← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Robert Corona, DO, MBA, FCAP, FASCP, CEO at SUNY Upstate Medical University Hospital
00:16:15
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- [00:02]
A
The most important healthcare decisions don't happen in isolation. They happen when leaders come together. Becker's 16th annual meeting brings together more than 3,500 hospital and health system executives this April in Chicago. With 800 speakers from Ascension, Cleveland Clinic, Common Spirit, and more, the conversations get real. Leaders will share how their scenario planning for policy shifts brief, breaking through value based care barriers and building clinical teams that translate new ideas into real world care. Join top decision makers in the room April 13th through the 16th. For the agenda and event details, visit BeckersHospitalReview.com and click on the Events tab in the upper right.
- [00:47]
B
This is Lauren Dardo with the Beckers Healthcare Podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Dr. Bob Corona, who is the Chief Executive Officer at SUNY State Medical University Hospitals, as well as the John B. Henry professor of Pathology at SUNY Upstate Medical University. Dr. Corona, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
- [01:08]
C
Good afternoon, Laura. It's great to be with you. I appreciate it.
- [01:12]
B
Absolutely. Now, I'm excited for our interview today because I know there's so much happening in the healthcare space and particularly doing some innovative things at the University Hospitals. But before we dive in, can you just tell us a little bit more about yourself and the health system overall?
- [01:28]
C
Yeah, a little bit about our health system. So we're three hospitals. We're a University hospital, a community hospital, and Golisano Children's Hospital. And the University Hospital is in a urban area downtown. The community hospital is a little more suburban, and the Children's hospital is downtown. We were collectively752 beds, 56 of them are in the children's hospital. We're the busiest trauma center overall for children in the state of New York and the second busiest adult trauma center and combined makes us the busiest trauma center. I think it's largely a byproduct of the fact that we're the only academic medical center for a significant part of the state of New York. Pretty much the central and northern New York refers trauma to us. We, we've been growing like crazy. We're about to embark on a big addition and we've been opening up satellite sites in some of our regions, north, west and east of us. So we're pretty excited about the growth and excited about the future.
- [02:47]
B
That's great to hear. And you know, it's always exciting to have that kind of growth mindset or to be looking in the future and seeing that pathway of how you can get bigger and continue to serve your patients well. Now when you think back to 2025. What was the most important initiative that you led? What did you do and what were the results?
- [03:06]
C
So we had a number of very important initiatives that I'm very proud of. So we've bolstered our quality group up and we have improved from a two star to a three star hospital, which is pretty tough considering some of the physical plant issues that we're dealing with with a hospital built in the 60s. But quality is improving. We just were re accredited, I guess you would call it, by magnet. We're now a magnet hospital. We were originally given magnet status during the peak of COVID So everything was done virtually. This was the first time we had the magnet people on campus and we renewed our magnet status and we're the only magnet hospital in our region. So we're very proud of that. We initiated something called Respect and Heal, which is an initiative to reduce workforce violence. We've held a couple of conferences and got participation from a large percentage of the hospitals in the state of New York. It's yielding some legislation which we're very proud of. And we're going to be having another conference related to workforce violence, share some best practices. We're going to be implementing a K9 unit as a result of some of the stuff we learned at our previous conferences. And we're doing some research now, some what they call photo voice quality research with our, with our medical college. So very proud of that. And then kind of a innovative thing that we're doing. We, we have a robust functioning drone and robot transport program, we call it our autonomous machines program. So we are fortunate that we're in a test site for the FAA for drone transportation. So we've taken advantage of that and we now regularly drone transport pharmaceuticals specimens between our hospital and some of our retail pharmacies. And we've now have done a few flights non line of sight, beyond line of sight they call it, between a cancer center that's 35 miles away from our main laboratory. And we're going to be starting drone transportation to a retail pharmacy we're building in a community about 50 miles away. So we have a, we have a full time pilot, we have several drone, we have a full time pilot that flies regular fixed wing and rotary aircraft and we have pilots that are drone certified now. And we've, we've done about, about 6,000 successful safe flights so far. And we fly every single day between our institutions.
- [06:15]
B
That's incredible to hear and I think, especially, you know, looking at the ways that you have gone about just improving the Workplace making a big difference. I know that magnet reaccreditation is huge, huge accomplishment. And then looking also into the ways you're leveraging technology with the autonomous machines program and especially drones, it seems particularly innovative and interesting. You know, in setting up a program like that, what does it take? What kind of resources, as well as skills and leadership do you need to, you know, bring that type of program and put it into place?
- [06:50]
C
So you mentioned that. I'm a pathologist. So back when I came out of industry, I was in industry for about 16 years as a medical officer for a medical device company. I wanted to really ramp up our transportation system. In the pathology department, we were not really doing a great job of transporting specimens with some of our cars. And so I started to think about drone transportation. Then that was like in 2014. Everybody thought I was nuts, so I just kept. Kept at it. And I think when I moved from a chair of a department to the CEO of the hospital, I got a little more attention and had a few more resources and just kept pushing. And with a little bit of luck, because of our FAA research site in this area, we were able to leverage that position and start to develop expertise. And then we just started building on it and hired a pilot, then hired some engineers and really have a number of people focused on it. We also have robots in the program too. We've hired some people that were with Google and their autonomous machines division that have helped us with our robots. And so we now have about 13 robots that do various transportation efforts within the hospital. And our next step is to get the robots and the drones to communicate, so there's no longer a need for a human in the loop when we transport things. And so it's an exciting area. We're getting a lot of interest even from industry to work with us.
