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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Allison Roditi, Vice President of the Musculoskeletal Service Line at Catholic Health
00:15:37
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- [00:01]
A
This is Laura Dardo with the Beckers Healthcare Podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Allison Roditi, Vice president of musculoskeletal Service Line at Catholic Health. Allison, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
- [00:13]
B
Thank you, Laura. I'm very excited to be here.
- [00:16]
A
Absolutely. Now I am looking forward to our conversation because I know there's so much happening in healthcare and particularly a lot going on with orthopedics and musculoskeletal care, which I know you oversee at Catholic Health. And so I'm excited to dive into this conversation. But before we begin, could you tell us a little bit more about yourself and Catholic Health? What's been your biggest winner success story from the last year?
- [00:39]
B
Yeah, sure. So Catholic Health, for anyone unfamiliar, is a faith based sick hospital system In Long Island, N.Y. we have about 18,000 employees and about 3,400 physician providers in various ambulatory practices and ambulatory hubs. We have several ambulatory surgical centers. We have imaging centers, home health care, rehabilitation, and even hospice care. And we're actually the third largest employer on Long Island. So small but mighty, as we like to say. And it's an absolutely phenomenal place to work. And you know, we have had. So I've been there about just under three years now and I would say, you know, one of our biggest successes is really growing, at least from my perspective, growing our orthopedic services. So I'm actually really proud to say that now after about two and three quarters years, we can offer pretty much any orthopedic subspecialty care that anyone would need on Long island through our health system. So when I joined, we recruited heavily primary sports medicine, orthopedic specialists in sports medicine, joint replacement, foot and ankle surgery, hand surgery, and we have a few of those folks are starting next month. We've had some start over the last few years and we've really, really grown our access for our patients. When we got here, we have some incredible community partners and some large orthopedic practices and we had a few faculty, I think we had about nine, maybe 10 across the island with the addition of some pain management folks, a large spine group, and some of our own recruitment as well. We're almost at 40 members now of faculty in addition to these wonderful community partners that we have. So we really do provide comprehensive musculoskeletal care from orthopedics to pain management to spine care, rehabilitation. We're growing our rehabilitation services as well. We just opened a facility about a year ago in Westbury. And I think within the first two weeks we were already full with appointments. So I think for us, even in some very challenging times over the last year, and what will surely be some interesting times ahead in the next few years, we're managing to expand our footprint and grow, which I think, I think is excellent. The fact that we can provide care for Long Islanders without them having to leave the island is something I'm really proud of. And if you look at the pedigree of the folks that we recruited, we're getting from the top fellowships. And in fact, I have a joint replacement surgeon starting very soon who is coming from a fellowship in Oxford. I mean, we're really getting some excellent clinicians here, and that's something that I'm really proud of that we work really hard on.
- [03:16]
A
Absolutely. That makes a lot of sense and definitely is super fascinating to see the growth that you've had in orthopedics. Great to understand how that volume continues to increase and that demand seems like it'll definitely continue over the next several years or so. And given some of this success, what are the top two to three issues that you're focused on right now?
- [03:39]
B
Sure. So I'm sure this is top of mind for many in the healthcare field. How do we continue to provide really high quality care, compassionate care, and an excellent patient experience in the face of dwindling reimbursements, especially from those governmental payers? And so I think what we've been really trying to do is look at how do we keep people in our system once we have them, and how do we attract more people through our system. And that involves a lot of partnership with our clinicians. So we've really focused on connecting our primary care providers with our specialists. And this is being done across all of our service lines and orthopedics in particular, educating our primary care docs about our subspecialties and what they do and where we can send them, and really providing access for patients that's convenient that they're not, for example, seeing a primary care provider in Suffolk county and having to go to Nassau county for specialty care. So we've made a huge initiative to grow our IN network utilization. And it's really starting to pay off. We're seeing a lot more relationships being built across the subspecialties and even across service lines. We're seeing oncology partnering with orthopedics for patients where it might be an ortho oncology issue. We're seeing a lot of partnership with primary care. We're even seeing a lot of partnership among. We're looking at trying to create a combined spine service where our neuro folks and our ortho folks are really working together to develop programs for back care and spine care. And it's really exciting to see the collaboration that's starting to happen. So I think another priority for us is now that we've done quite a bit of recruitment, we have some left to do is how do we take all of those amazing clinicians that we have and how do we continue to build on those programs that we want to offer. And so one of the other top priorities I think we have in orthopedics is building these programs around, you know, back, back care, back pain, spine, ortho, and really connecting folks so that patients have a very seamless experience. I think we are making strides towards that. And over the next year, a lot of our strategic plan is to grow these programs and really enhance access for patients and make it just really easy for patients to access care. And that involves linking providers or looking at services and saying, okay, well if something's not available for a patient maybe five miles from their home, you know, let's ask the patient if they're willing to drive for a service and see if we can get them in maybe at one of our other facilities and then connect them back to those providers that we're referring them.
