← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Dr. James McCarthy, Executive Vice President and Chief Physician Executive at Memorial Hermann Health System
00:13:41
Loading summary
Transcript19 lines
- [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.
- [00:33]
B
This is Laura Dardo with the Beckers Healthcare Podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Dr. James McCarthy, Executive Vice President and chief physician executive at Memorial herman health system. Dr. McCarthy, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
- [00:45]
C
Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.
- [00:47]
B
Absolutely. Now, I'm excited for our conversation because I know there's so much happening in healthcare today, and particularly Memorial Herman is always an innovative health system, a place where there's, you know, very much on the forefront of healthcare in care delivery. So I'm looking looking forward to getting your perspective on that. But before we dive in, could you tell us a little bit more about yourself in the health system?
- [01:07]
C
Sure. So, emergency medicine physician by training and background. And I've been in this role as the chief physician executive for the Memorial Herman Health System since March of 2018. Prior to that, I was full time practicing physician in emergency medicine at the University of Texas, working in our academic medical center in the Texas Medical center and the academic arm of Memorial Herman.
- [01:34]
B
That's amazing to hear. Now, what do you say from last year is the most important initiative that you led? What did you do and what were the results?
- [01:42]
C
Yeah, so our last year actually can really be very succinctly summarized is being completely dominated by ingesting epic. We made the decision after a careful analysis to switch EMR vendors. And for us, it wasn't just the clinical facing part of the emr, the parts our clinicians all touch, but also our entire back end office, the revenue cycle and all those. So we were really taking the entire organization and modernizing its digital footprint and putting in systems that we think will enable us to be successful for the future. I was the executive sponsor for this project and one of the real kind of challenges we had resulted from or because of, I guess, our pluralistic physician group practices. We have multiple different provider groups that are critical for our success of over 6,000 physicians affiliated us. We have our academic partners at the University of Texas, we have an employee group within the Moore Herman system, and we have clinical affiliates of 3200 physicians that are affiliated with us. So organizing training template builds with all of these different physicians, all with different leadership structures. Took a huge amount of collaboration across the practices, bringing docs in together from different practices to help them really organize and be prepared, particularly with our independent physicians who don't have the same level of support that some of our employed or academic partners do, and making sure we're able to make training accessible and available to them so they could be successful when we moved into this new system.
- [03:12]
B
I love that and I think, you know, definitely easier said than done. I appreciate all the advantages of having that more cohesive system and additional capabilities, but I know sometimes, you know, that integration and then actual adoption and maximization is easier said than done. So is there anything that you did within your especially physician organization that was helpful in terms of gaining additional adoption or really buy in from physicians across the board to make these changes and get it up and running as quickly and efficiently as possible?
- [03:45]
C
So obviously, epic's got a great playbook that we work with, and our goal from the onset was to stay as close to foundation as possible and something we were successfully able to do. One of the really important parts for us is the data transfer of information between our hospital health system and our independent practices employed practices. So in addition to the practices we had to bring online through our employed structures or through Community Connect with some of our independents, a number of them are still on very different EMRs and building the integration with those practices so they would have access to the EPIC data that we had so they could easily order within our system to keep the continuity with our patients required several very important working groups. We're fortunate in the Moore Hermann Health System that we have a clinical programs committee. These programs are all organized by specialty and encompass over 800 practicing physicians who get together to help work on problems unique to cardiology, emergency medicine, critical care, primary care. So we channeled those working groups as anchors and leads to help us build out all these programs to make sure we had everybody's perspective as we built this connectivity and made sure that we didn't leave anybody behind or unmet needs. We've had tremendous positive reaction from the accessibility of records and the ease of data exchange that we have as a result of this process.
- [05:11]
B
That's amazing to hear. Thank you for taking us a little bit deeper behind the scenes to understand your strategy and what you really focused on. With the team. Now looking ahead, what do you see as being some of the big priorities as well as headwinds that you're focused on for 2026.
- [05:25]
C
So part of the core mission, vision and values for Memorial Harmon is our commitment to our community. Right. We are a non profit healthcare system in Southeast Texas. We are the largest nonprofit health care system in our region with a truly board that has a volunteer board that has a deep commitment to our community. So one of the challenges we're facing for is how we can tackle the health care disparities we see within our region. We have the highest uninsured rate of any large metropolitan area in Texas. We do know we're going to have some impact with some of the changes and subsidies that are happening with the aca. So understanding how we pivot to meet those communities and try to keep them healthier to decrease their health care cost is a critical, critical part of our strategy moving forward. As well as reducing cost in all of healthcare. Right. The trajectory of spend we've talked about for decades now is not sustainable. It's compounding currently with all of the new pharmaceuticals that we're seeing, all these new high cost, highly effective medications we want to be make available means we have to figure out how to compress the system and compress cost in different areas. So a huge amount of our strategy moving forward for the next several years is going to be on increased efficiency and increased value proposition for our patients, for our employees, for the employers we work with so we can try to bend this cost curve and keep things from accelerating at the rate that they are. We think that the value based initiatives are going to be essential for us to be successful and to keep our communities healthy now and for generations to come.
