Building Trust, Transparency and Patient-Centered Culture with David Lubarsky

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Becker’s Healthcare Podcast

Episode: Building Trust, Transparency and Patient-Centered Culture with David Lubarsky

Date: May 15, 2026
Guest: Dr. David Lubarsky, President & CEO, Westchester Medical Center Health Network
Host: Jacob Emerson

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on the transformation of organizational culture in healthcare, focusing on building trust, embracing transparency, and developing a patient-centered ethos. Dr. David Lubarsky shares his experiences at Westchester Medical Center Health Network and insights from his four-decade career, highlighting how leadership conviction and radical candor can drive change—especially as healthcare moves toward consumer-focused service models amid industry uncertainty and financial pressures.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dr. Lubarsky’s Background and Westchester’s Mission

• [00:49] Dr. Lubarsky reflects on his 40-year journey, starting as a medical intern at Westchester County Medical Center, and his extensive leadership experience at major institutions, including UC Davis.
• The network now spans nine facilities and serves the entire Hudson Valley.

2. Shifting Organizational Culture: From “Mission First” to “Patient Experience First”

• [02:04] Lubarsky describes a big pivot: moving the organization beyond a “county hospital mentality” of providing care regardless of ability to pay, toward actively focusing on superior customer and family experience.
• Emphasizes employee engagement as the starting point:

  "First you have to demonstrate and get the trust of your employees... then organize them and really raise the level of expectations and accountability for delivering a superior patient and family experience without exception, no excuses." — Lubarsky [02:34]

• Notes the full-scale organizational change required, with early signs of significant progress.

3. Overcoming Local Competition and Self-Perception

• [04:07] Describes transition from UC Davis (“the top of the nation's delivery of health care”) to Westchester's competitive New York environment, surrounded by renowned institutions like Northwell, Montefiore, and NYU Langone.
• [04:59] Key insight:

  "We weren't necessarily seen as the pinnacle of healthcare in New York... Getting my own people to believe in ourselves because the data says we are [was crucial]."

4. Advice for Healthcare Leaders: Trust as a Foundation

• [06:10] Lubarsky advocates, above all, for developing trust with staff and patients, referencing Stephen Covey Jr.’s Speed of Trust:

  “You can do no change and you can do nothing right if people don’t believe that you’re credible, that you have integrity, that you are consistent, and that you’re communicating constantly." — Lubarsky [06:38]

5. Radical Transparency and Empowering Staff

• [07:33] Recommends a philosophy of radical transparency—openly celebrating successes but also confronting shortcomings collectively.
• Shares a recent example:

  "We had a bad February because we had a bunch of snow days... We didn't try and hide that. We went to our medical leadership... and just shared where we were... We actually recorded our best ambulatory volume month in the history of the organization because we trusted them." — Lubarsky [08:04–08:46]

• Highlights the innate dedication of clinical staff and how empowering that sense of responsibility leads to results, regardless of political or industry turbulence.

6. Digital Investments: Enhancing (Not Hindering) the Workforce

• [10:11] Discusses the pitfalls of electronic medical records (EMR)—intended to help, now often a burden.
• Details strategic approach:
  • Prioritize digital tools that make care delivery easier and less taxing for clinicians.
  • Use AI and digital solutions as “force multipliers,” not sources of burnout.
  • Focus administrative efforts on revenue cycle efficiency to meet budget challenges without cutting workforce or services:

    “No mission, no margin—still no truer thing said today... You’ve got to get it by being more effective at what you do, especially on the back end...” [11:36]

7. Staying Mission-Centered Amid Financial Pressure

• [12:11] Final advice: Remain committed to the core mission—serving the community—even in turbulent times.

  "I've actually never been to a hospital or seen its people... not care about the community they're serving. As long as you tap into that, we're all going to be okay." — Lubarsky [12:25]

• Warns of the complexity and fragility of hospital finances:

  "We’ve built a house of cards with, you know, 50 different streams of revenue... The average hospital in New York state makes a dollar on a thousand—a 0.1% net income... There’s no room for error." [13:05]

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Memorable Quotes & Notable Moments

• On trust and leadership:

  “At the end of the day, every success story for a CEO, for an administration, for a health system, starts in building trust with your people and with your patients.” — Lubarsky [06:13]

• On radical transparency:

  "I hew to a philosophy of radical transparency—where we're great, let's laud it, let's celebrate it, and where we're not, let's together commit to getting better every single day.” — Lubarsky [07:39]

• Empowering staff in difficult months:

  “We didn't have to, like, whip them or order them to do stuff. They did it because they believe also in the organization.” — Lubarsky [08:41]

• On digital investments:

  “…making sure that the digital tools that we're putting in are put in on behalf of making the delivery of care easier... with a lower mental effort on behalf of the providers.” — Lubarsky [10:20]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:49] Introduction to Dr. Lubarsky and his background
• [02:04] Cultural transformation at Westchester: trust & patient-centeredness
• [04:07] Challenges in perception and self-belief vs. competition
• [06:10] Leadership advice: Building trust
• [07:33] Radical transparency and empowering the workforce
• [09:53] Aligning digital investments with staff wellbeing
• [12:11] Mission focus and financial realities in healthcare

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Conclusion

This episode delivers a candid, practical exploration of what it takes to reshape a legacy healthcare organization for modern patient-centered success. Dr. Lubarsky advocates trust, transparency, and a focus on staff empowerment while revealing the necessary balance between mission, margin, and culture. Listeners are left with clear, actionable principles and an unvarnished view into the complex but crucial work of healthcare leadership in 2026.