- [06:13]
A
Absolutely, that makes a lot of sense. It is really fascinating to see that trend of trying to expand access to patients and the patient experience as well. I know that's something I've heard over and over again, is thinking about how to make sure access is close to home or as convenient as possible to the patients. So when you're troubleshooting that, does that involve technology or how, how do you really make sure that you're making the right investments to make the difference that you're looking for, especially with the access and experience.
- [06:44]
B
Definitely. So some of it does involve technology and some technological investment in terms of systems that allow us to very seamlessly connect our patients to our providers. Some of it, to be perfectly honest, is old school. We are getting physicians together and doing meet and greets and saying, okay, well here's our primary care specialist and here's our orthopedic specialist and you guys and gals should exchange cell phone numbers. This way we can do formal follow up and documented and epic in our medical record, but we also have those much more casual relationships. And this way the physicians can talk to each other and say, oh, I just saw your patient, Allison here's what we talked about. And next time you meet with her, this is something we should definitely follow up on. And so I think it's a little bit of old school handshaking, meet and greets. It's a little bit of technology. We're trying to make the most of things that are, you know, good investments and that maybe not such a heavy lift in terms of, you know, getting things implemented within a health system. So we also have a few little pilot projects kind of going on with this. And so we're taking one part of a small service line, whether it's in oncology or orthopedics, and saying, okay, let's try this and see if it works this way. If it's work out so great, we learn from our mistake and we kind of tweak it a little bit. And if it does work, then we can roll it out in a bigger way across the system. So, for example, we will be formally launching a back pain program, probably by the fall, out of one of our hospitals. And we really want to make sure it works there and it works well. And we've ironed out all the kinks. And then once we do, we plan to roll the model out across the health system. So pretty exciting. And again, it involves some tech, some people investment, and a lot of communication and having folks kind of meet face to face or via zoom, if we can't do a face to face and linking all these providers to each other so that they know who they're working with and who are their colleagues and who are they sending their patients to. You know, I think in this day and age, it can get very impersonal. It's just a name, you know, in a medical record somewhere that you're clicking off with a referral. And it's so much better when you actually know who the person is and you talked to them and you've had a connection and you can share patients and just share a conversation. And so I think the fact that we're doing that is bringing back a lot of that relationship building that sometimes gets lost in modern healthcare.
- [09:03]
A
That makes a lot of sense. And thank you for digging a little bit deeper there. Now, I'm curious, when you think about the growth and those additional opportunities in the future, where do you have your sights set? What are the things that you're talking about now in terms of your future growth and strategic plans?