- [07:00]
B
Got it. That's fascinating to hear and absolutely, you know, looking at the costs as well as the spend on the healthcare side, I know some that so many organizations are really reviewing and closely monitoring, especially in the next year, you know, when margins will continue to be tight for many hospitals and health systems across the board. So when you look at the overall potential for growth and strategy, what do you think is the hardest thing you're going to have to do in the coming year, given all the factors and things happening in the health care space?
- [07:32]
C
So I can break it into two kind of areas. Right. So what's going to be hard and what's going to be essential? And as one of the challenges we're facing in Houston is Houston, which is a blessing actually. At the same time is Houston's growing. Our population has been steadily growing. All projections continue to grow. We may see a slight slowing at the rate of growth, but we're continuing to grow, but importantly we're growing outside of the more traditional dense urban areas we've had. We're growing significantly north. We're growing to the west, northwest and south. And we're going to need to expand our footprint to meet our patients where they are. We know that parts of rural Texas are really going to struggle with healthcare access as smaller hospitals struggle for to stay open and viable. So we're going to have to expand our geographic footprint and we look forward to kind of expanding those over the next several years. That that requires careful thoughts on strategic land purchases, capital thinking carefully about where the market's going to need and what services we need to put into those areas first. We see those as real opportunities for us internally in challenges. One of the things we do as one of the largest employers in the region, we're very cognizant also of our employee health care costs. We're cognizant of how we can drive cost effective behavior. And that's a major initiative for us which is hard to do. Healthcare employees utilize healthcare at a higher rate than non health care employees. We utilize expensive care because we know what we want. We want it now. So getting our employees to the right level of care at the right time is a major initiative for us as well as things like pharmaceutical costs. So we have implemented what we think are really important and novel pathways. GLP1s for example, many healthcare systems have simply said we're not providing those for weight loss. That's not been our approach. We believe these are a valuable tool to improve our employees health. So we've come up with a comprehensive program where we bring them in metabolic weight loss management, get them enrolled for the healthy lifestyle. The things we know are essential for long term success as a part of that program, as a condition for participation using the GLP1s have to be enrolled in our program so that we can maximize the success and the value that we get and our employees get from being involved in programs like this.
- [09:52]
B
I love that. I think that's, you know, so amazing to think about that growth, think about that development and you know, even though there are some challenges with it, I think especially having that opportunity to spread the coverage that you have and treat those patient populations is critical. And I know you talked about value based initiatives earlier as well. How are you looking at that? Where do you see some of the ability for transitioning to more value based care really presenting itself as an opportunity or even a growth opportunity next year?
- [10:23]
C
Yeah. So a key initiative for us in this space is Direct to employer. So we think by working directly with employers, we can help them design targets around their employees, around specific pain points they have related to cost and drive more efficient models. We've rolled out a healthcare navigator program with several large employers where we embed a resource into their organization to help navigate their high spend, high cost patients. We've been able to demonstrate significant decrease in downstream cost for them in diabetes, in heart failure. Looking at several other targets now where we know that if we actively navigate those patients, we can reduce their rate of hospitalization, their days lost from work, and we're seeing significant benefit in these programs. So we think that's going to be a key anchor for us as we move forward. Working with employers to help them keep their costs down and maintain our role as their trusted healthcare partner when they do need to access healthcare resources.
- [11:21]
B
Got it. That makes a lot of sense, you know, is really helpful to understand, especially thinking about that direct to employer market. Now, is there anything else that you see as being really important for your growth next year?
- [11:31]
C
Well, so kind of growth, but also just initiatives, you know, so we've talked about value based care, which we think critical, but we're also, also critically involved in what I would call the high acuity parts of care. Health care are going to move to move to values that are the slowest. So we have one of the busiest trauma centers in the program. And one of our key initiatives this year is the complete replacement of our life flight fleet. We have the second oldest aeromedical program in the country. We have the largest aeromedical program related to a hospital based program like ours. We have six aircraft, five are in permanent circulation with one as a permanent backup station geographically around the city so that we can have these assets close to patients who need to come in for care. And we're replacing the entire fleet this year. We've got several of them already on board, but by the next summer we'll have the entire fleet replaced. And importantly, that's all been done with fill in philanthropy, all of this by donations from the community to replace the fleet. So no capital dollars involved in replacing all these aircraft so that we can have the most sophisticated, highest functional aircraft and medical teams available to transport these critically injured patients. And they'll come online all this spring, including one we think is a critical resource, H160, which will be a much larger helicopter, will be able to push our range out to 200 miles out, which will allow us much better access to bring patients back from further GH geographic reasons out into Louisiana. Down into South Texas, where we have patients who don't have access to some of the high acuity care that we can provide in the Texas Medical center. And we'll be able to bring that boom. So getting that fleet all up and running is a critical part of our first, first calendar year for 26.
- [13:14]
B
Got it. That's fantastic to hear. Dr. McCarthy, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. This has been an amazing conversation and very, very inspiring. And I look forward to seeing you in April at our annual meeting. I know you'll be speaking on a panel and truly helping to dig deeper into these themes in understanding what greatness looks like and what you're looking at ahead. So, Dr. McCarthy, thank you so much for your time.
- [13:35]
C
Thank you very much. Pleasure speaking with you.