← 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. We're looking forward to hosting you in Chicago.
- [00:32]
B
This is Laura Dearda with the Beckers Healthcare Podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Dr. Andy Anderson, Chief Medical Officer and Chief quality officer at RWJ Barnabas Health. Dr. Andersen, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
- [00:45]
C
Thank you for the opportunity.
- [00:47]
B
Absolutely. Now, I'm looking forward to our discussion because I know you're doing some fascinating things at our W.J. barnabas Health, and especially as you're looking at how the system has grown over the last several years. And, you know, really the potential ahead is exciting. So I'll look forward to getting into that more. But before we do, can you introduce yourself and tell us just a little bit more about the health system?
- [01:06]
C
Yeah, absolutely. I'm a general internist and feel very connected to being a physician. I'm the Chief Medical Officer, Chief Quality Officer at RWJ Barnabas Health, and we are the largest integrated academic health system in New Jersey. We have a comprehensive network of hospitals, physician practices, ancillary services, and truly want to improve the health of our communities in New Jersey. We have the vision of being the premier healthcare destination that delivers the highest possible quality care to our patients and families. And we also want to be the very best place for people to work, our team members. The engagement of our employees is critically important. The other piece is we have a strong partnership with Rutgers University, and that academic partnership is critical for training the future generations of healthcare professionals, as well as to conduct research and really be state of the art in what we're delivering to our communities.
- [02:12]
B
That's amazing to hear, and I know all facets of the enterprise truly depend on one another in order to be that destination place to care for the community in the right way and continue to have a strong pipeline of talent coming into the system. So when you think about the last year or so, what was the most important initiative that you led? What did you do and what were the results?
- [02:32]
C
Yeah, there's two things in my mind that have been most important, and we've been working on them now for a few years, and we accelerated both significantly last year, and we'll keep working on them this year, too. The two are mortality and improving mortality outcomes and then patient experience, giving our patients and families the very best possible experience when they're in our health system for mortality. We've worked hard on the observed mortality, the percentage of patients who come into our hospitals and pass away, to make sure that we're doing everything possible to prevent that. We've done a lot of great work on detecting when someone is getting very sick very quickly. We've used epic, our electronic health record, and something called the deterioration index to be able to identify those patients. And then we've better organized around our rapid response teams to make sure that we're acting quickly, that we're addressing issues that can help save lives. A lot of work on things like sepsis, A lot of work on palliative care, hospice to make sure we're having those conversations as appropriate with families. And we've also worked quite a bit on documentation improvement to make sure that we're accurately characterizing and capturing patients and how sick they are. So a lot of progress there. We've improved significantly. We're going to keep working on that. And then even more important in my mind is that patient experience, making sure that our patients and their families get the very best possible experience in our hospitals and of our settings of healthcare. And we've done a number of things related to our nursing leadership, our physician leadership. We've structured something called senior leader rounds to make sure they were actively out in the field looking and listening and trying to make improvements. And a big focus on rounding to go to the patient's bedside to ask key questions, to solve problems real time, to make sure that we're helping patients get better, helping patients feel better, helping patients have the very best possible outcomes.
- [04:31]
B
That's incredible to hear. And I know all are so, so important in terms of thinking about that patient within the health system and making sure that they stay have the best outcome possible as they're coming in. And especially, as you mentioned, for those who are deteriorating quickly in what you need to do to stabilize them and bring that together. I'm curious for the clinical care teams, how much change or adjustment needed to take place in order to get this on track. I can imagine some of it is incorporating some technology into the processes and workflows. But what else did you do to make sure that those goals were front and center for the team and the culture changed along with it?
- [05:10]
C
That's a great question. We had to reorganize and reprioritize and so certain things might need to change in terms of the daily work that for example, our physicians do when they round on patients. The things that they're doing historically needed to change in terms of things like sitting down, making eye contact, asking the right questions and making sure the patient's heard. And some of that's just changing the habits and changing the way that our physicians are doing their work. And the same thing with our nursing leadership and the areas that they are focusing on in their daily work. You know, much more include that focus on that individual patient solving problems real time. That's made a huge difference with our rapid response teams and mortality. We've had to reorganize. Some of our hospitals didn't have highly functional rapid response teams. We had to reorganize who is doing rapid responses, how they were doing it. We've had to hire some folks, we've had to add employees, we've had to change job descriptions. So yeah, a lot of work to implement. And part of how we did that is we piloted and then repiloted and then continued to scale this to make sure we were out optimizing it at all of our sites.
- [06:22]
B
That's helpful to understand and you know, I really appreciate all the work that goes into a transformation like that. But ultimately, as you said, you can see the results. You can see how patients are having a better experience, are experiencing stronger outcomes. And so that's incredible to see. Looking ahead, what are some of your big priorities and headwinds that you're focused on for 2026?
- [06:41]
C
Yeah, we'll continue to push to our top quartile performance in key areas such as mortality and patient experience. One of the areas that we have a lot of work to do on is readmission going to be a big focus for us in 2026 and beyond. And making sure that episode of care is highly coordinated. Making sure that if a patient comes in with heart failure or copd that we're following best practice gold standard care and making sure that patients get quick follow up, make sure they have easy access to resources if things start to go awry and make sure that we're paying really close attention, monitoring those patients to prevent them from being readmitted. So a lot of work there, coordinating our hospital environment, our case management function, our ambulatory medical group environment, centering on the patient and the patient's family, trying to keep that care highly coordinated. So a lot of work there to do that. We'll be focusing on the other big bucket. I just want to mention is we're going to, you know, double down on our culture, making sure that kindness, respect, teamwork, accountability, all those things are the center of everything that we're doing. We have implemented the Vanderbilt Professionalism program, which enables us to have a more structured approach to issues when they come up and to give good feedback to make sure that if there are that don't fit our values, that we're addressing them quickly. That's another piece of our culture that's been highly effective and really helped us build that team environment that's helpful to understand.
