← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Matt Chance, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Scottish Rite for Children
00:18:33
Loading summary
Transcript27 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. Looking forward to hosting you in Chicago.
- [00:33]
B
Welcome to the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. I'm Chris Sosa, your host, and I'm thrilled to be joined today by Matt Chance, of course, the senior vice president and Chief operating Officer of Scottish Right for Children in Dallas. Matt, thank you for joining us today.
- [00:45]
C
Thank you, Chris. I appreciate the interest in the hospital. Goodness. Tell the story.
- [00:50]
B
Of course, of course. So, Matt, for those who are not in our audience, who may not be familiar with yourselves and, or the organization that you work for, can you please tell us a little bit about both?
- [01:01]
C
Sure. Yeah. So I'm the chief operating officer like you said. You know, I've been here in the Dallas market for just about 30 years now and have been here with Scottish Rite for a decade. I was actually a volunteer at Scottish Rite 30 years ago. I started in 1995 as a little evening volunteer right after I got out of college trying to get some sort of healthcare experience or hospital experience. Went to grad school, did my residency here in Dallas and really have been able to stay here in the DFW market and two thirds of that. So 20 years at pediatric facilities. So that that's really been my passion and really makes me feel like I can give the most to healthcare through our pediatric providers.
- [01:51]
B
So you knew fairly early on in your career that you wanted to do this. It sounds like a lot was leading up to this.
- [01:58]
C
Well, you know, my story is probably similar to a lot of hospital, you know, frustrated hospital administrators who wanted to be a doctor and want to be in medicine. And unlike, you know, professionals and successful doctors, I took organic chemistry in undergrad and not embarrassed to say it was not my forte and so shifted and actually took a statistics class and fell in love with that and then just it's really been a great fit for staying in healthcare and supporting patient care, but for more the business side of things and using some business acumen.
- [02:32]
B
Well, that's tremendous, Matt. Yeah, it certainly, it goes without saying, but I will say it that, you know, administrative roles come from all sorts of walks of life. So I'm glad there was that path for you to lead you to Scottish Rite.
- [02:45]
C
It's been a great career for me and what a pleasure to work with clinicians every day that take great care of our patients too.
- [02:54]
B
Matt, let's get into some of the specifics about your organization. Let's just start with this. What would you say is the most important initiative that you led in the past year and what were the results of that?
- [03:05]
C
Scottish Rite is a pediatric orthopedic provider. We've been here for over 100 years and really it's unique from most pediatric hospitals and that orthopedics is our niche. So we really focus. We have experts, clinicians and of all flavors who really are experts in providing pediatric orthopedic care. We do it at a very high level. We really are obsessed with excellence here. That's a daily challenge, but it's a fantastic organization to work at and we have great outcomes. It's always a fun place to work, especially this time of year during the holidays. Probably our most important initiative that really we've been focusing on for the last several years now is just access. Because we provide pediatric orthopedic care at such a high level, we really kind of feel that if patients aren't receiving care from us and they're probably receiving inferior care somewhere else. And so we provide, we're a resource to other providers out in the community. But when they have complex cases or patients who have unique conditions, we want to really provide access to that care. So it's, it's been challenging really. We, we've been here for 100 years, like I said, and really we're just one access point in, in middle of downtown Dallas. For 96 of those years. We built a satellite facility in Frisco, Texas, which is a northern suburb of the Dallas area. And we continue to stay busy, sort of build it and patients came. And so we really try and balance the need for providing that expertise, but also making sure that we still can allow enough patients to come in and see us who need a variety of orthopedic conditions. So this past year we actually had many of our patients have orthopedic surgery with us, but then need recovery and therapy care post operatively. And so we actually opened a new facility that is actually again also in Frisco, another northern suburb. And it's actually in a sort of a medical office building, but it's actually on the same campus as the Dallas Cowboys organization campus. And so it's kind of a unique location to have an outpatient therapy clinic. But we really worked hard to refine sort of an operational model to get that off the ground. We opened about a year and a half ago now and really didn't know fully what to expect. And we're seeing about 600 patients a month now with just a handful of therapy providers. But we're probably most proud of relieving some of that capacity from our other campuses, but most proud really of the patient satisfaction at that location. Again, it's somewhat of an experiment to see if we could have a therapy only location. And we've had great outcomes. We have a patient satisfaction survey that we send out and literally got perfect patient satisfaction scores for the first year. So that's been a nice proving ground that this could be a potential solution in some of our other access points.
