Rich Helppie (00:58):
Welcome to the Common Bridge. This is your host, Rich, welcome to substack.com happy to have you join us on our subscription service today. Common bridge is also available on most podcast outlets and on YouTube TV. Today, we have a special guest with us to talk about healthcare, something that affects everybody worldwide, and particularly here in United States. There’s been a lot of reporting about healthcare, and in these divided and polarized time, I think we can agree that access to quality affordable healthcare is a universal need. Yet most people don’t understand this vast industry, which is the largest vertical market and the largest economy in the history of the world. So we’re not going to be able to cover everything today. As , we’ve had other program experts and opinion makers, such as Dean Clancy and Brian Peters, Rob Casalou, Chris Allen, and others. And today on the Common Bridge, we welcome Mr. Wright Lassiter III. Mr. Lassiter is a distinguished healthcare executive with career experiences that run from coast to coast. And based on his accomplishments, he was elected chair of the American Hospital Association, which is the national organization that represents all types of hospitals and healthcare networks. I was going to say, speaking with us from Detroit, Michigan today, the President, Chief Executive Officer of the Henry Ford Health System and the chair elect of the American Hospital Association, Mr. Wright, Lassiter. Mr. Lassiter, thank you so much for joining us today.
Wright Lassiter (02:37):
It’s great to be with you. And I appreciate the wonderful accolades intro as you started your broadcast. Thank you.
Rich Helppie (02:44):
Well, thank you so much. Our audience likes to know something about our guests. So tell us a little bit, where’d you grow up and what was some of your education, early experiences, and what was the path that led you to the Henry Ford Health System?
Wright Lassiter (02:58):
Well, thanks for the question. While my voice probably doesn’t sound like it anymore, I was born in the deep South. I was born in Alabama a little town that became infamous called Tuskegee, Alabama. And so my parents were both affiliated with local university there. And so that’s where my sister and I were born and where I lived until I was about 12 and then we moved up to the east coast. And so my dad was in education. We moved from Alabama to Maryland and from Maryland to upstate New York. I finished high school in upstate New York and went to college there. And while I was in college, my parents migrated to Texas for my dad’s career. And so much of my adult life was spent in Texas, post college. And so in terms of education I grew up in a Southern Baptist family, but went to a little Catholic elementary school, finished college at Jesuit school in Syracuse, New York and always liked [inaudible] and math. I never heard of healthcare administration, but I got introduced to someone who gave me an entree into the field. That led me to do a little bit of work in healthcare initially, and then go off and get a master’s degree in healthcare administration. So I’ve been in healthcare now for going on my 32nd year. And again began my career in Texas and spent the first nearly 15 years of my career in Texas, and spent almost a decade on the west coast in the San Francisco Bay area running a public health system there for almost a decade. I got lured to the Midwest and at the end of 2014, joined Henry Ford Health System as its president initially, and then about a year later, president and CEO.
Rich Helppie (02:44):
I understand you’ve done some I’m recruiting, bringing some other talent to Detroit, because, if I understand correctly, your college basketball coach was John Beilein, of course, that was your first influence on the state of Michigan. And, now you brought him to Detroit as Director of Player Development for the Detroit Pistons, just in time for another championship run for the Pistons.
Wright Lassiter (05:20):
I’m looking forward to that. John’s done a great job in his career and was a great impact on me in college. And what I said to the Pistons is that, when I moved to California and began being affiliated with the Warriors, a few years after that affiliation they won a National Championship and so I’m in one NBA championship city, I’m looking forward to the Pistons returning to their glory with the NBA Championship as well.
Rich Helppie (05:44):
That’ll be great. And we’ll all be given that chant of “De-troit basket-ball”, <laughter> we can’t wait for those days to return. Henry Ford is known as a leader in community health and our audience needs to understand how and why the health systems are focused on improving health status beyond the traditional role of diagnostics and treatment, but before something goes wrong with you. So can you maybe talk to our audience about some of those changes that you’ve been an integral part of leading.
