From the May 2022 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


HCB News: Are there any initiatives or special projects you're undertaking, or planning to undertake?
DH: First and foremost is our access and growth as major goals, and growing not necessarily in terms of patient bed capacity, but more how we open our doors to have a very consistent, easy access that's patient-family centric. We are working hard on elevating our digital front door, so online scheduling of virtual appointments when appropriate, opening up all of our ORs, making sure throughput in our emergency department is good.

We're also expanding what we call ED affiliations. These are partnerships with some adult hospitals to help them with emergency department care, and ensure when they have a very sick child come in that they would be able to call us 24/7 to be able to telemed with one of our pediatric experts in our ED to help ensure that the right care is being delivered. In addition, when patients leave emergency departments, if they need a subspecialty visit, we want to be able to have them call a number and have a subspecialty appointment be connected immediately.
HCB News: Have you been dealing with the same type of staffing shortages that have been hurting hospitals across the country?
DH: We certainly have not been exempt from experiencing some shortages similar to the rest of the country, but on a positive note, we have been able to recruit. We have a pipeline of new nurses in particular, that have started January through July, which will really help to get us back to optimal staffing.

With the new hires that we've been able to pull in, our physicians have been relatively stable. We have been working throughout with all of our essential health care workers on flexible schedules, looking at some incentives, some premium pays. We've implemented with our UPMC health system in particular robust career ladders, so that year after year staff believe they're advancing, and trying to incentivize them to stay.

We're doing work with schools and training programs and partnering with them to do our best to create pipelines to our top job families that we continue to recruit for.

HCB News: Do you foresee the pandemic creating any long term or permanent changes to the way healthcare is delivered?
DH: I would say, first and foremost, telemedicine is here to stay. For many of our families, it makes it convenient. It's consumer friendly. It creates a sense of efficiency, and I’m very pleased to see that it's being fully funded right now.

COVID-19 has really taken a toll on everyone, and we have seen a definite increase in demand for behavioral health services, and especially in pediatrics. So pediatric behavioral health is also a priority of mine. Western Psychiatric Hospital is our adult hospital, which provides service to both children, adolescents and adults, and we’re partnering with them to look at the continuum of care from when a child comes into our ED or any ED, and making sure that we have people able to evaluate and triage these children to the services they need. Not every child needs an inpatient bed, but we certainly need to ensure that we can meet demands for outpatient and partial programs, as well as looking at embedding behavioral health into our primary care offices to help meet the needs.

May 2022 Magazine

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