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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Dr. Suparna Dutta, Chair of the Medicine Department at Hartford HealthCare
00:15:54
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- [00:02]
A
Every year, Becker's annual meeting brings healthcare leaders together to unpack the most pressing issues facing the industry. And every year, those conversations shift in profound and unexpected ways. This April, more than 3,500 healthcare executives will return to Chicago for Becker's 16th annual meeting. 795 elite speakers will offer new lessons, new case studies, and predictions about what comes next. Join us April 13th through the 16th. For the agenda and event details, visit Beckershospitalview.com and click on the events tab in the upper right.
- [00:38]
B
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Healthcare Podcast. We're thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant physician leader from a brilliant system. We're joined today by Dr. Suparna Dada. And Dr. Dada is both a doctor. She's a graduate of the School of Public Health at Yale Dartmouth. Brilliant, brilliant background. And she's at Hartford Healthcare. And for those that are not familiar with hhc, Hartford Healthcare, it's one of the systems that over the last couple decades has become one of the great Systems in America. Dr. Dutta, you serve as a department chair. You've also spent time at Rush. Tell us a bit about your background and where you're most focused today.
- [01:26]
C
Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Scott. Thank you so much for having me on for the lovely introduction. I am the chair of medicine at Hartford Hospital, which is the flagship hospital of Hartford Healthcare here in Connecticut. And my job essentially is kind of overseeing the inpatient and ambulatory medical services across our large integrated system, especially on our Hartford Hospital campus. So my role is focused really on innovating and building systems of care delivery that kind of ensure high quality, high value, equitable care and reliable access for our patients and our community by aligning teams across our institution and various care settings. So we've been very intentional about designing care so teams can work together seamlessly rather than in silos.
- [02:20]
B
And you've spent a lot of time at some of my favorite institutions at Rush, which is local to Chicago, where I happened to be this morning, Hartford Healthcare, which has had this incredible growth over the last several years, and then University of Miami, where we have a stepdaughter at medical school. So we try and track with all the things you're doing. Talk to us a little bit about the trends that you're watching currently at Hartford Healthcare just in what you do. What trends are you most focused on?
- [02:51]
C
Yeah, it's a fascinating time to be in healthcare, I think. I'm a hospitalist by training, so I've spent most of my career in the inpatient setting. And what's really different from when I started working to where we are as healthcare in general in the United States today is kind of how we've gone from very discrete locations of care delivery to really having ownership across the continuum of care. So now as a hospitalist, if I discharge a patient to, it's not I'm discharged and my work is done, but I'm still accountable for what happens to the patient afterwards. And I have to make sure that I've created a plan for the patient that they can adhere to and they have a place to go for follow up and all of those things. And that accountability across the continuum of care, I think is a new development in the practice of medicine. So I think that's part of something that we've been really pushing on. I think another big trend is just social determinants of health and really understanding that this is a huge part of what our patients have to deal with day to day. And as health care, we can never get our optimal outcomes unless we help our patients get to the point where we can help them make sure they have food and the medications they need and heat and all of those things. So things traditionally that healthcare in general didn't get involved in. I think slowly healthcare is realizing we have to have some ownership around for our patients. And then I think the other thing is just value based care. I think rather than focusing on volume, we're really shifting the focus to how well are we providing care which kind of goes along with the population, health and care beyond boundaries. I think the final thing which everyone's talking about is how do we use technology to help us achieve our goals of a high quality, high value, equitable care system. And I think it's going to be really interesting over the next, you know, couple years or so to see how we're going to use AI to our benefit and use technology as an enabler of the work that we do.
- [04:54]
B
Thank you so much. And talk a bit about where on the technology side are you seeing the most impact or most excited?
