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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Rebranding, Service Line Strategy, and Digital Transformation at Powers Health
00:13:33
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- [00:02]
A
Every year, Becker's annual meeting brings healthcare leaders together to unpack the most pressing issues facing the industry. And every year, those conversations shift in profound and unexpected ways. This April, more than 3,500 healthcare executives will return to Chicago for Becker's 16th annual meeting. 795 elite speakers will offer new lessons, new case studies, and predictions about what comes next. Join us April 13th through the 16th. For the agenda and event details, visit Beckershospitalview.com and click on the events tab in the upper right.
- [00:38]
B
This is Laura Deardau with the Beckers Healthcare Podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Dr. Alan Kumar, who's the chief operating officer at Powers Health. Dr. Kumar, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
- [00:49]
C
Thank you for having me, Laura.
- [00:50]
B
Absolutely. Now, I'm looking forward to our conversation because we'll be able to spotlight some of the cool things that you're doing at Powers Health as well as gain your perspective on how you're looking at the future. But before we dive in, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and the health system?
- [01:03]
C
Absolutely. So quickly about myself, Alan Kumar, I'm the chief operating officer at Powers Health, which is a four hospital acute healthcare system in northwest Indiana, about 30 miles outside of downtown Chicago. So we would consider ourselves a Chicagoland suburb, which we are. About two thirds of our market is local to northwest Indiana, and about 20 to 35% of our market comes from the Chicagoland area as well. Basically, we have grown immensely in the past 10 to 12 years where our operating revenue has more than doubled. We are a AA rated with Fitch and double A minus with S and P bond rating, and we are about 1.5 billion in annual revenue at this point, with about 1200 physicians on the medical staff, 500 employed physicians roughly, and about a little under 10,000 total employees in the health system.
- [01:57]
B
Well, it's amazing to hear and, you know, such a fascinating place that you sit to be able to serve populations from a variety of different areas. And I can imagine just, you know, a lot of folks coming in and a lot of ability to make the community healthier. Now, what was the most important initiative that you led in the last year? What did you do and what were the results?
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C
So I think one of the biggest changes we made is we went through a branding exercise where we changed our name so we were a community healthcare system for the last 23 years, and then last year, the year before, at the end of last 2024 and late 2024, and then all of 2025, we went through a branding exercise of the new name we have, which is Powers Health. And there's two reasons for that. One, the problem with Community Healthcare System was that it was fairly generic. Plus in the state of Indiana, we had community healthcare system, a community health systems, a community health net and a community health network. And that caused a significant amount of market confusion. And we chose the name Powers because the founder of the flagship hospital in the system was Don Powers, and he was part of this system, one of the founders from the 1970s and he was CEO of the organization for many, many years. And as an homage to him, we did name the system after him as a tribute to him, although he'd be very embarrassed about it if he was still alive. But we named it Powers Health after him.
- [03:25]
B
Well, that's fascinating and you know, truly in homage to the health systems founding and then looking at, you know, where, where it's headed, I think anytime a health system goes underneath, undergoes a rebrand, you know, there's a lot that goes into it. It's a huge decision. So as you're going through this process in the last year, what did you learn? What were some of the things that you had to maybe reconsider or things that you leaned into more heavily as you went along the process?
- [03:54]
C
Communication is key in these areas when you make a change. There was a lot of assumptions in the community that we had been purchased by somebody else, that we were merging with somebody else, and that honestly wasn't the case. We did this purely as a rebranding to help identify our product more clearly along everything that we're doing. And it fit with the strategy that we've had over the past few years as we've gone into our three year strategic plan. And this was one of the primary focuses of the first three year strategic plan we had that ended in 2025. So it was very important to us. Communication was key and we found that we had to dispel many myths along the way. It has come through in late 2025 very well. It's been very well accepted in the community and we've seen only growth in the area and acceptance and the brand differentiation has been beneficial to us.
- [04:41]
B
That's great to hear. Very much exciting to have that success story. And now I can imagine going ahead. You know, there's so many possibilities and to think about the next year or so. What are some of the big priorities and headwinds you're focused on?
- [04:55]
C
I will say there's two primary areas. I mean, service Line integration is something that's a buzzword in many health systems nationwide. We've been doing things similarly across the hospitals. Although we never really pushed for standardization at a high level. We allowed some level of customization, which we still allow to a little bit. But we're trying to get best practices from each of our hospitals of how we're doing things in really stand that approach across multiple service lines. And the focus is really on the service lines where we see significant opportunity for growth at this current phase. So orthopedics, oncology, cardiology, neurology and primary care are the five primary pillars that we are using for our service line strategy of standardizing across the enterprise and the health system cuts across two counties and about a total patient population of about serviceable population of about 800 to 850,000 in those two counties plus surrounding. We're really focusing on those areas where we can really give people a very standardized and a very reliable product. So it's the same wherever they show in the system. So they're getting a very consistent product that they can rely on. And that's really shown up in our NRC scores on an ongoing basis. The second area I would say that we've really focused on important initiatives is digital transformation. We're really looking at a roadmap what we're doing with our IT infrastructure to support the organization. Everyone since COVID has realized that the status quo is no longer sufficient anymore and you have to be able to do more with less. You're having changes on a state and federal level in terms of changes that are happening financially in terms of access to care, in terms of insurance, in the payer market as well. So in as much we're finding that the rules, the regulations and how to give great quality hasn't changed, but our ability to fund that has changed. And so having to create levels of automation, streamlining and create ways of getting more with less is really how we move forward. And that level of automation for us is starting with digital transformation across our enterprise. For example, we have a current initiative that we're looking at natural language processing to automate a lot of the data entry we do across many of our get with the guidelines, our various quality initiatives that we're on to make it easier to get more value out of each employee that we have because there's always a demand for more people needed to enter all the information and gather all of this. So finding ways of standardizing that has been very valuable for us.