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Transcript

[A]

At Insight Global Health, we are dedicated to helping you and improving healthcare for everyone. That means building stronger teams and delivering sustainable solutions that truly make a difference. We offer a full spectrum of talent and technical services and deliver cross industry expertise to bring you innovative best practices to solve the problems that we face in healthcare. We're not just promising you results, we are delivering them. Visit [e-mail] hello everybody.

[B]

This is Jacob Emerson with the Beckers Healthcare podcast. Thrilled today to be joined by David Lubarsky, who serves as the president and CEO of Westchester Medical Center Health Network. David, thanks for taking the time to be with us.

[C]

Thanks for inviting me.

[B]

Absolutely. So Dave, to start us off, could you first tell us a little bit more about yourself, your background in healthcare and what it is exactly that you do today at Westchester.

[C]

Wow. So 40 years ago I actually started as a medical intern at Westchester County Medical center, which is now the hub of a nine facility very large network that spans the entire Hudson Valley. And between then and now I've been a chief Medical Officer, a CEO of a large physician practice. I was an academic anesthesia chair for many years and most recently before this I was the CEO at UC Davis for seven years.

[B]

Right, right. Well, appreciate you taking the time to be here with us. Obviously your career has spanned the gamut of the healthcare system on the health system side. So David, I wanted to get us started today by talking about what has already been a pretty intense year for healthcare in terms of the amount of changes going into effect both at the federal level, policy wise and then of course the across the industry within hospitals. So talk to us about what recent decision or pivot on your end required the most leadership, conviction and framing that in terms of when it came to aligning your people, your resources and your capabilities at Westchester.

[C]

Right. So even though my medical internship was 40 years ago, there's a little bit of that county hospital mentality that per persisted within the organization around. They're here to save people, they're here to pursue the mission. They're here to provide care to every single person without regard of their ability to pay. But they really weren't totally focused on the customer experience. That is how patients and their families felt about the life saving care they were receiving. And they didn't realize how important that was, I think in today's world. And so we embarked on a full court press, first and foremost on employee engagement. That is first you have to demonstrate and get the trust of your employees that we care about all the people in the organization, including the Staff and the faculty and the independent medical staffs, and then to organize them and really raise the levels of expectations and accountability for delivering a superior patient and family experience without exception, no excuses. And that took. That was a little. That's been a big culture shift the first year, but we are hard at it and seeing some tremendous gains already. Yeah, absolutely.

[B]

And I can speak firsthand. I've been a patient at UC Davis Health. I know what it's like in terms of good customer service at an organization you helm. That was my direct firsthand experience. I wonder how this moment has challenged your assumptions about maybe the health care industry overall, but specifically about your organization. What did it change about how you approach decision making, your talent, your organizational readiness? Obviously, it's a big change for your people. So how did that approach your leadership style or change your leadership style?

[C]

Right. Well, so at UC Davis, I was one of five very large, very excellent health systems. And, you know, UC sat at the. Honestly, the. The top of the nation's delivery of health care, period. It's gigantic. Having come to Westchester, it actually is very large. It actually is a bigger geographically serve a area the size of the state of Connecticut. But we're not necessarily seen as the pinnacle of healthcare in New York. I mean, I have Northwell, Montefiore Presbyterian Sinai, Sloan Kettering Hospital for Special Surgery and NYU Langone, and they're all in my backyard in Westchester.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So what has been interesting is starting frankly from a problem with the perception locally that maybe we weren't every bit as good as those other organizations and actually getting my own people to believe in ourselves because the data says we are. But we didn't advertise either to the outside world or to ourselves because we were always full and we didn't see the need to do that. And I think that was perhaps a little shortsighted.

[B]

Sure, it makes sense. So big competition in your own backyard. When you think about the forces reshaping this industry right now, it seems like this industry has really embraced consumerism at the forefront of exactly what you're describing, treating customer satisfaction as a priority versus just delivering the care in the past. So for all the leaders listening in right now, those in similar positions as you, navigating similar challenges, wanting to embrace the same priorities, what's your advice for them? And you know, they're going to have to balance the speed of doing this, perhaps some risks of doing this, and they're going to need the right teams in place.