- [08:05]
B
And I think that really focus on culture is fantastic and something that I have heard from a lot of C suite leaders in thinking through, especially given the last couple of years, the challenges that have been facing health systems and looking ahead of what's going to need to happen, really needing entire teams to buy into what the health system's trying to do and create that great culture. And so when you look at some of these efforts that you've been able to do to give the feedback, to help people understand the behaviors that need to change and then move forward in a unified way to have that right culture, how do you really approach some of those conversations when you are trying to make adjustments or make changes? And then what do you do to make sure that it's something I can imagine sometimes are a lot of emotions and feelings in it. So how do you really approach those types of things and put your teams in the best position possible to succeed?
- [09:01]
C
Yeah, I mean, part of that is just transparency and giving constructive feedback, letting people know how they were perceived. Some of that is enabled by data showing physicians, for example, how they compare to other physicians on things like patient complaints can help influence their mindset and their thinking. And sometimes it's just telling good stories. Having people understand the impact, having people understand how patients, their families are affected, and that can also be a highly influential lever to change behavior that's helpful to understand.
- [09:35]
B
Thank you so much for sharing some of those examples. Now, when you look at 20, 26 as well, what do you think is the hardest thing that you'll have to do in the coming year?
- [09:44]
C
Yeah, I think getting to where we've gotten to now is one thing. Getting to a place where we are truly exceptional, where we are top quartile across the board, I think that's hard. And you know, part of that is you have to go in with the mindset that you're not satisfied with being average or above average. You can only be satisfied when you're exceptional. You've got to you've really got to push the boundaries, you've got to provide experiences that stand out, you've got to embrace innovation. You have to try things, not be afraid to try things, not be afraid to fail. You know, learn from those things. And then when you do have initiatives that work, you need to rapidly scale them. There's a reason why, you know, all of our sites of service shouldn't be doing something that really works well. So that standardization of best practices and scaling them across the system, you know, that's the sort of the magic to get rapid improvement and get to the place where you are delivering those very, very best outcomes.
- [10:46]
B
I really appreciate that. And having that standardization approach makes a lot of sense, I think when you've got a best practice or you've got something that works and works well. I'm curious in that perspective, when you are putting together some of these best practices, what do you anticipate or what areas do you see as being some of the biggest spaces where you can make headway in standardization or finding and implementing those best practices? What aspects of the clinical practice as well as the entire organization seem primed for these types of opportunities?
- [11:21]
C
Well, I think a lot of it's the daily work that we do and understanding how to be most efficient and effective in that daily work. Some of it goes back to what we spoke about before with rapid response teams and standardizing the way that they get data, the way that they approach rapid responses, the way that they document and communicate. So we have tools too to help with this. Things like our electronic health record are very important. We're on the Vizient clinical database, which is another way for us to standardize the way we measure, compare ourselves to others. We also are using platforms like our event reporting platform through press gaining, which enables us to intake events in the same way and then categorize them in the same way and then collate them to understand are there themes, are there things that we could do better across the system. Another example would be our mortality review process where we go through patients deaths, understand was something preventable and if it was, learning from that, going back to the individuals involved in the case to give them feedback, but also collating results across the larger system and then sharing those to enable others to learn from those and really hardwire best practices to prevent future deaths.
- [12:36]
B
That makes a lot of sense and it really is helpful when you boil it down to, you know, the goal of the goal is to have those preventable deaths prevented and continue to care for patients before we wrap up. I Wanted to talk about growth as well. Where do you see some of the best opportunities for organizational growth at RWJ Barnabas Health? What is top of mind for you?
- [12:56]
C
Yeah, well, first I'll say that as we've become better integrated and coordinated and standardized, it's so much easier to grow when you're walking in with a platform that works. So merging with other hospitals, growing into different communities, all those things are enabled by having an integrated, highly functional health health system. And so a couple places I know that we'll grow. One is attracting and retaining patients. Some of that's our existing patients that we may serve, for example, in primary care. And we want to make sure that we're providing services to them across other areas such as specialty care, tertiary coronary services, physical therapy services, ancillary services like radiology and laboratory, et cetera. Really providing that comprehensive care network for patients. That's an opportunity to grow the volume of our services by providing that comprehensive coordinated to care. The other way that we're going to grow, I think is just by retaining employees and really recruiting and retaining that very best workforce that's going to enable us to be more efficient, more effective, present ourselves in a more standardized, best facing way to the patients and families and communities. And that's going to accelerate our growth because everybody's going to look at us and say, hey, they're doing things the very best possible way at RWJ Barnabas Health. And that's where I want to go. That's where I want to go for my healthcare. That's where I want to go to work. So that's what we're after, really being the very best at what we're doing.
- [14:25]
B
That's amazing to hear. Dr. Andersen, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. This has been such a fun discussion, you know, to really dig a little bit deeper into everything that you're doing at RWJ Barnabas Health and learn from all your of your experience. And I look forward to seeing you as well at our annual meeting in April. I know you'll be a speaker in sharing additional perspective and insights on all the things that you've been up to and spotlighting some of the great programs you have there. So I look forward to seeing you then.
- [14:53]
C
Thank you. Enjoy the conversation.