- [08:37]
B
That's fascinating to hear and, you know, really cool to be on the forefront of some of those changes in transformation in the healthcare space. Now, looking ahead, what are some of your big priorities and headwinds you're focused on for 2026?
- [08:51]
C
So the biggest priority is we got $450 million from the state of New York, thanks to Governor Hochul, who came to visit and saw how desperate we were for additional space. We are way over capacity almost every day. Today, for instance, we're at 120% capacity in our med surg unit, and we're way overflowing in our children's hospital. So she realized that and gave us the money to, to build a new emergency department, a new burn Unit. We're the only burn unit for a significant part of the state of New York. And also some additional operating rooms, imaging, and some laboratory space. So that's a big priority. There's a lot of paperwork, a lot of design work. The design team that we've, that we've picked is starting tomorrow. So we're going to be looking at the new design of the. We're calling it the Annex at this point, but it's really going to be a big acute care facility. So that's a big priority. We have a couple of parking garages to build. We have more ORs to build at our community hospital and new sterile processing. And we're going to build two new ambulatory facilities in the north and one in the east. So feel like I'm in the construction business, but that's largely what we're focusing on in 2026.
- [10:19]
B
Got it. Oh, wow, that's, you know, that's amazing to hear, and it sounds like a very much needed expansion in bringing in additional capacity into the health system and into the communities. I think, especially, you know, when you look at how important it is for more patients, I know, expected to continue to grow the demand of healthcare access in the coming years. And so that's great to hear. You're in a place where you can do that type of expansion and grow your footprint. What do you think the hardest thing that you'll have to do in the next year will be?
- [10:51]
C
Well, I also think that's probably going to be the hardest thing, and it's just really to manage the growth and the capacity strain that we have presently. And, you know, upstate New York is experiencing somewhat of a renaissance. You may have heard that one of the chip manufacturers, Micron, has committed to $100 billion investment to build four fabrication plants in our Syracuse northern suburbs. And there's an expectation of, at a minimum, 50,000 jobs, either related to Micron or the supply chain or other businesses that would be associated with that growth. We've heard estimates of the population growing by 200,000. And also Chobani, the yogurt manufacturer, is building a $3 billion plant just east of us. That's going to bring a significant number of jobs and then demand for health care. And that's an area we serve, too. I think managing the growth and not overwhelming our staff with the capacity strain we have is probably the hardest thing we have ahead of us.
- [12:12]
B
That makes a lot of sense. And certainly having that lens of the staff and the clinical teams and everyone involved being able to make sure that they're in a great position to handle that increased capacity and not feel stressed or overwhelmed is important when you're thinking about those types of things. Is there any, I guess, thing you're considering for the next year or planning on to really make sure that they are in a great place? I guess, in terms of clinician or physician wellness and those kinds of things?
- [12:42]
C
Yeah. So we've appointed a Chief Wellness Officer who's an outstanding individual, who was a person who's scaling back her cardiothoracic surgery practice, and she's been a driving force behind building some recharge facilities. We have. So we have recharge rooms in both of our community hospital and our downtown university hospital. We're doing a lot of wellness education initiatives and we're building, hopefully some exceptional throughput operations centers. We have one big one that's built off campus that's been helping us with load balancing. We have wellness people come in and speak all the time. We're trying to implement, I think, like every other institution, new technologies that reduce the administrative burden for physicians and nurses. Like I mentioned, the robots have helped a lot with the nurses having to run around the hospital. And some of the new technologies, for instance, that we're looking at, we're hoping to implement in the coming year.
- [14:03]
B
Got it. That is helpful to know and great that you've got a team in place to really support the clinical endeavors. Before we wrap up here, I wanted to see your perspective on growth, too. Where do you see some of those best opportunities for organizational growth, especially as you see the community continuing to grow around you?
- [14:21]
C
Yeah, so we, we see, like I think everybody else sees, tremendous opportunity for growth in the ambulatory space. There's a lot of people that don't want to come to downtown Syracuse to see our specialists, and so they want access points where they live. So we've been working with the community hospitals to provide services. For instance, one community hospital has our general surgeons cover their service. We have ICU specialists, intensivists, and in another community hospital, we have cancer specialists and other community hospitals. So we, we see multiple access points in the region as key. But, you know, there has to be a balance on that. We can't do all of that ambulatory work at once. And so we do have to grow our inpatient bed capacity, you know, as well as ambulatory. So it's a balance. And we have a lot of regulations in New York State, being a public hospital, being a state hospital in the SUNY system. And so the growth requires a lot of administrative work.
- [15:31]
B
I can imagine. So, Dr. Corona, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. This has been really helpful to understand, you know, where you're at today, where you're looking to grow and go. And I'm excited to see you as well in April at our annual meeting. I know you'll be speaking there and truly continuing to expand upon some of the things we talked about today, as well as share any new updates at that time. So looking forward to seeing you and continuing this conversation.
- [15:56]
C
Thank you, Laura. I appreciate it and appreciate Becker's giving us the attention.