- [07:29]
B
It's fascinating to hear and you know, it is truly helpful, I think especially thinking about, you know, the digital transformation side, looking at technology, looking at, you know, artificial intelligence comes in here in some ways too in the natural language processing is fascinating. When you're thinking about the technology and this transformation, what has to resources you have to continue to put into it, how you decide, you know, financially as well as from the people and energy resource side to make sure that you're getting the value you need from the technology you're incorporating into the health system.
- [08:03]
C
I've found that AI is a buzzword that a lot of people use, but it means different things to different people. For us, step one is getting a handle on the data we have in the system. So, and that's not just within our EPIC platform, which is our base EMR both in and outpatient, but also making sure our quality data is entered into a system that can talk to epic, that our systems can align in and then all the other various support systems that we have. So having end to end data visibility is very important and that's probably the first thing that we had to do was make sure that all of our systems have end to end data visibility. And then you can overlay machine learning, natural language processing, AI tools over the top of that to look across your various data sets and a data warehouse to be able to bring it together and look for key insights that you couldn't have picked up on your own or allow you to force multiply what you're able to do as an individual because you have a tool that's bringing more information to your fingertips out of the gate. And that has been a multi year process that we're in the middle of right now. We've had very good initial success, but we're only I would say 30 to 40% down this journey at this point.
- [09:16]
B
Got it. That's helpful to understand. Thank you for digging a bit deeper there. Now what do you think is the hardest thing you'll have to do next year?
- [09:23]
C
Be so a lot of what we do is plan for the future. And planning for the future requires visibility and there's a lot of instability that we're seeing both at the state and federal levels in terms of legislation that they're discussing coming out with, especially in the state of Indiana where they're talking about changing site neutrality and set of service type rules. And that's also having conversations at a federal level. How we make investments for the future really depends on what the rules are. And if the rules are actively changing, it requires us to think twice or plan for Multiple possible eventualities. So that is a lot of thought and a lot of process because you're talking about major capital project investments, six, seven, eight, nine figures sometimes. And when you're looking at projects of that size, you do want as much visibility as possible. But that's hard when things aren't determined yet. It takes a lot of thinking and a lot of conversations with a variety of people, both at the board level and the senior leadership level, to make sure you've truly done your due diligence. Got it.
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B
That's amazing to hear and, you know, definitely something that, you know is so critical for any health system today as they're looking at where the organization is going and how they can think about, you know, allocation and capital allocation in the future. And I think it's particularly when you talk about site neutrality, site of service, all of those kinds of things. Do you have plans to grow your services outside of the hospital? Whether it's ambulatory clinics or virtual services? Where do you see some of that growth happening and how does that change the inpatient hospital world as well?
- [11:05]
C
We have two projects that together probably add up to about $200 million in outpatient investment outside of the four walls of the hospital that we're looking to put into place at this point to that exact conversation around continuing to offer care where the community wants the care to be. You can always increase in hospital and build up, but trying to centralize it and force patients to come to larger and larger centers, it's very confusing for them. And these mega locations are more difficult to navigate. So having more care locations throughout the community where our patients are located in our growing marketplaces, I think that's where we see value and where we're putting investments in, in the short term.
- [11:50]
B
Got it. Helpful to understand. Thank you so much for digging in there. Now, before we wrap up here, I wanted to talk about growth as well. Where else do you see some of the big opportunities for organization, growth and development?
- [12:02]
C
So we really focus on physicians and our caregivers, nursing, respiratory, et cetera, as our key driver and our key differentiator. I believe we have wonderful clinicians to care for our patients, both on the clinical side as well as on the support service side. So investing in our employee base, we have a very low turnover, much lower than the national and state average, both on the physician side as well as on the nursing side. We're proud of that. What can we do to continue investing in our employees from an educational basis, from a support basis, so they have the tools they need? To feel that they're supported to do the right care. So a lot of what we're doing in our growth is investing in our employees and I think that has had great dividends to decrease the amount of agency, decrease the amount of travelers to almost nothing at this point and really invest in growing the system by organically finding the right people that fit the mission and vision and the values of the organization.
- [13:05]
B
That's fantastic to hear. Dr. Kumar, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. This has been a really fun conversation and interesting to hear all the different areas that you're looking to grow and develop and serve the community better in the next year or two. I appreciate your time and look forward to seeing you in person in Chicago at our annual meeting. I know you'll be there and speaking on a panel, so it'll be great to catch up and just learn a little bit more about how things are going.
- [13:28]
C
Sounds great. Laura. Thank you for your time.