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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Advancing Quality, Patient Flow, and Value Based Care at WellSpan Ephrata with Ericka Powell
00:14:52
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- [00:02]
A
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.
- [00:32]
B
This is Laura Deardell with the Beckers Healthcare Podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Dr. Erica Powell, Vice President of Medical affairs at Wellspan ephrata Community Hospital. Dr. Powell, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
- [00:44]
C
Thank you, Laura. I am excited to be here and share a little bit about myself and Wellspan and some of the things that are facing healthcare in 2026.
- [00:55]
B
Fantastic. Well, I'm excited about this too. I mean, I think there's so much happening in healthcare. It's such a dynamic space and so I'm looking forward to spotlighting some of the things that you're doing. But before we dive in, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself in the hospital?
- [01:07]
C
Yeah. So I'm an emergency physician by training, but have been in a leadership role for about 20 years in various positions. But my current role really is to oversee the quality and safety along with a dyad partner at Wellspan Ephrata Community Hospital. Wellspan is an integrated community based health system that serve central Pennsylvania and Northern Maryland. We have about 23,000 team members, eight hospitals, and a comprehensive network of ambulatory, specialty and behavioral health services. We're really here to provide exceptional personalized care and inspire hope in communities. Our real focus is on clinical excellence and innovation with the goal of delivering high value health services to the community.
- [01:57]
B
That's great to hear. You know, a huge, huge and important responsibility that you have within the community to make sure you're having that access to care and continue providing great outcomes. Now, if you think back the last year or so, could you tell us about the most important initiative that you led? What did you do and what were the results?
- [02:13]
C
One of the big initiatives that we led was around length of stay and really how do we align clinical, quality and operational across the entire acute care division, focusing on patient flow, reducing variability and strengthening physician engagements. I mean, some of the key components to that are interdisciplinary rounds, managing care escalation pathways, and really improving documentation accuracy to support the quality and financial integrity of our system. And what that really has led to is reducible, avoidable variation in length of stay across multiple service lines, better metrics in ed to admission in overall length of stay. But the real beauty of focusing in on this was the strengthened collaboration between operations, nursing and medical leadership. When you get sort of the whole team engaged in this, it really helped us to deliver high reliable, patient centered care while managing our capacity much more effectively.
- [03:23]
B
That's helpful to understand and really great that you've been able to make movement in measurable impact on some of those things. I think especially having that overall length of stay be managed closely is critical because capacity continues for many hospitals and systems to be constrained. Right now, I think when you were looking at those interdisciplinary rounds, can you tell us a little bit more about that? What really occurs during those conversations that has moved the needle in making a difference on some of the metrics you talked about?
- [03:56]
C
One of the things that we sat down as a health system to do is to put together a playbook. What are those best practices that are really going to help us move the needle? And by creating that playbook for the health system, not just the individual hospital I work at, we were really successful at creating standardized processes and strategies. One of those was multidisciplinary rounds. And so at each entity we have a standard for that work and what it should look like. And we're really focused in on geometric length of stay and how we are addressing that for each patient and in their care continuum. And by doing that with each patient at every one of our eight hospitals, we were really able to identify what are the true barriers to getting a patient through the system. And so some key opportunities came up for each of our hospitals that were similar. And then we could solve to root for those barriers and put new countermeasures in place that help us to be successful. And I'll just give you a quick example. We realized that we had some delay with processing how we use our consultants. And so we really worked hard to identify how we order the consultation, how it gets completed, and really streamline that documentation so that now we have a dashboard where we can sort of see how our consultants are engaging with our hospital teams in order to improve that throughput and by adding an escalation pathway, that really was the turbo boost around making sure that the people who needed additional resources from other team members were able to get fashion.
- [05:50]
B
That's helpful to understand. Thank you so much, Dr. Powell, for digging a little bit deeper there. Now, looking ahead, what are some of your big priorities and headwinds that you're focused on for 2026.
- [05:59]
C
I think like every hospital, workforce stabilization and optimization are going to be key. We need to ensure that we attract, retain or clinical talent while addressing burnout and the complexities in clinical practice. I think everyone's sort of focused on how we can improve the use of technology to stabilize and optimize our workforce. The other piece that I'm really interested in focusing on is value based care performance and really being able to deliver high quality outcomes at a lower cost using data that supports care redesign. And I think between these two things, we're going to put a lot of energy into optimizing both pathways to get a different product without losing sight of the patient experience. And that always is first of mine is the patient.
- [07:01]
B
Got it. That's helpful to know. And you know, I love the ability to keep focus on what's happening with the patient, the patient experience those outcomes and making sure they have quality care. And to your point, in looking at the transition to more of the value based care performance, looking at ways that you can get the best possible outcome for the patients, I'm curious, how are you approaching that type of, of transformation, thinking through not only the technology that you'll have to get that in place, but then also, you know, having it be part of a broader shift in the way that you're thinking about care and care models.