- [06:46]
B
It's hard to get better than perfect, huh? I don't know where to go from here.
- [06:50]
C
Yeah, you know, it's always a challenge, but the family's really pleased with the care and that really comes down to the providers providing every single day. But it's really a unique environment to have that level of focus on ensuring that each of our patients have great outcomes.
- [07:07]
B
Makes sense. Matt, let's look ahead a little bit here. So just in 2026, certainly there are headwinds aplenty and that's just part of being in healthcare right now, unfortunately. So how are you at Scottish Pride looking to tackle these and what are your other big priorities?
- [07:24]
C
Yeah, you're right. There's a lot of headwinds, there's a lot of funding challenges in mystery, a lot of great clouds right now. But I would say probably in our region where all the healthcare systems are really struggling just with the population boom. For anybody that's not aware that kind of the north, well, the state of Texas is seeing a mass increase in or trend in population increases, but the North Texas area in particular is probably one of the fastest growing areas in the country. And so really our challenges are to keep up with those young families that are coming into town and moving into the region looking for healthcare providers. And I mentioned earlier, we really, our challenge is that we want to make sure that we maintain the same very, very high standard of care that we provide. And so how do you expand but not dilute your level of expertise? So it requires a lot of very specific recruiting and building a culture around care that is focused on the patients no matter where you are. But yeah, that population growth and really it's not going to slow down. It's probably going to continue to expand exponentially. That's really looking strategically. So a balance of providing excellent care for the patients walking in the door every single day, but also thinking strategically about how can we serve a growing population in the region. And then when I was considering this question, one of the other unique things in 2026 that we're going to be challenged with the World Cup. The World cup is going to locations across not just the US but also Mexico and Canada in Dallas or the Dallas DFW Metroplex is hosting nine games in particular. And I think five or six different teams, countries will have their teams camped in different locations around the Metroplex. So that's going to be June, July of 26. And so lots of preparations already in place. We're actually the Dallas area is also going to be the international communications hub as well. So there's a lot of coordination not just in healthcare, but transportation, security, language services. And so it's going to be a really interesting time and coordination effort. So we've already had our regional trauma group has really taken a leadership role, but there's other groups of hospitals that are really focused and they're in micro region and supporting the World cup efforts. And all the visitors are going to be coming through, probably speaking other languages other than English. And it's going to be June, July in the middle of the hottest time of the year in Texas.
- [10:17]
B
Yeah.
- [10:18]
C
So a lot of healthcare needs there too, and hydration and, you know, things like that too. So we're really trying to play an active part in the region's response to.
- [10:26]
B
The World cup that's coming up, man. Yeah, that's. That's going to be really tense couple of months for you guys. And I would not necessarily have thought that a children's orthopedic specialist group such as yourself would be that involved. But I thank you for illuminating all of that for us.
- [10:43]
C
Yeah, you know, one of our pediatric orthopedics also includes sports medicine. And so it's probably the fastest growing aspect of what we do is, is, you know, elementary, middle school and teenage, you know, high schoolers that have injuries. And we do, we do a lot of injury prevention, but also help athletes get back on the field as well. And so that, that why we have that we absolutely will be a player and a lot of support during this World cup process.
- [11:14]
B
Matt, I want to back up just a little bit here. You mentioned how your strategy has to involve when it involves expansion, not diluting your services. So as that relates to recruiting, what do you think Scottish pride has found is as key to that process and being able to maintain that high level of Care?
