← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
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- [00:00]
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 us@insightglobal.com this is Grace Lynn Keller.
- [00:28]
B
With the Beckers Healthcare Podcast and we are recording live at the 15th annual meeting. I'm excited to be joined by Pete November who is the CEO at Ochsner Health. So thanks so much for joining me today. Would love to have you start off by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit more about your background in healthcare and your organization.
- [00:45]
C
Well, great. Thank you for having me today. So I'm as you said, I'm the CEO of Ochsner Health and I've been in that role about two and a half years. I've been in the organization for about 13 and had a number of different roles. Prior to being the CEO I was a CFO and chief administrative officer and also oversaw innovation. Prior to that I was a partner in a law firm in Atlanta working in the health care space and prior to that actually worked in public accounting and so have a little bit of a different route to be in the CEO of a health care organization. But really proud to be in this role and I'm just really excited about our organization at Ochsner. Ochter is a health system that is in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. We've actually got some locations in Florida and are opening up some locations up in South Carolina as well. We've got about 10 billion in revenue and 46 hospitals and three to 400 different outpatient locations and 42,000 employees. And we were founded. The name Ocher was founded came from Dr. Alton Ochner who founded our organization in the early 40s with four other physicians and they started it as a multi specialty group and then got into the hospital space and ultimately that's why we have our clinics and hospitals but very physician led organization and have a fantastic group practice of really aligned, amazing physicians.
- [02:09]
B
Wonderful. Well, thanks for taking the time to be here and let's start our conversation within the past 12 months or so. What's an initiative you've taken on that you're particularly proud of and how has this impacted your organization?
- [02:22]
C
Yeah, I think one of the things that we've done in the last 12 months that has really been special is emphasizing the importance of the nursing role in an organization. You know We've obviously always known that our nurses are so important and certainly we talk all the time about how important our physicians are. But in the last 12 months or so, we've really focused on the importance of the nursing role and their ability to make important changes in the organization. And you know, one of the things I saw last year was we wanted to make some improvements in some in different quality areas. And because we had empowered and focused so much on nursing, we went to them and said, hey, we need your help. And they just created incredible results from a quality perspective in a really short amount of time, which is challenging to do in an organization of our size. And it was just because we created the right, the right environment, culture and emphasis on the nursing role and just gave them the autonomy to go do what they needed to do.
- [03:23]
B
And on the flip side of that, I'd love to know what you see as the most significant challenge facing the healthcare industry currently and how are you working to address this?
- [03:32]
C
I think there's a number of challenges. I think one is the need to transform care. If you look at the macro environment of health care, certainly reimbursement challenges with the aging population and Medicare, you've got workforce challenges in terms of just the number of people available to be in the health care workforce. We're really blessed right now to have the lowest turnover we've ever had and are doing great from that. But, but, you know, certainly workforce is a challenge. So because of those things, you've got to transform the way you provide care. You've got to use technology and innovation and think about doing things differently so that you can provide the access that people need, you can provide the quality people need, and you can also deal with the cost pressures.
- [04:15]
B
And let's touch on leadership. I'd love to know what the biggest leadership lesson is that you've learned. Either are currently learning, have recently learned that you'd like to share with the audience.
- [04:24]
C
Yeah, I always go back to my first, first boss was a guy named John Lowe. And John was a Harvard Law School graduate. Really accomplished guy, really driven, goal oriented, detail oriented, smart, creative, but also one of the kindest, most empathetic, understanding people I've ever met. Very family oriented. And what John taught me is you can be driven and goal oriented and results oriented, keep people accountable, but you can also be a great human being who cares about the people that you work, that work for you, or you work with and understand that they understand that you are looking at them as a whole person and care about them not just as A person that works with you, but as a person that also has a family and career aspirations. And to me, I think the great part of leadership is combining both of those things. And if you can combine both of those aspects, the drive plus the caring and the empathy and the understanding of others, I really think you can make special things happen.
- [05:25]
B
And I'd love to touch on workforce as we round our conversation out. So this remains a top priority for health care organizations. And I love to know what your hope is or what you envision for the health care workforce in the next five to 10 years and then what are you doing to prep for this?
- [05:42]
C
Sure. I think for the health care workforce, one, you know, always I want to make sure that everybody that works for us first and foremost, is achieving what they want to achieve in their career from an aspirational perspective and creating an environment where they can do that. And I think, particularly in today's world, when, you know, as I said, you've got to innovate and you've got to change. We provide care, you've got to create an environment, and you got to educate and train people in a way that allows them to effectuate change and to do things differently and feel comfortable doing that. And so I think for us, you know, it's multifaceted. One is just workforce development. We've got a number of different programs that we partnered with, with external universities to train the next generation of workforce, both to increase the volume of the workforce, but also change the way they're educated so that they're prepared for the way that healthcare needs to be changed in the future. A lot of emphasis on development of people internally, both from a leadership perspective and a skills perspective. And then we've got some special programs where we're taking people who might be a medical assistant, training them to be an lpn, training to be an rn, and hopefully in some cases go on to be physicians. And really, really trying to take everybody in the organization and develop them into achieving what they want to achieve. So it's a combination of all of those things. But I do think it starts with creating the right environment where they can feel empowered to make change and also feel that they're in an organization that cares deeply about their development.
- [07:09]
B
Wonderful. Well, Pete, thanks so much for taking the time to join me today on the Beckers Healthcare podcast. Again, we are recording live at the 15th annual meeting.
- [07:17]
C
Thank you for having me.