Wright Lassiter (06:16):
Here’s what folks should understand. America’s hospitals and health systems do an amazing job responding to crisis, responding to critical needs. But the fact of the matter is—or your health and health status—not things that happen within the four walls of the hospital. There’s things that happen well outside. It’s issues related to environment, issues related to social status, issues related to access to food and clean water, it’s educational status, and it’s a number of things that frankly have nothing to do with what happens in the four walls of hospital emergency department, et cetera. And so I think that America’s hospitals and health systems have a lot of motivation, frankly, to help the communities they serve focus on health and wellness, not just focus on responding when you come to an emergency department, responding when you come to a physician’s office. And so we’re very focused on evaluating community health needs. One of the things that not for profit health systems are required to do is to complete, on a regular basis, a community health needs assessment. And so what that allows us to do is to talk with stakeholders that understand what are the health needs in communities. When you understand what those needs are, what you’ll realize is that the four walls of a hospital are critically important when something goes wrong. But given that America is the country that spends more in healthcare than any other nation in the world, one of the ways we can address that is by getting ahead of when you become sick and helping our nation’s populous focus on health, focus on prevention. I would say that Henry Ford, because not only do we have hospitals and clinics and surgery centers and doctor’s offices, those kind of things, but we also operate a large insurance company called Health Alliance Plan. And so that gives us even further incentive to work with the members of Health Alliance Plan and the communities we serve in Southeast Michigan, and Michigan broadly, to focus on health and prevention and wellness.
Rich Helppie (08:35):
Are you able to mention anything about the American Hospital Association, how that fits in, and are other health systems facing these same challenges and trying to meet these same objectives?
Wright Lassiter (08:47):
So the short answer is yes. The American Hospital Association, one of the great benefits that I’ve had in being part of the board for a number of years, and now serving as the chair of the organization, is to help drive the strategy and the strategic plan for the organization. Obviously, our first objective is to advocate on behalf of America’s hospitals and health systems to ensure that all the communities in the country have what it needs from a health system perspective. But one of the other significant roles for the American Hospital Association is to assist America’s hospitals with the kinds of change evolution that’s necessary to to meet the needs of our country as we evolve. And so absolutely, the American Hospital Association has, for instance, a group called the Systems Leadership Council. That group brings together the largest health systems around the country. All of which are focused on the things that I just mentioned, all of which call themselves integrated health systems that have physicians, hospitals, clinics, home care services, tele-medicine services, and all of those organizations and hundreds of them are very focused on how do we function as a great hospital operating company, and how do we also function as an organization that partners with this community around health, wellness, and prevention. And so that is one of our strategic frameworks for the American Hospital Association.
Rich Helppie (10:28):
Well, I’m glad you’re using the word partnerships because for people outside the industry, healthcare is kind of baffling. Where does the insurance company fit in? How does my doctor integrate, and what’s this rehab facility that I’m going to after my surgery? Talk to us broadly a little bit, where do hospitals fit in? What are some of the stresses for hospitals? How are some of the other industry participants doing? There’s Big Pharma out there, there are insurance companies out there, which you’ve got your own there, but there are other commercial payers and such. What’s changed during the pandemic among all those players? I know it’s kind of a broad question, but just kind of give it a little background for our people.
