← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
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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. Looking forward to hosting you in Chicago.
- [00:33]
B
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. I'm Scott King, thrilled today to be joined by a very special guest, Darren Roark, President and COO of Wentworth Douglas Hospital. Darren, how you doing today? Thanks so much for joining us.
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C
I'm doing outstanding, Scott. Thank you for having me today.
- [00:48]
B
No, it's our pleasure. And you know, we have a lot of big topics to get to in healthcare. Before we dive in there, I was wondering if you just please tell us a little about yourself and your organization.
- [00:58]
C
Sure. My name is Darren Orrick. I'm the President and COO of Wentworth Douglas Hospital and we are part of the Massgen Brigham family of hospitals. We provide care here in New England and I am a registered nurse, been a nurse for over 25 years and was fortunate enough to enter leadership early in my nursing career and now have the privilege to be able to serve as the President and COO up here in Dover, New Hampshire.
- [01:22]
B
Darren, thanks so much for the background information. It sounds like you had a tremendous career journey there. And then just looking back at the past year, as we're just about to wrap up 2025 here, what do you think is the most important initiative you led in the last year and what did you do in terms of achieving those results?
- [01:42]
C
We have been a straight a leapfrog hospital for seven grading periods in a row now and working with Mass Gen Brigham, we use Vizient Healthcare as our benchmarking tool for our quality. And, and back in late 2023, early 2024, as we began benchmarking with Vizient, we were not necessarily a top performing hospital. We were more of a lower decile performing hospital. So we doubled down on improving our quality journey and partnered with the leaders in crossmaster Brigham and created a new structure under our acmo, who was our chief Assistant Chief Medical Officer to really focus in on our quality performance, our length of stay and, and we've been working over the past year and a half to dramatically improve the service that we provide our clinicians and bring us all the way up now to where we sit today at the top quartile as a vizient hospital. So we're very proud of that quality journey. We feel that in a time of tumultuous change that's occurring in healthcare, that we should really get back to the mission of taking great care of people. And that has been our goal over the past year and a half, to double down on our quality journey, improve our quality metrics with the help and support of our nursing leadership. And what we've been able to do, Scott, is we've been able to move our overall patient length of stay and reduce that by over 10% this year. And we've also reduced our observed versus expected mortality. And we've been north of 500 days, knock on wood, without a clabsi or a cauti in our icu. So by doubling down on that patient experience, doubling down on the quality of care that we provide our patients, reducing our length of stay, we're able to get patients back to their families quicker and avoid complications that patients could experience from just being in the hospital too long. And the beauty of all that is when you take great care of your patients, when you deliver great service, when you deliver great outcomes, it also supports your financial metrics and we've been the beneficiaries of that as well.
- [03:47]
B
Darren, just to follow that up, how much patience is needed from yourself and the system staff while that structure is being built? And do you all just kind of look, say it's going to be greener pastures ahead, we just got to weather this storm and put the right pieces in place and our quality is going to improve tremendously.
- [04:05]
C
It takes a lot of change. You know, we have a 9:30 morning huddle every day where all of our leaders, all of the leaders across our organization gather and we go through the opportunities and the challenges that we know exist for that day and try to support each other. We also evaluate and so that every, every single clinician in the hospital knows exactly how many Foley catheters are in place, where those Foley cathet central lines, where are they? When are they coming out? So we do a deep dive and review those quality metrics every single day with a goal of improving. And then at 10 o', clock, our teams join together with our medical staff and in every single nursing unit we do a quality round. And that quality round is attended by our hospitalists who now are assigned geographically and they report on every patient. It's led by our hospitalists. And physical therapy is there, pharmacy is there, rehab is there, case management is there, the, the nursing staff is there and they go through every single patient that's on that unit, with the goal of everyone being on the same page in terms of the plan of care and everyone being aligned and what the goal is for discharge and where that patient will go upon discharge. And by having the team so aligned and working together and communicating so efficiently, we've really, really been able to drive significant outcomes. And you're right, this was tough because we had to do a lot of change to get there. We had to move our hospitalists to geograph, which was something that they didn't do before and that was a change. And you have to really sit next to folks sometimes, hold their hand, guide them gently, and then listen intently as a leader to what the barriers are to being able to achieve this process so that we as leaders can remove those barriers and make this process as seamless as we can for the people who are participating every day and making sure that it meets the needs of, of our clinical staff as well as our patients in achieving our optimal goals. So you're right, it takes a lot of patience, it takes a lot of listening. But I find that our clinical team is extremely passionate about delivering great outcomes and when we work together to do that, it's amazing what we can achieve together as a care delivery team.
- [06:23]
B
Well, it really sounds like your team's efforts led to some great in depth personal care for patients. And Darren, Looking ahead to 2026 now, what do you see as the big priorities and headwinds you're focused on?
