← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Stephanie Everett, Administrator of Mountrail Bethel Home and Chief Executive Officer of Mountrail County Medical Center
00:09:47
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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.
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B
With the Beckers Healthcare Podcast and we are recording live at the 15th annual meeting. I'm currently joined by Stephanie Everett who is the administrator of Montreal Bethel Home and the CEO of Montreal County Medical Center. Thank you so much for being here, Stephanie. Let's have you start out by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit more about your background and organization.
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C
Well, thank you so much for having me. My name is Stephanie Everett. I am the CEO of the Montreal County Medical center and also the minister of Montreal Bethel Home. As she has said, my background in healthcare has actually been in the revenue cycle portion and the credentialing portion for providers for like 20 years. That was down in Texas for a chiropractor and then when I moved back up to North Dakota and 12 years ago, my dad was actually on the Montreal Bethel Home board and I was pregnant at the time with my third child and he was like, so I think you'd be great at the foundation director job. And I'm like, dad, I'm pregnant. It's an hour away in Stanley. I live in Minot. So anyway, I interviewed, I'm from Stanley, so it was a nice little tie back. I did get the position. So I've been the foundation director for since 2013. Added on the public relations and marketing director onto that because as in the small critical access Hospital, Montro Bethel, or in the Bethel home, we wear a million hats. And then back in like 2018, our CEO at the time was going to retire and we'd be going on to our fourth season CEO. In the years I'd been there and as the foundation director, it gets really hard fundraising for a building when the CEO's vision changes all the time. So I made the comment to one of my board members, foundation board members, I said, how hard would it be to go back to school and become the administrator of the nursing home? Well, I did it and it's been a challenge. But as I talk to fellow CEOs in North Dakota that are CEOs in their hometowns, but like who else will have the passion though to be able to bring your health center into the next decade and keep it alive over the decades. Covid hit. I became the CEO administrator on March 3, and of course, Covid hit March 16. So it was like trial by fire. But anybody I had talked to, any of the CEOs around me was like, steph, we're all flying the flying and building at the same time. None of us have been able to, you know, none of us had ever been in a pandemic and all that. So that's kind of my little background of health care.
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B
Wonderful. Well, thank you for being here. And let's start with the last 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?
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C
As I stated, I'd been the foundation director since 2013. We literally have been in building projects the entire time that I've walked in. We added on a brand new rural health clinic. We had six rooms for our rural health clinic and then we expanded it, more than double the size of it. We added a CT scanner and services onto the er. And then we then added assisted living, which is a new service line, along with an executive conference room and the Bethel Chapel, which we had fundraised for years. We had three little sisters that had been donating money for like 25 years for it. And so it was wonderful that we were able to make it true for them. But in the meantime, we always knew that we needed a new nursing home. So as last July, we broke ground on a $53 million project. It's going to be a brand new nursing home and it's going to be more added services and MRI suites, a specialist clinic, infusion suites and a pharmacy suites for our hospital side. And we're actually adding seven more units onto our assisted living because we have a waiting list of 27. So I'm very, very proud of that.
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B
Absolutely. And kind of on the flip side, then, what is a significant challenge that you see the health care world to be currently facing and what are you doing to address it?
- [04:16]
C
Staffing. As everybody says, staffing. Personally, the nursing home keeps me up at night. The hospital that, you know, we can bring in really good ER traveler, ER nurses for traveling. We only have two on staff. You know, 12 hour shifts. It's the nursing home and taking making sure you have enough qualified CNAs to take care of your residents because they are 24, 7 coverage. And as anybody that runs a SNF knows that residents can come in fine. And then as dementia kicks in, it just becomes very hard for care. So you have to have the right people taking care of those residents 247 because you never know when those little brains are going to switch, you know. But there's also a lot of significant challenges like with the whole value based care, what does that payment model look like? None of us really know because it's so brand new. None of us. We just started with the acos. This has been our first year with raco and we're really diving in deep with Blue Cross. Nobody knows what those payment models look like. And so that's uncertainty for revenue cycle staffing. Like I said on all areas with all of that and it our AI, it's going to be really interesting with as everything advances, what can IT do for some of your staffing? Granted, the problem with us, we need hands on. So AI is great for certain things like dictation for our providers and different care levels for them that can free up their time. But you need the ER nurses, you need the CNAs, you need the nurses inside the Bethel home taking care of those residents.