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Wright Lassiter (11:34):
Well, there’s a saying that many people have heard that says, never waste a good crisis. And so I think that when you face crises, it’s a time when you can hopefully see the best of each other, the best of companies, the best of industries, the best of humanity. And so as you ask a question about how does this complex web of hospitals, health systems, insurance companies, pharma, et cetera, all fit together, I would say a couple things. I think that during the pandemic some of the greatest collaboration that was seen was an understanding that the cost that Americans would bear for COVID support was likely going to create significant financial harm for many individuals across the country. What you saw in many cases was insurance companies waving co-insurance related to COVID care, waving fees related to COVID testing. And so that certainly was a great benefit to the citizens of the United States. What it also did though, in partnership with the Federal Government, it didn’t mean that if hospitals were expending all those resources, they wouldn’t get revenue for that. And so there was a pretty great partnership there. You clearly saw this sort of race to the finish line with Big Pharma as it related to solving the crisis of the day, which is we have a virus which is infecting the world, not just Americas, but the world’s pharmaceutical companies need to figure out how do we have a solution to that? So many people, while whole process of the pharmaceutical manufacturers creating drugs and the research around that is baffling to most people in the United States, what we saw clearly was a period of time where we had vaccinations, which I know is still a dicey subject in some, and maybe many parts of the country, but like it or not—and this is, in my mind, in apolitical statement—we got drugs to market the fastest that we likely have seen in any period in history. That was a combination of a lot of people doing good work; pharmaceutical manufacturers, researchers outside of that area, obviously the federal government, the regulatory bodies—who at times people criticize that maybe in the United States, they take too long to approve things for folks to use, slower than in other parts of the world. So I think you saw there, with a host of our companies who put a lot of money, time, and research into what can we do to provide a solution for America and the world. And then I would say another partnership that really worked well during the pandemic—Henry Ford, for instance, served as a vaccine clinical trial site for two of what were ultimately the four approved vaccines for Americans. And then you saw a number of hospitals and health systems around the country who had an ability, had the wherewithal to serve as enrollment sites, who were involved in clinical trial research service places for enrollment for those critical vaccine trials. That’s a place of great collaboration between the pharmaceutical industry and America’s hospitals and health systems, because we are on the ground and able to draw folks. One of the reasons that that Henry Ford was so sought after was because we have a pretty rich patient population, a very diverse patient population, so we can provide, in some cases those clinical subjects that you might not see in some parts of the country to make sure that they’re testing their potential new drugs on all varieties of genetic compliments in the country. So that’s another place where I would say there has been great collaboration. And so I really appreciate you asking that question because often times we spend more time just talking about when hospitals don’t agree with how much reimbursement they’re getting to cover their costs from an insurance company, or when the pharmaceutical companies are odds with health systems about X. And so this is a great conversation to talk about how we can work well together, and hopefully how we can use that as a way to work better together going forward.
Rich Helppie (16:40):
Well, I share your optimism and I saw the pandemic, obviously a horrible event, but as a catalyst for some things. We can get into it today, if you wish, a little bit about payment systems, about data systems, about disparities in care that we’ve seen throughout various patient populations, and the impact on the supply chain and frankly, the impact on a very important part of the employment sector. That your personnel and your staff feeling the brunt of supply chain, perhaps not getting them all the PPE they needed that literally were healthcare heroes in the workforce. How’s your workforce doing today? And what are you hearing from around the country about the clinicians, the nurses, the people that maintain the facilities, how are things going?
Wright Lassiter (17:34):
So I would just say, being very honest with you, it is a challenging time for America’s healthcare workers, whether they be clinical or whether they support those in clinical roles. You used the term heroes, and I would just say first and foremost that on a daily basis, we see examples of heroism throughout America’s hospitals and health systems with those folks who continue to lean in to do the work, to do the business of healthcare today. But the short answer is most of the folks who work in our facilities and in our hospitals and health systems never had the experience that they have had since January of 2020 unless they’re veterans and spent time on a front line of a war. And obviously you’re not dodging bullets necessarily on the front line when you’re dealing with healthcare, but what they were dealing with initially was this unknown, invisible assailant. When the coronavirus first hit our shores, we didn’t know much about it. And so they’re beleagered, they’re tired. In some cases they’re frustrated, particularly some of our clinical team members get frustrated, at times, by the volume of patients who they believe have a way to not be in the situation they’re in if maybe they made a different choice. So they’re tired, they’re worn out. They’re in a place where at times they feel under-appreciated. And, as we talk about the great resignation in the United States with folks who are making different decisions about do they work anymore, do they work in the situation they’re in, do they find a job where they can work from home and not have to go and be exposed to invisible viruses and the, like, we’re seeing all those stressors. I would say, in our organization, we’ve seen a six hundred percent increase in our team members requesting employee assistance through our various employee assistance programs. That is just a sign of trauma. That is a sign of resilience being less than you would want it to be. And in some parts of the healthcare system, people are using it to leave it and not come back. In other cases, people are saying, I’m 58 and I planned to work until I was 65. I think I’m done—my family and I have decided we’re going to live differently. I’m not going to do this anymore because it’s too stressful. So folks who sit in chairs like mine, we spend a lot of our time talking to our leadership teams about, how can we better support our team members, because what they need from us today is something different than what they needed three years ago. I think most folks sitting in a chair like mine, would’ve said that we thought we were doing a pretty good job in most organizations of providing the kind of support that your team members need to be their best at work. And in our organization, and frankly, I would say that in most organizations today, not all, but in most organizations, PPE is certainly not the issue, supply chain, isn’t the reason people are stressed. It’s just the fact that you’ve been on platoon duty for now going on three years and you’re looking for that light at the end of the tunnel. And every time you think you see it, you realize that there’s another train barreling down the tracks at you. What I think most folks want is just a break.
