The Power of Connection: Harnessing Physician Relationships within Your Hospital Growth Strategies

While I am currently a director of strategy and business development with Dignity Health East Valley in Arizona, I have served in multiple roles within our hospitals for the past twenty years. In my career, I've helped open urgent care and outpatient clinics, served on the planning teams for multiple hospital projects, and led the strategy and program development for an array of inpatient and outpatient service lines from sports medicine to surgical weight loss. My passion is helping improve all aspects of the care we provide our patients, but I find the relationships I build with our physicians most gratifying. In my experience, there are a few strategies you can develop within your hospital growth plans to realize the full potential of your medical staff.  

Let your physicians thrive! An important aspect of my role within the strategy is to provide our physicians with the tools to do their job safely and effectively, whether that be obtaining capital to purchase equipment for a surgeon or exploring innovative technology that improves their efficiency in the operating room. We want to improve their experience as care providers, which studies suggest can positively impact patient outcomes. But I don't want to stop there. I want to light a fire in them. I want our physicians to thrive in their roles. One of the best ways to harness that energy is to give your physicians a voice and challenge them to become active in leadership roles within the hospital or to secure a seat on a hospital committee. One of my favorite committees that I sit on is our monthly physician strategy council, in which physician thought leaders representing each of our hospital service lines sit side by side with our hospital administrators and discuss key topics like quality, patient experience, and growth. This open forum offers physicians from multiple specialties the opportunity to bring concerns or issues forward and work together to solve them. The committee is facilitated by Mark Slyter, president and CEO of Dignity Health East Valley president, who creates an environment of trust and collaboration where our physicians feel heard and represented. 

Inspire them! Another rewarding part of my role in strategy is to ensure our physicians are given the opportunity to develop their strengths. Our medical staff is ripe with immensely bright and talented people. Sometimes, it takes careful cultivation and relationship-building over time to foster that talent.

 A perfect example is when I worked with one of our brilliant young surgeons, just a couple of years out of fellowship, to realize his vision of forming a multidisciplinary tumor board within his specialty of digestive disease. We had to work together to assemble the right team of physicians, develop a framework for nursing, coordinate ER and hospitalist education on how to manage patients with these disease types and assemble the quality metrics and administrative tasks that would define the program. After months of working together to secure all of the necessary resources, obtain hospital approval, and hire a nurse navigator to help prepare the cases, we launched the first of four multidisciplinary tumor boards that now review well over 350 patient cases per year.

Showcase their talents! Organizing continuing medical education (CME) events and featuring your physicians as presenters is a great way to provide them an opportunity to share their knowledge with a targeted audience. I serve on our hospital's CME committee, which is co-represented by physicians from different disciplines and hospital administrators. One of the goals of the committee is to identify a demonstrated community need in a certain area and tailor a presentation to address that need. For example, last November, during Lung Cancer Awareness Month, our committee wanted to focus on improving lung cancer screening rates in the communities we serve. With the help of our surgeon partners, we curated a thoughtful agenda that included speakers with expertise in multiple areas of lung cancer care, including surgeons, oncologists, pathologists, radiologists, and targeted primary care providers. The hospital co-hosted the event alongside our outpatient imaging partners, Arizona Diagnostic Radiology, and we infused a bit of entertainment into the education-focused event by offering refreshments, door prizes, and networking and fun photo opportunities. It took several months for the committee to plan the event, and the surgeons sincerely enjoyed the opportunity to meet with our planning team, which had a role in developing the agenda and assembling the speakers and panelists. Our newer surgeons found it extremely beneficial to have direct exposure to community providers. The event attracted nearly 50 providers from our community and was featured on various social media channels afterward so everyone participating could share and connect virtually.