- [05:03]
C
For me, I think, I mean, right now I feel like there's AI that can do just about anything. I think where the biggest opportunities are, are really operational. I think a lot of healthcare has kind of been bogged down the past couple of decades just by the extra stuff that came along with the, with the provision of care. And not in a bad way. I think as we started focusing more on quality metrics, what happened, especially in our early stages, is that we had to document the metrics or add in make sure we're putting in certain things in the electronic medical record. And often a lot of that fell on the care teams to do that work. And where I think technology can help is way that onerous data entry work for providers and care teams and really allow technology to do that so you get the information that you need to do your job at the highest level of your license in the best way possible. That takes away a lot of the typing after the outpatient visit and allows them to really actually look at their patient and talk to their patient, rather than kind of inputting things into the computer over the course of a visit. So I think that's really the biggest win for. For AI right now and where I think we can make the biggest difference.
- [06:16]
B
Dr. D. As you look towards 20, 26, and we're just starting it right now, what are you most excited about? What are you most excited about? What gets you going in the morning and most excited about what you're doing?
- [06:29]
C
Yeah, that's a great question. I think, you know, sometimes I think healthcare, at least historically, is this big, messy room with a lot of great things in the room, but there's all kind of all over the place and it's a big mess. And I love the concept just mentally of cleaning up that room and making it so clear where all the great things are. And so anyone could walk into that room and figure out how to get anywhere and get what they need out of that room. So what's really excited that I think all of healthcare is really getting on board with that vision of building these connected systems of care where nobody's siloed and we're all really focused on the actual patient and how they're dealing with their illness and how we can support them. I'll give you an example. I think I had mentioned social determinants of health. And I think for a long time, I think we as care teams knew that, you know, my patient can't afford heat or they're getting evicted from their apartment. I can tell them to take all the blood pressure medications I want. They're not going to. That's not the top of their priority list. And so we know this, but there wasn't a whole lot that we could do about it because we're not really given instruction in how to help someone through the eviction process or what to do in terms of navigating that. And so now I see, like at Hartford, at our hospital, we've created a partnership, a medical, legal partnership with the University of Connecticut, where we have a Law professor and some law students on site. So if I am seeing a patient and they tell me, you know, I'm worried about getting evicted from my apartment, I don't know how I'm going to be able to take care of myself. I can send them to the medical legal clinic to see if there's something that can be done to support the patient. And we also have a food for health clinic that, you know, we have food insecurity. That's a big issue in our patients lives. We have a place that we can send them where they will get help in terms of getting groceries that are actually grown on our hospital roof and also cooking lessons on how to optimize and make sure that they're creating healthful meals. So a lot of things that in the past that we knew impacted our patients and how we cared for our patients, but we were pretty helpless around how to help our patients through that. Now I think we're starting to build networks to support people to do that sort of thing. The other thing that is really exciting for me when I think of like cleaning that room is care transitions. I think historically a very messy period of time like when the patient leaves the acute care setting or the ED setting and then before they're kind of picked up on the other end by the primary care doctor or the specialist that follows them. And especially with access after the pandemic that stays space got even messier and led to a lot of the emergency department overcrowding and things that we've seen over the past couple of years that everyone in this country has been dealing with. And so we've really started creating a transitional care infrastructure to ensure that everyone gets timely access to care. So we created a clinic called our center for Transitional Care, which is essentially there for patients coming out of the hospital or the emergency department that aren't able to get in to see their primary care doctor in a timely fashion or maybe don't have a primary care doctor. And so we will get these patients in within 7 to 10 days, follow up from the acute care setting. So that allows the patients to get out of the hospital, which is never the best place for a patient to stay long, for a long period of time anyways, lets them get on with their life but still make sure that they have the care that they need for their illness. And so what our clinic does is helps the patient navigate the system and get a primary care doctor if they don't have one or connects them back to their own primary care doctor. So that's been really really exciting to watch that clinic grow and help our patients and how it's been adopted by our teams here in the hospital. I think we've also created offshoots