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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Harpreet Pall, MD, MBA, CPE, Chief Medical Officer at Hackensack Meridian Jersey Shore University Medical Center and K. Hovnanian Children's Hospital
00:13:32
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- [00:00]
A
This is Scott Becker with the Becker's Healthcare podcast. We're thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant physician leader. We're joined today by a chief medical officer at Hackensack Meridian Healthcare. We're joined by Dr. Harpreet Paul. Dr. Paul, can you take a moment and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Hackensack Meridian and about your career?
- [00:24]
B
Absolutely, Scott. Thank you again for having me. I'm Dr. Harpreet Paul. I serve as the Chief Medical Officer for Hackensack Meridian, Jersey Shore University Medical center and Cahovnanian Children's Hospital. And I'm also a professor of pediatrics at the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine. A little bit about Jersey Shore University Medical Center. We're located in Neptune, New Jersey. We're an academic referral center for the central and southern regions of New Jersey. And we're high acuity, high throughput, and one of the fastest growing hospitals in the state. But I would say that we're also nimble enough to be able to have some innovation and testing of pilots, and we're able to scale rapidly as well. My role as CMO is to strengthen the alignment that we have with our physicians, to work with our quality improvement teams, to accelerate all our improvements, and also to drive safety and high reliability. I'm really excited to modernize how we deliver care. And one of the really exciting things that I've noticed in health care over the past few years is that we've got the opportunity to redesign how we're transitioning care out of the hospital and into the home and into the community. So that's really exciting for me as well. Ultimately, our academic medical centers need to be built for the future and not just managed for the present. So that's definitely a direction that we're all fully aligned with.
- [02:08]
A
Fantastic. And you've had this amazing career. And one of the things I love about your career, Dr. Paul, is aside from medical school at McGill, you've also been a lifelong learner. You did your fellowship at Harvard. You went back and did an MBA at some point or did it while practicing. Talk about for a moment that commitment to constant improvement in lifelong learning. If you don't mind.
- [02:33]
B
Absolutely. Being a. Being in a leadership role in health care is really a calling. It's really important for me to stay constantly in touch with our teams and understand how to best engage them and connect with them so that I can better explain the why of directions that we're taking. People follow clarity. They follow fairness and purpose. My role as a CMO is to build a system where exceptional care is really the norm and not the exception. So that intense focus on hardwiring standard work is critical. And for me, the importance of a lifelong journey of learning is really helpful for me to know how to best take all the changes in the environment and the triggers that our teams are having, the stressors that they're experiencing, and help orient them into the work that they do and why it really matters.
- [03:42]
A
Thank you and take a moment. Dr. Paul, what trends are you watching right now in healthcare the most closely? Talk about what is on your mind. Is it physician shortages? Is it technology? Is it reimbursement? What are the top things that you're most focused on and thinking about currently?
- [04:02]
B
Scott I think that there's really a handful of key trends that every CMO is paying close attention to. The first, as you've already mentioned, is sustainability of our workforce. It's not just the shortages that we're seeing, but it's how do we redesign these teams so that they're having tenure in the field? How do we look at our apps, our physicians, and look at the scheduling, the support that they're having with data and reducing the burden of our EHR documentation? Recruitment alone isn't going to solve this workforce problem that we're having. I think that redesign is going to be the new strategy. Another key trend that I'm paying really particular attention to is the clinical variation and the importance of reducing that as a quality lever. Unwarranted variation is really a driver for the cost and the inconsistency in the outcomes that we're seeing. One of the initiatives that we've led at Jersey Shore is a reduction in clinical variation. And we are having weekly meetings with our frontline teams to develop transparency on data and allowing the frontline teams to have a platform to showcase some of their work that reduces that variation. Ultimately, if we don't intentionally reduce the variation, the system's going to produce variability by default. So I think that that work is really important. Another big trend that I'm seeing is the transitions of care from the hospital to the community and back from the community to the hospital and ensuring that we're treating that as a continuum. So looking at our multidisciplinary rounds in the hospital, medication reconciliation, looking at virtual platforms that connect patients to primary care doctors after a hospitalization, those are really important initiatives because a safety discharge is one of the most powerful quality interventions that we have. Data analytics is really important. It's not just getting more data to the teams, but how do these teams use that data in a smarter way? The clinical teams need the same visibility into that data that they expect from lab results. So building that structure, those dashboards, that variation reporting so that they can have actionable clarity at the frontline level is really important. And at the end of the day, all of these trends are really driven by the culture. The culture is set by the top. And as many of our listeners probably know, change moves at the speed of trust. So trust determines if all of these levers really change behavior.
