Pam Teufel, Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Main Line Health

Summary

Becker’s Healthcare Podcast: In-Depth with Pam Teufel of Main Line Health

Release Date: June 17, 2025
Guest: Pam Teufel, Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Main Line Health
Host: Becker's Healthcare

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Introduction to Pam Teufel and Main Line Health

In this episode of the Becker’s Healthcare Podcast, host Gracelyn Keller welcomes Pam Teufel, the Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Main Line Health. With nearly three decades of experience in the healthcare sector, Pam provides a comprehensive overview of her extensive background and the scope of Main Line Health.

"Mainline Health is about a two and a half billion dollar health system in the suburbs of Philadelphia. We do have an inpatient behavioral health clinic as well as four acute hospitals, a rehab facility, and many clinics. We employ about 14,000 people, including 550 physicians," Pam shares at [00:47], highlighting the organization's significant presence and diverse services within the healthcare landscape.

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Leading a Major CEO Transition

One of the standout initiatives Pam discusses is her pivotal role in orchestrating the search for Main Line Health’s new CEO following the retirement of longtime CEO Jack Lynch after 20 years. This comprehensive nine-month process involved partnering with the board to define the ideal profile for the next leader amidst evolving healthcare challenges.

"It is a tremendous responsibility... We did select a wonderful CEO, Ed Jimenez, who will be joining us in May," Pam states at [01:34], expressing her pride in successfully navigating the leadership transition and ensuring continuity and growth for the organization.

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Navigating Current Healthcare Challenges

Pam delves into the multifaceted challenges currently confronting the healthcare industry, emphasizing financial strains and evolving workforce dynamics. She outlines how Main Line Health is grappling with a changing payer mix and the imperative to operate more efficiently.

"Retention is high, but I feel like if we don't continue to do that, then we're not going to have the workforce for the future," Pam asserts at [04:34], underscoring the critical need to build and sustain robust talent pipelines in the face of diminishing long-term employee loyalty.

She further elaborates on the necessity for rapid decision-making in a conservative organization, contrasting past practices of piloting and gradual implementation with the current demand for swift, impactful actions.

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Addressing Workforce Challenges

Workforce sustainability is a high priority for Main Line Health, and Pam outlines several strategic initiatives aimed at cultivating and retaining talent. Recognizing that traditional retention is no longer a guarantee, the organization has invested in developing internal pipelines to nurture future leaders and skilled professionals.

"We have aspire, which is our emerging leader program. We have new leadership development, we have transformative leadership," Pam explains at [04:34]. These programs are designed to engage younger employees who seek development opportunities and have diverse expectations from their careers.

Additionally, Main Line Health has pioneered apprenticeship programs in areas such as patient care and medical assistance. Pam emphasizes the importance of these initiatives:

"Even though in the city of Philadelphia, we are quite blessed with a lot of schools... we are going to have to be constantly filling that pipeline," she notes at [05:52], highlighting the proactive measures necessary to ensure a steady influx of skilled workers.

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Embracing Agility in Leadership

Concluding the discussion, Pam shares her insights on effective leadership amid rapid changes and uncertainties. She advocates for agility and a collaborative, feedback-driven approach to leadership development.

"The more we can engage our people to get those ideas and be agile on how we implement... we're doing things very differently now," Pam emphasizes at [06:02]. She illustrates this with examples from Main Line Health’s HR practices, such as their iterative rollout of leadership programs, where feedback is continuously solicited and incorporated to refine and improve initiatives.

This adaptive strategy marks a significant shift from past practices, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and responsiveness to both employee needs and organizational demands.

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Conclusion

Pam Teufel’s conversation on the Becker’s Healthcare Podcast provides valuable insights into the complexities of managing human resources in a dynamic healthcare environment. Her emphasis on strategic leadership transitions, workforce development, and agile management offers a roadmap for other healthcare organizations navigating similar challenges. Through her experience at Main Line Health, Pam exemplifies the critical role of HR leadership in driving sustainable success and fostering a resilient healthcare workforce.

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Note: Timestamps correspond to the podcast’s transcript and are included to highlight notable quotes.

Transcript

[A]

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 [e-mail] this is Gracelyn Keller with.

[B]

The Becker's Healthcare Podcast and we are recording live at the 15th annual meeting. I'm currently joined by Pam Teufel who is the Chief Human Resources Officer at Mainline Health. So Pam, thanks for joining me today. Would love to start by having you introduce yourself further, telling us a little bit about your background in healthcare and your organization.