[C]

So what's your advice for them at the end of the day? Every success story for a CEO, for an administration, for a health system, starts in building trust with your people and with your patients. And, you know, Stephen Covey Jr. Wrote this great book called the Speed of Trust. It's like a bible for how do you succeed organizationally? Because you can do no change and you can do nothing right if people don't believe that you're credible, that you have integrity, that you are consistent, and that you're communicating constantly. And if you're not doing that, all your efforts, all the greatest ideas in the world, will fall flat. So I think that that's, that's really the number one thing.

[B]

Yeah, credibility, consistency. I think fair to say it's something that's missing in a lot of the world right now. I mean, we're on day one one of four of this conference, David, and we're already hearing from leaders across the country. There is a lot of uncertainty within the industry, within the people you are serving in their communities. What is a leadership habit or a mindset that's been most critical in keeping Westchester and your people moving forward during this moment in time?

[C]

You don't only want to trust. You don't only want to gain the trust of your people. You want to trust your people, trust them with pictures that may not be perfectly rosy. So I hew to a philosophy of radical transparency where we're great, let's laud it, let's celebrate it, and where we're not, let's together commit to getting better every single day. You can't do that unless everybody has open access to data around quality, around likelihood to recommend, around the financial state of the organization. And there is uncertainty and there are troubles. But, and I'll give an example, we had a bad February. We had a bad February because we had a bunch of snow days. And we have. Almost all of our business comes from the ED and our specialty practices. And there were several snow days and we just didn't operate. And it was a bad month financially and we didn't try and hide that. We went to our medical leadership to get all together and we said, hey, we really need everybody to just pitch in a little more, right? Do something more. And didn't have to do anything more than that than just share where we were. And we actually recorded our best ambulatory volume month in the history of the organization because we trusted them, right? We didn't have to like, whip them or order them to do stuff. They did it because they believe also in the organization. And that's the other thing that sometimes People forget, as a physician, an academic physician, all my medical staff at the main hospital or on faculty at New York Medical College, people come with an incredible sense of responsibility, dedication and a desire to do the best for their patients. I mean, in the whole discussion in D.C. and everywhere else that seems to have gotten lost, that there are all these incredible doctors and nurses, not only in academic medical centers, but again throughout our nine facilities, some of which are as small as a critical access hospital, come to work every day just wanting to do the right thing for the people they're treating. If you tap into that, you're going to be in a good place. No matter what the political landscape is

[B]

in these moments, David, where you have to ask your staff to do more. In your pursuit overall of better patient satisfaction and that customer service mindset, how are you ensuring that the digital investments that you're making right now are supporting rather than straining your workforce even further?

[C]

Right. Well, we all know that the EMR was supposed to help people turned into something that was reviled because it added effort and time and complexity to what used to be a simple patient caregiver interaction. So that's job number one, is that making sure that the digital tools that we're putting in are put in on behalf of making the delivery of care easier and higher quality with a lower mental effort on behalf of the providers. That is, it's AI and the provider and the nurse, AI and the doctor being more effective, more efficient and less taxed to deliver the same care. So that's number one, which is prioritizing your digital investments so that they really help the clinicians, number one. And then number two, really focusing your administrative solutions on things they can yield dollars. Because at the end of the day, no mission, no margin, still, still no truer things said today. We've got to make up for those holes and those big bumps in the road that are coming our way with the implementation of HR1. And so we gotta find tens of millions of dollars when you're a billion dollar organization or multi billion dollar organization to offset those cuts. And you're not gonna get it by cutting people or cutting services. It just doesn't work. You've got to get it by being more effective at what you do and especially on the back end where it just helps. Right. You're just being more rigorous in your pursuit of being paid for the work that you have legitimately performed.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. It's fantastic advice for our listeners as they face this shifting reimbursement landscape as well. Before we go, anything else you want to share with them any final bits of advice.

[C]

The key is to remain centered and true to your mission, even in the times of greatest stress and if people believe in what they're trying to do for their community. And I gotta be honest with you, I. I've been all over this country and I've actually never been to a hospital or seen its people. Right. Not care about the community they're serving. As long as you tap into that, we're all going to be okay. And we do need a little more sense in how we finance healthcare right now. We've built a house of cards with, you know, 50 different streams of revenue that, you know, it shouldn't be that hard to make a dollar delivering health care. And forget about making a dollar. The average. The average hospital in New York state makes a dollar on a thousand. A 0.1% net income. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's no room for error. It shouldn't be that hard. And they're scrambling and working. We need to make it a little bit more straightforward to deliver care, pay the cost of care to the hospitals so they're not constantly facing a dramatic budgetary shortfall.

[B]

It's a good place to leave things. David, thank you very much for being here with us this week and for sharing your expertise with our audience. We really appreciate it.

[C]

Thanks for the opportunity to do so

[B]

and to our listeners. If you'd like to listen to more podcasts from Becker's Healthcare, you can visit Beckershospitalreview.com.