- [07:41]
C
One of the things if you're going to endeavor to do this work is to understand what your data is telling you about your community, about your hospital, about your practices, and then really leveraging that data to different outcomes. Every hospital is going to have some unique barriers in order to deliver amazing care at a good cost. And so one of the things that I feel like needs to happen in this space is to have good data analytic tools to be able to understand where your unique barriers are. And again, I'm an examples person. So one of the things that we've done in this space is really to understand down to the drg, how our physicians are diagnosing certain types of illnesses and where are the opportunities to create standardization in care pathways. We need all of our physicians to speak the same language to understand the impact of their documentation and how we leverage that to better outcomes for the patient. We've really worked hard to implement ERAs, COPD pathways, heart failure pathways, so that everybody's getting the same excellent high quality care and we're also able to manage those cost pressures that exist for all of us.
- [09:15]
B
That makes a lot of sense. And it's helpful to kind of get additional detail around those things. I think it's something that so many organizations are dealing with right now and trying to wrap their heads around. So thank you for some of your insight and perspective on it. What do you see as being the hardest thing you'll have to do in the coming year? What do you think that will be?
- [09:35]
C
I think for anybody in healthcare leadership, one of the toughest things that we do is balancing short term operational needs with long term transformation work that we can't afford to slow down. Many of us spend time working day to day on the small things that are in front of us, but there is a lot of real work out there and the pace of change is exceptional and we need to be able to lead people through that, support them, motivate them, and make some tough decisions about priorities, which takes a lot of communication, clarity and empathy. And so I would just sort of reiterate that it's easy to get lost in the day to day when you know that the overall opportunities for organizational growth and stability lie in that longer term transformation work.
- [10:29]
B
Well, Dr. Powell, that makes a lot of sense and I know there's a lot going on right now in the healthcare space to both think long term, big picture, strategically, as well as getting things done on a daily basis. Now, from your perspective, if you're thinking about leaders in the healthcare space, emerging leaders and more, what advice would you have for them to really be successful as they're going throughout their own leadership journeys?
- [10:51]
C
Laura, that's a great question. As I did on what I need to get done in 2026, one of the things is to lead with clarity. People really are overwhelmed and ambiguity is the enemy. I mean, we need to set fewer priorities, communicate them consistently and reinforce them relentlessly. It's just getting back to the basics in a very real way. So in other words, like, we need to go slower in order to move faster. I think sometimes the pace of change in healthcare is so exceptional that it just overwhelms our frontline team members and leaders in order to get done. And then as I sort of weave through this, we need to prioritize patient connection in every initiative. I mean, the reason we went into health care really was about the patient. And we need to ask ourselves, does it make it easier, safer or more humane for our patients and families? And if it really doesn't, then we need to take a pause and wonder whether this is the right pathway to go down. And so I just would say to anybody who's going to be leading in health care in 2026 is we've got to be more transparent about the tough stuff and really protect how we're doing things in terms of just being clear and concise and to the point until we build a new muscle in terms of our leadership skill set.
- [12:35]
B
Fantastic. Now, where do you see some of the best opportunities for organizational growth?
- [12:39]
C
I think leveraging digital tools and virtual care are going to both help patients and clinicians. As we know, particularly on the physician side, there are multiple specialty gaps across the country and in various regions, and we're really going to need to make work efficient for those individuals who are in the specialty who want to be able to help as many people as possible but may not be located exactly nearby. So being able to start like virtual dermatology and virtual rheumatology, which are specialties that we struggle with across the country in various areas, are gonna be key to being able to deliver those patient outcomes that I talked about earlier. I also think that we're gonna need to focus on building strategic partnerships to improve care integration and support population health. As we know the population is aging at a significant rate, and I think we're going to need to be able to work with people outside of our individual health systems to make sure that we're able to support those patient outcomes both inside and outside of our organization. And that whole community wellness kind of lens is going to be critical to the success of health care.
- [14:09]
B
I love that. Dr. Powell, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. This has been such an informative conversation. I really appreciate everything that you're doing and the passion that you bring to healthcare, and I look forward to seeing you as well at our annual meeting. I know that you'll be speaking on a panel there, and so it'll be great to connect in person and continue the conversation.
- [14:29]
C
That's awesome, Laura. I appreciate the opportunity to be able to share some of my insights here about what Wellspan is doing and looking forward to connecting with my colleagues at the conference in Chicago. It's always an exciting time to be able to hear and listen and learn from some of the best in the in the country.