[C]

Great. Well, it's great to be here. I've actually been in healthcare for almost 30 years. It is hard to believe, but started in the lab industry and then have worked in community health systems, academic medical centers, private equity for a little bit and I'm happy to be back in Community health systems. Mainline Health is about a two and a half billion dollar health system in the suburbs of Philadelphia. We do have a inpatient behavioral health clinic as well as four acute hospitals as well as a rehab facility and then of course many clinics. About 14,000 employees in total, 550 employed physicians.

[B]

Awesome. And let's start by in the last 12 months or so, what's an initiative you've taken on that you are particularly proud of and how has that impacted your organization?

[C]

So my CEO Jack lynch is retiring after 20 years and so one of the things I had the privilege of doing was partnering with the board to lead a CEO search. It is a tremendous responsibility and did take about nine months of really actively going out and saying what is the profile of the person that we need to lead this organization and is that the same or different from what we've had in Jack? I'm thrilled to say that we did select a wonderful CEO, Ed Jimenez, who will be joining us in May. But that really took up quite a bit of my time in terms of making sure we got that profile right because of all the challenges that are facing us.

[B]

And on the flip side of that, and kind of a great segue that you've introduced here, what are some of those challenges that you see as major points currently facing the healthcare industry and what are you doing to work to address those?

[C]

So I mean first and foremost Mainline is financially challenged. Like every other health system, we have a beautiful payer mix. But that payer Mix is changing and the competency of having to function very leanly is not a competency that we actually have. And so we're actually having to really change the way we lead. So the financial challenges are severe. You know, retention, we no longer have the 30 year nurse who wants to work on med surg. That's a shock to a lot of our leaders. The fact that while we have great retention, it's not going to be 30 years anymore. And so our leaders having to adjust to that. You combine that with the fact that you're leading a very young generation that doesn't have the loyalty, that constantly wants to be developed and has bigger needs than perhaps employees had in the past. The fact that we don't have the luxury of time anymore, and I think that's very jarring to our leaders. Right. So in the past we could pilot something, we could learn from it, we could take a year to implement. We don't have that luxury anymore. We have to make very quick, quick decisions that have big financial implications. And we're a conservative organization, so that that's a struggle for us to have to do it very quickly. And so all of those challenges combined, I think individually one would be okay, but when you combine it, it's overwhelming. And so really we are leaning in on how do we support our leaders because we also find younger people don't want to be leaders. And there's times when I say I don't blame them. You know, it's a tough job, but really leaning into what can we do to support them, how do we get them to really engage their people to fix whatever system is that they need to fix.

[B]

Absolutely. And great segue again to touch on workforce challenges since that is a high priority in health care right now. So how are you addressing workforce challenges within your organization?

[C]

So I think the first area is leaning into that leadership pipeline. So pipelines as general is really where we never had to do that at mainline health. So pre Covid, we didn't have to fight to attract or retain talent. People showed up, they stayed forever. Now we really have to build pipelines. So for things like leadership. So we have aspire, which is our emerging leader program. We have new leadership development, we have transformative leadership. And so what we're seeing is people are actually starting to become excited about the opportunity. But then pipelines like patient care, tech, sterile processing, medical assistance, radiology, you know, these are areas where we never had to build our own apprenticeship programs. So we're taking our existing employees in environmental services, food service, putting them into these apprenticeship programs, training them for six weeks, guaranteeing them a position. Those are all things we never had to do before. They are becoming quite successful. Retention is high, but I feel like if we don't continue to do that, then we're not going to have the workforce for the future. Because even though in the city of Philadelphia, we are quite blessed with a lot of schools. Penn, Temple, Jefferson, those are wonderful. The retention is not going to be what it used to be, so we're going to have to be constantly filling that pipeline.

[B]

Absolutely. And then as we round out our conversation, I'd love to touch on leadership as well. So, as a leader, what is the biggest lesson you are currently learning or have recently learned that you'd like to share?

[C]

For me, it's really continue to be agile. You know, I have some people on my staff that will say to me, like, this is really stressful. Like, have you ever done this before? And I'm like, no, I haven't. But I think the more we can, again, just engage our people to get those ideas and be agile on how we implement, you know, we've done this in hr, I think very well, which is test and learn. When we rolled out our leadership development program, we had three pilots, we had one class. We asked for feedback, we changed it. We changed. The second week, we. We rolled it out, we asked for feedback, we changed it. The third week, we asked for feedback, we changed it. I mean, that's. We wouldn't have done that in the past. We would have just created a program, rolled it out, said, it's fine, we don't have capacity to change it. We're doing things very differently now. And so that agility means we're going to have a better work product in the end.

[B]

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today on the Becker's Healthcare podcast. Again, we are recording live at the 15th annual meeting.

[C]

Thank you.