and including CMS cost reductions. You know, these changes are going to hit not for profit healthcare particularly hard and we've gotta really be thinking about how we sustain our product for, you know, the next hundred years. We are committed to being here for our patients and to do that we've gotta look at how we operate differently. So Those are the three initiatives that I think 20, 26, our organization will be highly focused on.
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B
That makes a lot of sense. And it's, you know, really fascinating to hear about that intersection between, you know, being able to come out of the pandemic, stabilizing the workforce, using technology and integrating that in an important and strong way, and then, you know, proactive planning for the future. As you mentioned, there are so many changes happening right now, and being able to stay on top of them is easier said than done. And I'm curious, you know, thinking about all of those things, what do you think will be the hardest thing that you'll have to do in the coming year?
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Yeah, you know, healthcare is going to look different in the coming years. And I think with any gestalt change in the way things look from future state to past state, it is very challenging to manage and to lead the workforce. So our organization just here locally is, you know, over 10,000 colleagues, and I mentioned that Trinity Health has over 130,000 colleagues. So those are all individuals, right? Those are individuals that have connections to the way health care was practiced. You know, frankly, over the last 40 years, we just had a new nurse retire in our organization that has been here for 43 years. So think about the tradition and the history and the way that that person has been working for their entire career. And, you know, we know a lot of those things are going to change, and change is hard. And so in nursing, it's the largest, usually the largest workforce in any health system. Much of what I and the nursing leaders that I work with do is focus on our people. And that includes change management, communication, helping to deal and confront the emotion that occurs with change. At times there's disagreement about the direction that we should go, and those always lead to, in depth, crucial and at times, critical conversation. And there's an impact on people. People's livelihood is connected to the way that they practice and work. And so for me, one of the biggest focuses and challenges with this will be on how we bring our extensive workforce along with the work that we will need to do to thrive in the future of healthcare.
- [11:41]
B
That's fascinating to hear and, you know, so on point with what is going to be the engine of that, you know, being able to operate at the highest capacity and provide the best amount of care possible. And so it's fascinating to hear some of the ways that you're looking, looking at continuing to boost the workforce and make sure that they're in the best position to be Successful. Is there anything especially that you've noticed that's worked particularly well to recruit or retain new clinicians in knowing that there are shortages in many parts of the country? And so how have you been able to continue to keep that top of mind and make sure that you're ahead of where you want to be with the workforce recruitment and retention?
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A
Yeah, you know, I would say that it's very easy to point to things like salary and benefits and maybe some of the other very traditional things that we come to work to receive. Right. Pay. And we need to be competitive in those spaces. There's no doubt about it that particularly in areas like Chicago or some of our other big markets where there's a lot of competition, we have to stay competitive within that market on our pay and benefits. But it's so much more than that. And what we are seeing in our emerging workforce is those people that are either entering the workforce or in their first couple of years out of their preparatory education focuses on things like flexibility. So when I graduated from college, I kind of knew that I was going to be a low person on the totem pole and would work nights and weekends and holidays. And there's really less tolerance for some of that today than there was 20, 30, 40 years ago. And so we're trying to think of ways and implement ways to be very flexible with the way that our workforce is scheduled and what that looks like for our patients to be, you know, to continue to receive great clinical outcomes. We also know that emerging, emerging populations embrace technology. And for many of us, we're used to communicating in person and in small groups. And so I think we need to retain some of that high touch communication. But we also have to challenge ourselves to think about mass communication methodologies like social media. I know text messaging is a bit simple, but there's a lot of different platforms that we can use that are similar to text messaging to communicate with our colleagues. And you know, I mentioned joy and burnout and resiliency in the workforce. I think our newest colleagues are really looking to their organization to help solve some of those problems for them, more so than previous generations did. So we've embedded programs and invested significant amounts of money in how we can help combat and create a less burnt out and more joyful and engaged workfor. Those are the things I think that will differentiate us in the market.
- [14:54]
B
I love that. I think it's so helpful to understand a little bit deeper into how those differentiators are really coming to life and shining within, you know, what you're doing there at Trinity. Before we wrap up, I wanted to ask about growth as well. Where do you see some of the best opportunities for organizational growth and continued development in the future?
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Yeah, well, what we know is that there are plenty of patients and people out there that still need to access healthcare. We see it in our own organization. And those organizations that can make access easy for patients, I think will win in the future. 10, 15, 20 years ago, patients were willing to wait weeks and in some cases even months to see a provider and maybe even travel great distances. And I think our ever evolving, technologically savvy population in the United States and across the world is not as willing to wait or to travel for that same access. For us, one of the key growth strategies that we have is just making ourselves the easiest health system to access in our market. Now, there are some other areas too. Ambulatory surgery is a particular growth strategy that many organizations are looking towards in the future. Right. So the center of surgery and procedural care used to be in the hospital. And we know that as those procedures, surgeries, anesthesia practices have improved and advanced over the last decades, that many of those things can be done in a lower cost of care in an ambulatory setting. So there's huge opportunity for growth. There's. And then last and not least is primary care. You know, we've, we've sort of moved to high profile specialty care as at times being critical to, to different strategic plans and organizations. And I think healthcare, many organizations lost track of the importance of having a very broad and wide primary care base because quite honestly, that's the health care that most of us need to receive. Right. Which is preventive primary care. And so investing in high access primary care, perhaps that uses virtual technologies, is easy to use and meets populations where they're at, I think is going to be a winning formula in the future.
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B
I love that. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today, Tim. This has been such an amazing conversation, very informative and inspiring to think about, you know, how you're looking at the future and continuing to spur growth. And I'm excited to see you as well at our April annual meeting. I know you'll be speaking on a panel and truly it'll be a fantastic opportunity to connect with so many different clinical leaders as well as administrative leaders from the health system side and figure out ways that we're going to tackle some of these big challenges together. So looking forward to that and very much excited for your panel as well.
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A
Thank you very much, Laura. It was a pleasure.