- [11:34]
C
Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, when we think about recruiting. So we're a pediatric provider, that's already limits the gene pool of potential candidates that when you're looking for specific expertise. But then we're a pediatric orthopedic provider and really a pediatric subspecialty provider. And so recruiting physicians, not just orthopedic surgeons, but radiologists and anesthesiologists and neurologists and pediatricians. It's a real challenge. And really, we do that in a couple different ways. Our orthopedic surgeons in particular. We have the largest pediatric fellowship for pediatric orthopedic fellowship in the country. We're an academic provider. Our academic partner is UT Southwestern here in the Dallas area. And so every year we have five pediatric orthopedic fellows who come in and train for a full year with us. And so then we have. We've now, that program has really started in the 70s here at Scottish Rite. And so we now have over 200 pediatric orthopedic former fellows, alumni essentially, that are out, that have been shotgunned out really across the world and provide their expertise in their own regions. And, you know, usually when we have a need here locally, we sort of thumb through the alumni book and recruit some of our own alumni. But we don't have that opportunity with all of our service lines. We struggle just like everybody else in healthcare with anesthesia and radiology in particular. We've had some really good success this past year in really rebuilding our pediatric radiology musculoskeletal radiologist group and have had some really nice recruits who've come in and really fit very well in the culture. And yes, with the secret sauce is for us, it really is the culture of our organization. It's a remarkable organization. It's not just pediatric, and I think everybody enjoys walking around a children's hospital. But I always say Scott Schweit really attracts fantastic people in every single role. And we look for individuals who are compassionate, who really would do everything they possibly can to help every family and every patient that walks in the door. And again, it's just. It's almost hard to describe the culture and the feel when you get here, but I mentioned earlier I was a volunteer 30 years ago, and that's what. Whatever it is, I got struck with it very early in my career and. And sort of made it a mission to get back here and, you know, try and be part of this remarkable organization.
- [14:18]
B
Well, it sounds like you're doing a lot of things right, Matt, to Say the least, shifting gear slightly here. So as we looked ahead toward next year, what do you think is the hardest thing you're going to have to do in 2026?
- [14:32]
C
Well, again, another great question. It's kind of hard to narrow down too, but you know, it's right. You know, it's probably the hardest and the simplest thing all in the rolled up in the same issue. And that's really just to make sure that we're providing expert care and a fantastic experience to every single patient that walks in the door. We've had the, you know, really nice year this year and gotten lots of accolades for the care we provide. This year we actually we jointly submit for our pediatric orthopedic submission to U.S. news Report with another children's hospital down the street here in Dallas. And this year we're ranked number one in the US News and World Report for pediatric orthopedics. We're proud of that. For the last eight years in a row now, we've received the highest pediatric hospital patient satisfaction awards. Same thing with employee satisfaction. And those are nice. But the reality is in its confirmation of the focus and the great care we provide. But the reality is it starts over again tomorrow. And so you got to be sort of like a world class athlete and keep on being obsessed again with excellence and how do you do better again tomorrow? And again, that's the hardest thing and the simplest thing in trying to motivate your staff to come back and do things even better tomorrow.
- [16:01]
B
Matt, you mentioned that the organization has expanded a little bit here and there to Frisco and some of the things you're doing in that space. So lastly here, could you give us a glimpse of where you see the best opportunities for growth for Scottish Rite?
- [16:18]
C
Yeah, I mentioned the population growth. So really the opportunities are endless at this point. We really do because we are experts in what we do. We do get referrals really from all over the state, all over the country and even international patients. And so, you know, really what we try to do here is continue to again focus on access. And so in the, you know, so I've been here at Scotch right now for 10 years and during that 10 year period we have tripled the number of patients we see. A lot of that is because of the fact our Frisco campus opening up. But the reality is every year we see pretty significant growth. And so, you know, we're, we're absolutely to the point where we've got to continue to look for ways to provide care closer to the families who are coming to us. The challenge is because we're not a full service children's hospital, though it doesn't make sense to have an entire web of Scottish Rite hospitals or even outpatient facilities scattered across the state. Really what we are continuing to do is look for ways that we can provide very focused locations with a limited scope, clinical scope, so that we can patients and families in other areas can at least see some of our providers and be screened. And then if they have a more complex need, they can come to the Dallas location or even Frisco for our sports medicine programs.
- [18:00]
B
Well, Matt, thank you so much for giving us a glimpse, a really detailed glimpse, wonderful glimpse into what Scottish Rite is all about and your efforts, not only with expansion, but just dealing with population growth and all the other challenges that you're dealing with, recruiting, etc. We really hope to see you again down the line. And yeah, we really appreciate you being with us.
- [18:19]
C
Well, again, Chris, I appreciate all the interest in Scottish Rite and we love telling the story and helping out, you know, patients, families and also other providers across the country as well.