Rich Helppie (21:24):
And potentially there’s not a break coming because during the pandemic with so much resource devoted to battling COVID, your associates and your staff members suffering from the stresses and strains of mental health, it’s exploding elsewhere in the communities where we’ve had deferred care for prevention and for acute cancers. So it doesn’t sound like it’s going to get any easier. And I can’t even imagine what the leadership challenges would be for you and your peers around the country.
Wright Lassiter (21:56):
I think the leadership imperative is to continue to try to do a couple things at the same time, which can be challenging. It is to be honest and transparent with the team that’s doing the work on what you see around the corner and how you’re preparing your organization to support them as best as you possibly can, based upon what you see around the corner. What you see around the corner is something that’s scary and that’s ghastly and it’s worrisome. It’s helpful to be as honest as you possibly can around that, so that you don’t give people false hope, false expectations. So one of the things that we do within our organization, and I would say that that many large organizations do today, is share with the teams what they’re seeing on the epidemiology front, around, where do we see the waves? Do we think the wave is moderating? Do we think we’re about to go back into a wave? And so we publish pretty regularly and we have team members who do an internal podcast or internal video message to the team. And some cases, it comes from me, but in more cases, it comes from some of our clinical team, just sort of sharing here’s what we’re seeing in the community, here’s what we’re seeing across Michigan for the next two to three weeks, here’s what we’re expecting so that people have a bit of a sense of, okay, I got it. As opposed to I walk in hoping it’s going to be fine and I get hit by a bus. And it’s like, well, geez, if someone had told me that there was a bus barreling down the street, I could’ve prepared for it, maybe I could have stepped aside.
Rich Helppie (23:39):
When I think about things like the disparities in healthcare, so much of the pandemic’s worst effects being on people with complications and comorbidities, and perhaps those people weren’t getting preventive care. What have we learned as a nation and as a healthcare delivery system about disparities that—maybe you knew them—what has the general public learned about the disparities in healthcare during this time?
Wright Lassiter (24:09):
I really appreciate that question because I think what it highlights is the fact that we have to talk more broadly about the health inequities that exist across our country. And we’ve got to do more, we’ve got to be more aggressive at resolving them. What COVID showed us was what already existed and that is when you have certain portions of the population that have a greater chance of, a preponderance of comorbidities, of diabetes, of hypertension, of food insecurity, a lack of transportation to get to a doctor’s visit, lack of access. And that’s not just in urban settings, it’s in small town, rural settings, where you have to drive a hundred miles or more to get to a primary care doctor or to get to a specialist or to get to an emergency department. And what it’s really taught us is that we have to address some of the fundamental underpinnings of health and wellness in our country because we are vulnerable and COVID just simply exposed what was already there, what many public health professionals and those who focus on health equity and disparities would’ve said all along, which is we have many populations that suffer more than they should in a country that has as many resources as the United States has. And we, we can and should do better.