- [09:21]
B
So I think for orthopedics, continuing to build on the programs that we have and really looking to some best practice across the country, but how do we start creating centers of excellence for our patients? I think the main goal for orthopedics in any subspecialty for us is no matter where a patient enters our system, how do we get them to the right provider at the right time? That's going to involve creating some hub for certain subspecialties and then some places where maybe a patient enters the emergency department and if that particular location can't provide the quality of service, or sorry, not quality, but the type of service they need, getting them immediately to the place where they can get care. And again, this will also involve lots of linkages, lots of connections, some use of technology, but a lot of communication and systems in place to get those patients what they need. So I think for us, program building is really going to be key. And then I think the other thing on more of a system level is we have an incredible leadership team at all levels at Catholic Health. And we've recently been exploring other ways to communicate as a leadership team, from corporate to the practice management side, to each hospital side. And so we've been kind of experimenting a little bit with some of these meeting structures. And I think what's great is over the last year we've iterated some of these and figured out who the right people are to have in each of the meetings to accomplish our goals and help accomplish them quickly. Healthcare is very interesting. Things don't always move as quickly as we'd like, especially when you're in a surgical subspecialty. And so I think by having leaders that are willing to take a little bit of risk and iterate, I think we've really come up with some great ways to make sure that the hospitals are staying aligned with the service lines, who are also staying aligned with the practices and also staying aligned with our supply chain and our strategic planning department. These folks are all integrated into our everyday processes and it's really helping us to have a really good picture of what's going on across the system rather than operating in sort of different silos and then having to backtrack and say, oh no, we made a mistake there, made a misstep there. So I think it's allowing us to be very forward thinking and plan ahead versus being reactionary. And so I think that'll be key to Catholic Health success as a system going forward. And obviously that trickles down to all of our service lines. And so I think we're all really excited to be a part of that in this evolution going forward.
- [11:44]
A
I love that. And you know, it sounds like A really solid way to work with not only the team you have there and understand exactly what they're seeing and being able to implement that and incorporate that into the broader best practices and operations, but also, you know, strongly listening to patients and improving that quality, improving that experience, which makes a really big difference. Before we wrap up here, I wanted to get your on what you think it will take in order to lead a thriving organization thinking over the next five years or so, what's important for leaders to know and be able to pivot to as they're looking into the future?
- [12:21]
B
Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. I think one, communication is going to be really key. I think we, you know, healthcare organizations are highly complex and in order to be successful, we are all going to have to figure out, you know, kind of like what we're trying to do at Catholic Health is how do you get the right people at the table to make decisions and be fellow thinking? You know, I also do think that we're going to have to remember that at our, at its core we're about serving people. You know, it's too often we think about people as patients or consumers, but we're all human and we're all people. And I think as long as we adhere to, you know, remembering that these are human, human beings that need our care, that'll help keep us guided in the right direction. When things get a little bit tough, it's easy to look at numbers and say, okay, well we need to do this and we need to do that. But you know, I think especially being in a faith based organization where caring for people is at our core, I think that will help us in particular really, you know, help our patient population on Long island and provide them with what we need. And then I think, you know, as leaders, I think we're going to have to be a little bit innovative, we're going to have to be a little bit flexible and you know, all the organizations are getting lean and I think, you know, we as leaders are going to have to roll up our sleeves and it means pitching it at every level. You know, no one is above doing any job. And you know, I think some of us are going to have to get back to, you know, some of those hands on things that maybe we haven't done in a while because organizations have gotten a little bit, a little bit big. And I'm excited about that. I love kind of delving into a project and problem solving and thinking about how we can be creative about how to solve something and maybe Think outside of the box. I also think we need to look to other industries for examples of how to do this. So many other industries are much more nimble than we are in healthcare. And I know a lot of that because we come with a lot of rules and regulations, but it doesn't mean we can't try things in pilot projects and, you know, experiment a little bit and be a little bit creative. And if something works, let's run with it and let's not worry about large scale implementations as the first step. Let's do it on a small scale, let's see if it works and then let's rule it out. And again, being mindful of involving all of the key stakeholders so that, you know, it is involved. Supply chain is involved, strategy is involved, finance is involved. You know, too often, and I've been guilty of this too, it's very easy to kind of run with something and realize you've left out a major stakeholder and then you've gotten very far down the path of something that sounds really exciting. And they come in and they're like, oh, we have to, you know, roll that back a little bit. So for me, I'm always learning and this is going to be a really exciting time about, you know, how do we evolve as leaders ourselves and, you know, really think about, you know, what we challenge our assumptions and what we've known over the last 20 odd years of healthcare in order to take it into the future.
- [15:11]
A
Absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. Alison, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. This has been a really inspiring conversation to have with you and learning a ton from our connecting point here and I appreciate your perspective. I look forward to connecting with you again soon.
- [15:27]
B
Sounds good. And it was my pleasure. Looking forward to connecting with you again soon too.