of the transitional care work. We have an addiction services, both an inpatient consult service, which I was really excited about. Opioid use and alcohol use disorder are things that everyone deals with in the inpatient setting. I think our county here in Connecticut had the second highest rates of opioid use and alcohol use disorder coming out of the pandemic. And so having a team that's boarded in addiction medicine and was really able to bring the most up to date treatment plans and protocols to our order sets in the hospital and advise our primary teams on how to help our patients both in the acute medical setting in terms of withdrawal and getting them started on medications to stay clean. And now we have an outpatient transitional clinic for addiction medicine where if they can't get the medications that they need, need from other community resources, they will be seen in this clinic and given the medications until we can hook them up with long term care. So that's been something that I've been really, really excited about. We also have a similar concept with our endocrinology transition clinic. So diabetics that were really tough to control in the hospital, we have a clinic where they can be seen pretty quickly after they're discharged from the hospital to make sure that they're on track before getting them back to their regular endocrinologist. Other things that I'm really excited about that we're working on here at the hospital and in our region is how we're starting to partner outside of just the hospital with community groups around the city of Hartford in terms of creating just comprehensive plans for our patients and putting together all our resources to support our patients where they are and really creating equitable outcomes for our patients. We started an initiative in our outpatient clinics around population health and to optimize the blood pressure and a 1Cs of our patients in our community clinics. It's a fairly underserved population and historically we did not do a great job of that and worked really hard to meet patients where they were. So for example, if patients couldn't come to our clinic during the day because they had to work, we tried an evening clinic, we tried a virtual clinic which helped get access for patients. We met the patients where they were coming. So if they were coming to our food for health clinic to pick up some groceries, we met them there with a blood pressure cuff and checked their blood pressures we got our other specialty community clinics to partner and check blood pressures and notify our clinic if patients were high. So I think a lot of this is just really creating a culture that aligns everyone that works with the patients on the same page. Of it's about the patient and their outcomes and how can we help them get there.
- [12:55]
B
I'm going to ask you, Dr. Daddy, if you're ready for this, the toughest question of the day. And you have to let me know if you're ready and prepared for this.
- [13:03]
C
I'm ready.
- [13:04]
B
Okay, so here is the question. You went to three fantastic academic institutions, Public School of Health at Yale, did a master's in public health, a couple since at the University of Buffalo, and then time at Dartmouth for undergraduate, I take it correct?
- [13:22]
C
Yes.
- [13:23]
B
Okay, so here is the question. Where were the people the nicest?
- [13:31]
C
That's a great question. I am a native Buffalonian, so I'm going to always have to go with upstate New York. But there's a lot of similarities between New England and upstate New York. I can't say that there's huge regional differences.
- [13:49]
B
Well, fair enough. And I think you handled that very well. The last question, you've been a lifelong learner. You're a leader, you're a physician. Any advice that you give to emerging leaders?
- [14:02]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing for me has always been the knowledge that, one, I don't have all the answers. And knowing that and realizing that my job is really to kind of be the person that brings the ideas together. So really tapping into the expertise of the amazing people all around me, I think has really helped me knowing that I alone am not going to be able to solve these problems. But when I have this amazing team that's doing this work day in and day out, they're seeing things and they know things that when they bring them to the surface and they are working in an environment where they feel empowered to own the outcomes, I think a lot of great things can happen. So I think really allowing these insanely talented, motivated people that work in healthcare to own the ideas, and then releasing my job as kind of taking the ideas and helping people make their ideas into reality and helping make their workflows easier so that they can really do the work that they signed up to do. I think we're really, really lucky in health care that it's a special type of person that wants to work in this world. It's hard work, and there's a lot that we have to work to kind of struggle with in terms of helping our patients get what they need in terms of just our overall system. And so being able to find the people that are willing to do this work and select for it and get them to do what's right by the patient and put them in a position to be successful is incredibly rewarding. So I hope that answered your question.
- [15:38]
B
No, I love it. And, Dr. Dada, what a pleasure to visit with you. What a magnificent career. Thank you for taking the time with us on the Becker's Healthcare Podcast Day. Thank you so much.
- [15:49]
C
Yeah, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.