Rich Helppie (25:35):
I’m glad you brought up the, the resources because, and by the way, my humble opinion, and you can disagree or endorse it or modify it if you wish. But it occurred to me that during the, a time when we most needed our healthcare providers, not only for the care of the pandemic, but also for everything else that didn’t stop—cancers, broken bones, car accidents, and the like—had we stayed on the same payment system and not intervened as a federal government, our hospitals and health systems would’ve been bankrupted. That during the time most needed, they would’ve gone away. And I wonder, could we design payment methods any worse than the ones we have today?
Wright Lassiter (26:22):
Financing of healthcare is obviously incredibly complicated and there are a very few people who would just say that they love it or that they fully understand it. Our system is one that is predicated on being paid, more than not, on what you do to someone not necessarily for how you able to keep them well. You’re absolutely correct that the nation’s hospitals and healthcare systems are quite vulnerable wit a large percentage of them who are only barely financially viable. And when we went through a pandemic, as we did, and you shut down so much of the elective surgeries, elective activity, and even some basic hospital activity, those organizations that were vulnerable teetered on the edge of not being able to stay solvent. So not unlike your prior question of, what did the pandemic teach us about the reimbursement system, about the financial incentives of healthcare, highlights what many in the industry already knew and many public policy folks, the financing folks knew, which is we’re on a little bit of a house of cards system in our country as it relates to reimbursement and financing of healthcare. If you ask me the question so what’s the way to redesign is it, what I would tell you is that’s a complicated question that we don’t have enough time today to address. Clearly we’ve got to get to a place where there’s more incentive for partnering with people to help keep them healthy and simply doing stuff to them once when they get help. Now, obviously we cannot remove from the system fair reimbursement for the healthcare industry When you respond to someone’s critical health emergency or critical need for restoration of health, there’s got to be more attention and incentive pay to partnering with individuals to prevent illness, to create healthy and wellness lifestyles. If there were sufficient incentive there, then you would see more activity. A case in point is this, the federal government put in place an enhanced reimbursement system for tele-medicine during the COVID-19 crisis. And so depending upon the organization, Henry Ford, for instance, was already doing a lot of tele-medicine, but our activity increased almost 1500% at its peak during the COVID-19 crisis. And to this day, we’re still doing significantly more than we did before. And that was across the industry you would see similar kinds of data points. That was in large part because one, you couldn’t have people in your facilities given the potential spread of the virus so we adapted, but the federal government also put in place an incentive that said, we’re not going to penalize you any longer for delivering a health interaction virtually versus in-person. That still exists today, even though most of the country, if not all the country, has reopened itself to elective surgeries and all the kinds of things that would allow someone to come into a facility. And so what has happened, there’s been a little bit of re-calibration back to in person visits, but most healthcare systems with the capabilities are doing a lot more virtual medicine still to this day than they were three years ago. And that’s primarily because the dis-incentives were removed such that you would get reimbursed equally for an in-person visit versus virtual medicine. So one of the things that, for instance, the American Hospital Association advocated strongly about was you’ve got to give the healthcare industry the incentive to see people digitally because they can’t come into our facilities or they’re nervous about coming into a facility. So don’t pay us ten cents on the dollar for a virtual visit and then pay a dollar for an in-person visit. Make that more equal. And I think that that’s one example of a host of reverse incentives in the reimbursement and financing of America’s healthcare that frankly causes behaviors that aren’t always in the best interest of our country.
Rich Helppie (31:23):
Well, I’m in strong agreement with you on that. Tele-medicine, I think, is so appropriate. When you think about it, we don’t pay extra to go into a branch bank, we can do a lot of the banking off of our phones. But it also calls out one of those disparities that you can’t do tele-medicine unless you have access to a device and broadband. And decades ago there was a federal legislation for universal telephone service. And now I think universal broadband service is just essential. One of the things we talk about on this program is what some of the policy responses should be. Broadband can’t be a place for the privileged, it has to be a place for everybody because it relates directly to quality of life, quality of healthcare. And then as we begin to address those root causes of some of the healthcare maladies: nutrition, housing, and the like. You can probably tell, I’m a forever optimist, that we can get ahead of any problem. One of the things that I think has come to light during this time is the public health system. And you ran a big public health system. You’re in a city that has a fairly robust public health system. Any view on how the public health system was good about supporting pandemic response, or places that maybe [you] said, we need to strengthen it in some areas?
