← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
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- [00:00]
Dr. Ecker Villas
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 us@insightglobal.com hello and welcome to the.
- [00:27]
Host of Becker's Healthcare Podcast
Becker's Healthcare Podcast, recorded live at Becker's 15th annual meeting in Chicago. I'm joined today by Dr. Ecker Villas, chief Human Resources Officer at keck Medicine of USC. Dr. Villas, thank you so much for joining us today.
- [00:39]
Dr. Ecker Villas
It's a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you for inviting me.
- [00:42]
Host of Becker's Healthcare Podcast
It's our pleasure. Would you begin by taking a brief moment to tell us a little bit about yourself and your role in your organization?
- [00:48]
Dr. Ecker Villas
Sure. So, as you said, I am the Chief Human Resources Officer for Keck Medicine of usc. This is the health enterprise of the University of Southern California based off of Los Angeles in California. I have accountability for strategy and operations of the human resource and talent management function for the entire health system which comprises of four hospitals, it's academic medical, two acute care hospitals and two community hospitals in over 100ambulatory locations. Personally, from experience perspective, I have about two decades of experience in the healthcare industry. Of my total 28 years of experience, all of it in premier academic medical institutions, starting with Stanford Medicine, then UC Davis Health and now Keck Medicine. I'm now nearing three years with usc, haven't taken a system wide HR transformational journey, introducing a new operating model for the organization. In regards to my organization, as I said, we are academic medical enterprise. We are actually one of the two university based medical systems in the Los Angeles area and overall across the four hospitals, around 910 beds and nearing 10,000 employees. So we combine academic excellence, world class research, state of the art facilities to provide highly specialized care for some of the most acute patients in the country with the highest case mix index. Again, very proud of our flagship hospital being ranked in the top 50 in the nation.
- [02:19]
Host of Becker's Healthcare Podcast
Awesome. Well, over the last 12 months, what's an initiative that you took on that you're particularly proud of and what impact has it made on your organization so far?
- [02:28]
Dr. Ecker Villas
Well, we have a huge transformational effort and progress. I've talked about that at length in one of my previous Becker's podcast. It's hard to pick one initiative out of all those that I'm proud of because every single initiative has had a huge impact on the workplace. But since you've asked me to pick one, I would consider the maximum impact across all constituents. Right. And an initiative that has fundamentally changed our operating model as part of the HR transformation. So it's our centralized Human Resource Business center that was launched in February of this year. Now establishing this business center has been an 18 month journey for us where the entire HR team worked across five work lanes to identify the transactions happening in different functional areas of HR. And there were about 400 plus processes that moved into the business center streamlined and standardized to the extent possible. That means removing duplication of work and multiple different ways to address the customer needs. We instituted ServiceNow and telephony as our technology with a tiered escalation model for simple to complex inquiries, including those where we need to partner with the university in deploying resolutions for the employee needs. Now, in terms of why this initiative makes me proud, there are a couple of reasons why I'm really proud of this. First, it's not easy to streamline transactional work within and outside of your core HRIS system, especially when there are multiple workarounds in place. So it was a huge lift for my entire team with multiple process charts coming to a consensus on how to define and redefine the multiple variations of the process. Second, it alleviated a big pain point for all of our employees and leaders, including the HR staff. As a centralized unit with an accountability model that has measurement built into it to see how long it takes us to address different issues. It's helped tremendously in knowing the needs of various constituents, it's brought down silos between different functional units of hr. It's helped build new skillset for the HR team members and it's also empowered them to confidently resolve customer issues with a well established knowledge repository and standardized process. An additional outcome of this initiative is that because it's now centralized for the entire health system, the transparency and measurement around types and volume of cases at various entities provides us real time feedback and insight in how our new operating model is serving various entities across the system. So within the two months we have now received approximately 1500 cases of which 80% cases are closed within first 28, 24 to 48 hours. And all of the components of this new model, they've brought us closer to our employees in understanding their day to day needs and helped our leaders equally by alleviating employee concerns more quickly. So you know, all in all, the transparency and measurement speaks for the model's merit. Establishing a data driven accountability for our services to the organization what do you.
- [05:42]
Host of Becker's Healthcare Podcast
See as the most significant challenge currently facing the healthcare industry and how is your organization addressing it?
- [05:49]
Dr. Ecker Villas
There's not one challenge, as you may imagine, but many significant challenges in our industry today. In my chro role, I have to focus on the workforce, right? That's basically what my accountability is. And the ongoing crisis with the staffing models, the work life balance, competitive rewards, burnout and employee well being. So if you look at the most recent industry surveys, the reports are recording levels of stress, right, for frontline workers. And an urgent shift toward better work life balance and mental health support, including of course, competitive compensation is always among the growing financial pressures, is always a huge concern for CHROs and CFOs. So we have several focused initiatives in progress at Keck Medicine that target almost everything I called out from a chro perspective, the workforce trends leadership development is a key initiative that I would want to mention that we have strongly committed ourselves to because I strongly believe the quality of the leaders makes a big difference in the quality of the experience you can create for your workforce in the institution. You start with the leaders. We have strategically invested in our new leading at Keck framework. This is our leadership development model. It has focused programs as cultural anchors and foundational trainings for new leaders and specialty programs for critical interventions that are needed at different parts of the organization at different times. And then additionally, if I move outside of the leadership realm and get to employee well being, those efforts are strongly rooted in our culture through our Care for the Caregiver program. Of course, the program has been at Keck Medicine from years before I joined, so I don't take full credit for that. But they have focused services across the full spectrum of mental, emotional and physical wellness. Now I've mentioned HR transformation a couple of times. So we are now wrapping up our phase one of the transformation and embarking on phase two of the transformation in the new fiscal year in July. And we've crafted an employee experience strategy now and that's inclusive of strengthening our listening efforts for employees voice by deploying multiple channels of feedback through a new internal communications platform and also enhancing our employee experience with expanding expanded recognition programs. So if I were to wrap this up, all in all, I truly believe that, you know, if we build a workplace that cares for our employees and can deliver that message to them by building a high trust culture, most of the other industry challenges, right, that are everywhere, not just workforce and other parts of the organization associated with the financial and business model can be addressed effectively through collaboration with a stronger workforce.