- [06:37]
C
We're definitely focused on continuing that quality journey. We want to continue to improve that quality of care. First we have to worry really about maintaining our gains and then consistently looking at other opportunities. It's easy when you first start because you kind of capture a lot of low hanging fruit and then once you've done that, you do a deep dive on what exactly those challenges are and what changes need to be made to continue to support the clinical teams to deliver that mission. One of the things we're going to be focused on in 2026 is our sepsis patients. We still have opportunities there. We really want to dive deep into making sure that we have the right drug for the right bug and doing that as quickly as possible because we know early identification of the appropriate bug in those sepsis patients with the right antibiotic will really, really enhance outcomes. So we're going to heavily focus on that. In addition, you know, we do know that we have to grow our service line and we need to be reaching our population in the northern service area in which we Operate. And we'll be looking to start construction and hopefully finish a freestanding emergency room department in the Rochester community, which is in our northern service area. Because we already have roughly 30% of our daily ED volume at our central campus comes from folks to the north. So we really want to try to bring that care to them closer to home and work on improving outcomes to the residents that are in our northern service area. So we got a big 2026 ahead of us. We're excited and we're looking forward to continuing to be able to serve our community.
- [08:06]
B
What kind of challenges do you see in growing that service line? What has to be put into place for that to happen?
- [08:11]
C
Well, we got to continue our recruitment journey. So that's, you know, recruiting additional medical staff, continuing to shore up our nursing staff, and recruiting folks here into New Hampshire. New Hampshire is a small state. You know, we don't have a lot of hospitals here. We're just south of 2 million res. So we really want to work on recruiting and finding the right team members to join us in this mission as we continue to serve the community and then working through the normal construction challenges that you have in any market, especially today, with the supply chain opportunities that present themselves and making sure that we can bring this project in under budget with inflation and so a lot to do in 2026, but super excited.
- [08:53]
B
What do you think the hardest thing is overall you and your team will have to do in 2026?
- [09:00]
C
Wow. It's a great question. The hardest thing we're going to have to do in 2026 really is maintaining the great momentum that we had in 25. When you go through a lot of change, there's a lot of excitement, there's a lot of angst, and then you come out on the other side of that and you continue to see the fruits of your labor. But it can be challenging sometimes to keep that motivation to keep folks doing the great work. And we simply have to stay the course, continue our mission and come together as a team, unite together and continue to be open to those ideas and those changes that we discover along the way that can only help us be even better. And that is the challenge is we achieve things, we get really great and then sometimes we want to sit back and relax. And I, as a leader have to continue to motivate the team to say, yes, we've done amazing things, but we can be even better as we continue that quality journey and as we across massgenbrigham continue our journey to become a true high reliability organization and As I explain to our team every day, the quality journey really never ends. Quality is a continuous improvement. It's a continuous improvement cycle. And we gotta stay motivated to continue taking great care of our patients. But also at the same time, Scott, when you walk out on our nursing floors every day, when we do our high reliability organization rounds, we don't have to look far for those opportunities to meet with our patients and understand our mission. And that, you know, sits deep within side of us and helps us gain that enthusiasm that's necessary to take those steps to continue that quality improvement journey. Because our patience and that patient feedback and the service we're able to provide is why we're here and why we get out of bed every morning and come to work.
- [10:45]
B
Yeah. And I know you're focused on keeping that great momentum going, but where do you see the best opportunities for organizational growth?
- [10:51]
C
Organizational growth really is centered around continuing to serve our service area, whether that means expanding primary care, bringing more specialists into our market. We're certainly looking to continue to grow our oncology footprint. And also we're expanding our cardiology services this year with the help of our fantastic electrophysiologists, to offer some more complex ablation procedures and doing everything we can to keep our patients close to home. We want to provide the right care at the right place closer to home and expand those service lines where we have patient demand and need so that patients can receive the great care right here in the seacoast and not have to travel for world class care, but get it much closer to home.
- [11:34]
B
And the last thing I want to ask you, Darren, is how have you evolved as a leader?
- [11:38]
C
Wow. As a leader, I grow every day, Scott. But I grow because I'm enthused to see the team and to see the work that they do. And I would say that as a leader, I've learned to be an excellent listener. I've learned some patience because growing up as an emergency room nurse, emergency room nurses have a tendency to want to get everything accomplished immediately right now. And I've learned that sometimes you have to. It takes a little bit more patience. And even though you didn't get it done yesterday, you still have the chance to achieve that goal tomorrow. So I've learned to be a very good listener. I've learned some patience, and I'm very fortunate to have surrounded myself with an incredible team so I can rely on them to help us accomplish the tasks that we need to do. So I don't have to take on all those burdens by myself as a leader. But I have a great team who's willing to pitch in and help and get the work done. So it's, it's incredible to be here. It's a great time in healthcare and I feel just so blessed and fortunate to be able to take care of the Seacoast community.
- [12:40]
B
Darren, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Is a great, informative conversation. I look forward to working with you again soon.
- [12:46]
C
Thank you so much, Scott. I appreciate you asking me to participate.