Wright Lassiter (32:53):
So this is an area that I would say Wright Lassiter’s opinion about this is pretty clear. And that is that the public health infrastructure in the United States is underwhelming. It’s one of the areas where we really need significantly more investment. I think when you look across the country, what you will see is that municipalities and states that had stronger investments in public health had more tools to offer their citizens at the beginning of the pandemic. It’s why at times you saw different understanding in some states for what was happening and what wasn’t happening. Take contact tracing, for instance. Early on, when we really didn’t fully understand the virus, contact tracing was extremely important. Because we had no tools, we didn’t have vaccines, didn’t have monoclonal antibodies, didn’t have new drugs. All we really had was to find a way to stay away from someone who has it. By the way, this is an invisible virus, at times people are asymptomatic and so you don’t have a good way of even staying away from folks early on. So one of the best tools that you might have available during a public health crisis with a respiratory virus is contact tracing. I would say that was effectively done in probably no more than a quarter of the country primarily because there was not, there is not a robust public health infrastructure across much of our country. Now some states and some cities have done it better. We had a very strong partnership with the city of Detroit and with Mike Duggan, the mayor. We embedded our Chief of Infectious Disease into the mayor’s cabinet to assist him and the city of Detroit’s Public Health Department with infectious disease expertise and with thinking medical advice around how to do strategy development and strategy deployment and problem solving. There were a number of health systems that did very similar things in other localities whether that’s in Michigan or outside of Michigan. I would tell you that you’ve got to continue to focus on public health infrastructure across the country because we weren’t equipped as much as we should have been. When early on, when the vaccines were first being approved, in many places, the entity that was doing more vaccination administration were hospitals and health systems. Now this is the first time in our history that hospitals and health systems, as opposed to doctor’s office and public health clinics, were the sites used for administration of vaccines. Often times vaccines are done in pediatric population. And so most vaccines are generally done in a pediatrician’s office, in a doctor’s office or in a public health clinic, not necessarily in hospitals. But in this crisis you had America’s hospitals doing mass vaccination clinics, being the oversight in stadiums, Cobo Hall and places like that to have that done. And what I would say to you is that I think the America’s hospitals and health systems did that eagerly and saw that as our role in that crisis, that wasn’t necessarily something that we’d ever done before, but we did it. Some would say, well, is that good, bad, or indifferent? And what I would say is, if there was an adequate public health infrastructure, hospitals would’ve been a compliment to that, not the lead. And I’d say generally speaking, hospitals probably aren’t the best place to do mass vaccination, but in the crisis, everybody leans in and you do what you have to do until you get through the crisis. So hope that…
Rich Helppie (37:21):
I got my vaccine through the health system and they did a great job of really…an absolute de novo build of an outreach to the community, the way they segregated the population into the high risk, got your appointment, got in, got your follow up, got your second shot. They did a terrific job. And that leads me to one of the things very near and dear to me, is the data systems in healthcare. And to your point about public health being probably inadequate at this point, and some of the coordination, and with all the participants, it seems that we should be doing a lot better job on interconnected data systems. If I’m unconscious and brought into one of your facilities, I sure want you to know what my medical history is and what allergies I might have and so forth. What’s the thinking at the system level or perhaps at the American Hospital Association level about the need for data systems?