- [07:01]
A
Thank you very, very much. And Dr. Paul, as you move towards 2026 and look at 2026, what are you most focused on and excited about as we move towards next year?
- [07:13]
B
Yeah, a couple of areas really stand out for me. What I'm really proud of at Hackensack Meridian Health and at Jersey Shore University Medical center are our efforts towards reducing clinical variation. As I mentioned before, we've set up a comprehensive structure for the hospital where we meet on a very regular cadence to engage our frontline teams. We're also focused on readmission and discharge transformation. So looking at our high risk patient cohorts and ensuring that we've got a continuum of care and it's not just a transaction that discharged out of the hospital. What I'm really excited about, in addition to all of this, is the clinical leadership that we're creating at the hospital. We've been giving a lot of thought to how our leadership is structured clinically, how it's aligned with quality and patient experience incentives. And, you know, thinking through strategically about building a future bench is really important, not just filling roles. Because at the end of the day, our, our goal isn't just to manage our frontline clinical teams. It's to unleash their potential. Culture, again is really important and it has to be built very intentionally. And I do want to give credit to our hospital president, Vito Buccilato, for setting that tone. All of these things are foundational level moves and I'm really excited to be able to continue that journey over 2026.
- [08:51]
A
Thank you. And take a moment on one other subject. Dr. Paul, you've had this great leadership career. You've been a tremendous lifelong learner. I'm a huge fan of McGill University. Maybe a bigger fan of Harvard because I spent a few years there, but a huge fan of both great, great institutions as well as the other place you've studied, Amherst and Drexel, and you did your residency. Fantastic career. What advice would you give to emerging leaders? What advice do you give to somebody trying to have a fulfilling and impactful career.
- [09:22]
B
Great question, Scott. I would say a few key things. One is leading through value and not authority. With all the rapid change that we're seeing in health care, which I know is going to accelerate over time, it's really important to connect teams to the why. People follow clarity and leaders create that clarity and that purpose. So sometimes with all this rapid change, complexity becomes the default. And our core mission as leaders is to provide a purpose and a reason for why we exist. And connecting those teams to that why is really important. Frontline teams don't resist change. What they do is they resist change when it's unclear. That would be one key advice that I would give to our emerging leaders. Another would be be clinically curious. It's the changes that we're seeing and the complexity that we're experiencing, especially with the implementation of AI in so many facets of healthcare, is that health care is just too complex for anecdotal leadership. You've got to really be curious. Trying to ask questions of the clinical teams. Understanding where the pain points truly are is going to be really important and understand how to access that data and how to interpret it in a way that's meaningful for the frontline clinical teams. I would say that that's really important as well. Relationships and trust is critical. And especially when we're under pressure to make decisions in healthcare, it's really important as a healthcare leader that you're front and center and visible to the teams. So rounding regularly in the units of the hospital, connecting with the teams, building that credibility, following up with the teams, because that's what's going to allow you as a healthcare leader to have influence with the team when it comes time to driving change. So a couple of key things about change management that I've learned over the years that I think is going to serve our emerging leaders really well.
- [11:32]
A
Thank you, Dr. Pawell. What an amazing career. I want to thank you for what you do in your career and your leadership. Take one moment and tell us a little bit more about Hackensack Meridian Health and your pride in the institution.
- [11:47]
B
I'm really excited about the direction that Hackensack Meridian Health is going. What we're developing at Jersey Shore is really exciting and it's connected to the broader health system. And that's the advantage of a learning health system because we can continuously measure and share pilots and initiatives from one hospital to the rest of the network. We're leaning into digital integration, system wide reliability and a growth in our ambulatory platforms and expansion workforce is critical to us as well. We're looking at building a model that's future proof. So I would say that Hackensack Meridian Health is a system that's willing to rethink old assumptions and look at how we're going to be able to build a model for the future. And the scale allows us to innovate with speed as well. So really exciting direction that we're taking.
- [12:47]
A
I'm going to ask you one last question. You're not from Jersey, I don't think. I'm not from Jersey originally, but everybody from Jersey raves about the Jersey Shore. Is the Jersey Shore as much as it's cracked up to be?
- [13:04]
B
It is all that and even better, Scott. So I you're right, I'm not from Jersey, but having lived here with my family for a number of years now, the Jersey Shore in the summer has nothing else like it. So absolutely.
- [13:18]
A
Dr. Paul, I want to thank you so much for joining us today on the Becker Healthcare podcast for what a pleasure to visit with you. Thank you so much for joining us.
- [13:27]
B
Such a pleasure. Scott, thank you so much.