- [08:38]
Host of Becker's Healthcare Podcast
And what would you say throughout your career journey is the biggest leadership lesson you've learned.
- [08:42]
Dr. Ecker Villas
Oh, my. There have been many, many, many lessons throughout my leadership journey. But if you ask me to pick one, I would say the significance of continually improving your communication and listening skills as a leader, there's never enough you can do when it comes to listening. Right? And I say that because we deal with multiple issues in our work lives. And I truly believe that stress and conflict in organizations is caused not so much by the complexity of the projects or initiatives or resources or by the personalities we work with, rather by the complexities of managing relationships at multiple levels of the organization. Most of us assume a lot and fail to validate if our understanding of a particular matter is aligned with our team members, our stakeholders, even for matters that we think we have solved for our customers with the right effort and intent, we don't often validate if they really think we offered a solution, you know, or if the solution we offered actually worked for them. In the long run, it all goes back to two way communication, the feedback loop, and cultivating real listening skills. By suspending judgment, you know, overcoming our own biases and increasing our awareness of the gap between our intent and impact. It's very, very critical. Intent is what we mean to do or say. Impact is how it is received. On the other hand, and I think we as leaders can cause a lot of unintended harm to ourselves and to others by assuming so much and validating very little. So humble inquiry is so critical to improving our communication, developing stronger relationships and engaging people. I would say this has been not just a leadership lesson to me, but continuous journey as much as so much that as part of the HR transformation, internal culture transformation of hr, we built an HR manifesto that started with training my leadership team on critical listening skills. Because listening actually matters.
- [10:55]
Host of Becker's Healthcare Podcast
And as we close this out, I want to ask you to look to the future a bit. What do you envision for the healthcare workforce in the next five to 10 years and how is your organization preparing you for it?
- [11:07]
Dr. Ecker Villas
Well, there's a big shift. There's a huge shift. You know, it's already started happening. We're already seeing that huge shift. And I think most organizations are already in the preparation phase. So the healthcare workforce of the future will face challenges as well as opportunities, right? It's both as technology, the work models and expectations change, healthcare professionals will need to work in multidisciplinary teams. They're gonna have to embrace digitization, they're going to have to embrace automation more than now and adapt to new rules of the industry and new roles and skills. We'll all need to balance the benefits of technology and AI with the human touch. We'll all have to be more innovative, be more inclusive and focus on the well being of everybody, just not ourselves and generate value, right, for the ultimate customer. In healthcare, that's the patient. So from the perspective of what we are doing at our organization to prepare ourselves for the future, I think our organizational investment needed for such future. It's a multifaceted investment. From a business perspective, I see ket medicine evolving and growing with a very thoughtfully carved out business strategy with diverse investments in our growth through not just acquisition, but collaborations, partnerships and joint ventures. A strong emphasis on evolving our technology roadmap, getting into the AI realm and making investments in building stronger communities both internally and externally. If I translate what does that mean from an HR perspective? What do I and my team have to do to set the organization for success for the future? Our current transformation strategy has been created to position ourselves for those changing times and what's coming our way. So we have a vision of digital hr, right? We are not fully digitalized right now. So the new operating model that we have launched certainly, you know, there is a huge effort going on to bring more digitalization. As I talked about the strong leadership development program for leaders at all levels, right. System wide. And then, you know, another one that we are embarking upon in our transformation journey. Phase two is a positive employee relations strategy. You know, recruitment and retention always are the staffing issues. So we have a new recruitment model through specialized pods. And again, right. When it comes to really recruiting, retaining, engaging, motivating employees in a shifting business model, what comes to your rescue and what becomes the most important is the culture and environment, right? That's proactive and crafting that employee wellbeing program and instituting process equity. We are doing that through just culture, our commitment to just culture. An important component that is gaining momentum in our efforts is solidifying our efforts to bring more data, transparency and utilization and crafting our business and people strategies. Since in the future the volume and variety of healthcare data are only set to increase and that necessitates sophisticated analytics tools and strategies to make meaningful data driven decisions. So I think, you know, to wrap up, I think we have been quite intentional and future focused in deciding where we invest and how scalable and sustainable it is for the future of our organization and the workforce.
- [14:29]
Host of Becker's Healthcare Podcast
Well, thank you so much again for joining us today on the show. We really appreciate it.
- [14:33]
Dr. Ecker Villas
Oh, thank you again for having me here and for the podcast interview and allowing me to share the work that's going on in our organization.
- [14:41]
Host of Becker's Healthcare Podcast
It's our pleasure. I hope you have a lovely rest of your day.
- [14:43]
Dr. Ecker Villas
You do the same. Thank you.