Wright Lassiter (38:30):
Well, so I would say that no one would disagree with the comment you just made, which is no matter where you are, if you suffer some serious critical clinical issue that the physicians who are taking care of you need access to, as complete as possible—your medical history—to be able to manage your care [as] best as possible. I think that probably the lay person may or may not have heard the term epic, or they’ve heard that in some context different than what I would mention, but in a hospital health system world there are really two dominant information technology platforms, Epic, which is by far the market leader. I’d say probably two thirds of hospitals and health systems have Epic as their clinical platform, and Cerner. The good news about Epic’s market share is that there is the ability, if you’re an Epic user, to share data, frankly, across the country. If you’re on an Epic platform and you have enabled your system and signed up for the various data sharing portals that are available it’s pretty easy that if you live in Michigan, but you’re vacationing in Montana and you have an accident and you go into a facility that’s an Epic shop it’s pretty east for them to have access to your MyChart that might be resident in the state of Michigan. So that’s not particularly difficult because now we’ve put in place number of HIEs—Health Information Exchanges, and RIEs [inaudible] health information exchanges that allows the inner sharing of that data. I would just say that it is not quite as seamless between two competing information technology platforms to share data as it is within one. And so work needs to be done there. There’s been a lot of work in the last decade or so around trying to overcome the barriers to competitiveness and to just focus on the highest priority, which ought to be delivering the best possible care to that individual. And so let’s forget about competition because if your data is your data, you own it, and so ought to be able to sort of carry it around with you and have it available to any caregiver that you’d give access to. So it’s not as seamless as having a chip that someone can access or some sort of data file that someone can access, in the event that you have an issue. But I would say it’s better today than it was a decade ago, but there’s still more work to be done to ensure that data is shared seamlessly across any corner of our country in the event that you have a serious clinical need and [inaudible] need to give it to you. What they don’t need is to make ten phone calls trying to figure out how to get to your data. And if you’re unconscious, you can’t give them the access to your MyChart account to be able to download your data. And I would just say that at one point there were these companies that were sort of selling access, selling health vaults and the various tools that would allow you to sort of carry your data around with you. And those have not been, I think, as popular or as well subscribed as they might have thought. Ultimately the Cloud is the way the way to go to get access to the data in a secure way to make sure that you have it and anyone that you want to have it can get it, but not anyone else to use that data against you.
Rich Helppie (42:40):
Exactly. And I think interoperability, I know there’s a subgroup at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid working on that. And it should not be a purview of a single company or even a couple of companies. If you look around, every place else we deal with information there’s an ATM nearby, it’s around the world, you get your data instantly, it crosses all kinds of platforms, not that hard to do. We’ve interconnected many other types of systems. And it’s always a disruptor coming in from the Cloud that gets the resident data versus the resident data being kept in and you have to go find out where it is. Probably a bigger topic for another day. We actually have been talking about having a Common Bridge panel discussion, an in-person, to talk about payment reform and such. And if we get that set up, I’d love to have you be a part of that panel as well. A lot of fun, a lot of other smart people on the panel that know a few things. Mr. Lassiter, you are in very highly influential positions at this incredibly complex and difficult time. I’m happy we have people with your experience and your credentials and your obvious energy for this. Do you have a vision for maybe what does healthcare look like in the next ten years?