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B
Absolutely. And let's touch on leadership. I'd love to know what the biggest leadership lesson you've learned is.
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C
Listen to your team. Don't just ask questions because you think that's just what they want to hear. Listen to their answers because that's just going to deflate them even more when they tell you something that they really, really are important to them and you literally just walk away not really listening. One of the things I'm very, very keen on with my directors and with my managers is when they come in with an issue, even though I might think it's a very minute issue, it can be very important to them. And if I just blow it off, then they're view of me will change and their trust will go away. And you can have that. In order to move our building forward, we need my directors and I need my managers. We all need to be having the same vision. We all need to be on the same page. And they all know that if they ask me something, I will try to take care of it to the best of my ability. And if I can't, I'll go to them and say, this is what I've tried, this won't work. And prime example is my physical therapist. We're in a 53 million dollar building project as I said, and PT is downstairs and that's where the special clinic is going. And so she goes, okay, great that you're bringing a specialist clinic in, but we use these hallways for rehabilitation of patients. Number one it could be HIPAA violations because they're going to see who's in the hallways doing pt. And number two, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're all growing then with all of this, when we're gonna have all this movement with specialist clinic. So here I am not even, not even half a quarter done. It's a four year project, so we're not even a quarter done of our, of the $53 million project. And like, okay, guys, guess what? We're going to have to put our.
- [07:28]
B
PT clinic off site.
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C
And they're like, you've got to be kidding me. But it's important to our physical therapist departments and you know, you have to listen and we all have to. In order to grow and in order to be the best at what we can, you know, the best in our area, we need to advance and we need to listen and we need to think outside the box of how can we advance? Can we put a cute clinic on Main Street? And with all the staffing and then with all the travelers, we're always in need of apartments. Put them in. Well, let's put an apartment up on top above the physical therapist, you know, to new clinic. So anyway, that's a long way off because it's a four year project. But at least she knows I'm thinking about it and she knows that I'm hearing.
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B
Absolutely. And let's touch on digital as we round our conversation out. So from your perspective, what technological innovations are transforming healthcare and what are you prioritizing in regards to digital healthcare at your organization?
- [08:18]
C
We know that we're behind the times with everything that's coming at us with technology. One of the main things we're focusing on right now is we want to get a new EHR system. Our EHR system is very cumbersome. We're tied with one of the bigger systems. They have to run a lot of our reports. So it slows a lot of things down for us. And we don't even know if some of the reports are accurate and if we're getting accurate information. So that's affecting our AR days in AR that we can possibly be bringing in. So we know that's a major issue that we need to focus on. Granted a lot of money, but also then we'll be able to streamline it. Because with the EHR systems out there right now, there's so much great capability inside of it, analytical data, just the AI capabilities. It's exciting what could come at us, especially with analytical data, as we're diving into the ACOs, and they're giving us all these different quality measures, from Medicare acos to Blue Cross acos. They're kind of all the same measures, but kind of not all the same measures. So if I was able to have a data or a dashboard that all my staff could look at quickly every morning and not have to go through 50 pages of reports all the time, that'll just allow us to do the best patient care possible. So we know, like I said, there's a lot of great things out there for technology if you embrace it. And if you want to embrace it.
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B
Absolutely. Well, Stephanie, thanks so much for joining me today on the Beckers Healthcare Podcast. Again, we're recording live at the 15th annual meeting.
- [09:44]
C
Thank you.