Wright Lassiter (44:05):
You know, here’s what I would say. I think that healthcare needs to be viewed as ubiquitous, consumer-oriented, safe, available to all, and affordable. And some might get nervous when you say ubiquitous, what that might mean, my goodness, well, we spend a lot of money already on healthcare, so what does ubiquitous mean, we’re going to spend twice as much? My sense is we spend all the money we need to spend on healthcare today, we just need to spend it in different places and in some case focus on different problems more than we need more money. But healthcare clearly has to ensure that it never compromises the quality and safety and the needs of our citizenry. I’m a firm believer that everyone who’s here in our country needs to have access to high quality and affordable healthcare, because without it, it has numerous deleterious effects that are much broader than healthcare. I mean, if you don’t have good health, you’re not able to contribute to society in a meaningful way. And so my belief is it’s in our best interest to ensure that folks have access to high quality affordable care so they can be their best selves, whatever that God given ability is. I think that [what] healthcare is going to have to do in the next decade is constantly re-evaluate where and how it’s provided. We’re going to have to be able to, in many cases, rely less on brick and mortar and more on other ways of providing that care. You’ve harped on a couple of occasions around data and technology and so we’re going to have to use data and technology better in the next decade than we’ve used [it] in the last decade to understand who you are and what your needs are better. We’re going to have to use artificial intelligence and machine learning in a robust way to improve efficiency and effectiveness of our services. Obviously there’s a lot of applications that say that you can use those technologies to reduce unnecessary care, but also to help extend the human brain to be able to solve problems that we just can’t solve on our own. But the place where we have not used it as much in the last decade that we need to use those technologies more in the coming decade is how to better deploy healthcare talent. When we know that we have, the same way we spent time focusing on supply chain at the beginning of the pandemic, as we hopefully now come to the back end of our pandemic, we now have to focus on healthcare talent, our healthcare supply pipeline, like we did at the beginning of the pandemic on our personal protective equipment and ventilators and other kinds of supply chain, because we’ve had a lot of folks who have decided to leave the industry. And we have pressure to try to deliver the same care with a bench that has less people on it. So I think that we can deploy AI and machine learning in ways that helps us deploy talent better. That ensures that we are fully utilizing people at the top of their license and credentials and skillsets, and in some cases we’re deploying folks who are not at the bedside, obviously in virtual settings, in a way that leverages them more than we could do in the prior decade. So I think that’s going to be really critically important.
Rich Helppie (48:10):
I’m glad you mentioned talent. And for everyone listening, healthcare is an extremely rewarding career. I can’t think of anything more noble than taking care of ill and sick and injured people. And I love the words, helping people live their best life through good health. And look, if you’ve got the talent to be a clinician, great, maybe you’re a computer nerd, like me, but I came to healthcare because of the mission. And there are lots of support jobs. We need people to greet people, to transport people, to clean the facilities. There are many ways that people can participate in this largest and most important industry. Mr. Lassiter, you’ve been a very great guest today. We told our audience at the beginning, we can’t cover everything because of the breadth of this topic. Anything that we didn’t cover today that you’d like to make mention of. And perhaps, what would you recommend people do today to make the most of their health and their healthcare system?
Wright Lassiter (49:16):
I’d love to end on that. So, if you say, what can people do today? Well, first I’d say to folks, get the facts about the positive impact of getting vaccinated. I worry daily about the number of unvaccinated individuals who are in our hospitals and who are suffering greatly. I fully understand and respect the fact that it’s a choice that an individual has to come to based and what they believe is best for themselves and their families. But frankly, our staff sees the unfortunate outcome of folks who have not come to that decision. So that’s the first thing I would say is avail yourself of whatever information you need to hopefully be able to make that decision, because we are losing a lot of folks who we’d like to not lose. That’s first thing that I would say. The second thing I would say is that ultimately you are the biggest driver for your own health and wellness. Health systems can be a great partner. Your physicians, our therapists, our counselors, they can all, we can all be great partners. But you as an individual are a great driver of your health and wellness. And so allow us to help partner with you so that you can live your best self through health and well-being. Hospitals will be there for you when there’s a crisis. We can also be there for you when there’s not a crisis that helps you be healthier today, tomorrow and beyond. And so we’re here to partner with you for that, and we wish you the best.
Rich Helppie (50:57):
That is a great finale to our talk today. We’ve been talking with Mr. Wright Lassiter III. He is the President and Chief Executive, of the Henry Ford Health system, Detroit, Michigan, and because of his illustrious career, he has been elected the chair of the American Hospital Association. We wish you very strong success in both those roles, because they’re critical to all of us. This is Rich Helppie on substack’s Common Bridge. Please go to substack.com, look up Common Bridge and subscribe. And this is your host Rich Helppie signing off on the Common Bridge.
Narrator
Thanks for joining us on The Common Bridge. Please subscribe to the Common Bridge on substack.com, where you can find more interviews, columns, podcasts, video, and other are non-partisan discussions to the problems of today. On Substack, you can access the full archive and bonus columns, podcasts and interviews for only $5 a month. Please go to substack.com and search for the Common Bridge and subscribe. All rights reserved by Richard Helppie.
