Health systems nationwide have grown to encompass hundreds of care sites, thousands of employees and even more patients, procedures and policies.
This amounts to a tall order for chief medical officers, whose roles have shifted drastically over the last several decades as clinical practice becomes more entrenched with technology and finances.
“Leadership is learned, and the CMO is really no longer the senior doctor in the room where they have been traditionally,” Samuel Bauer, MD, a maternal fetal medicine specialist who was recently named CMO of Corewell Health William Beaumont University Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., told Becker’s. “The landscape has changed. It’s now become a role that needs to be much more fluent in data, in finance, operations, change management. That’s all the CMO, and it’s different for different hospitals.”
William Beaumont is the largest hospital in Michigan and has been since 2021 when then-Southfield, Mich.-based Beaumont Health and Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Spectrum merged to create a 22-hospital system with 64,000 employees. While several years have passed since the merger, “it’s a big enterprise where there’s still a lot of standardization and change management that needs to happen,” Dr. Bauer said.
He is focused on balancing broad systemwide needs for standardization with the looming demands of healthcare institutions as the U.S. population ages. In 2020, around 73 million baby boomers were eligible for Medicare benefits, and by 2030 all baby boomers will be Medicare-eligible, according to the Census Bureau.
“Some say 20% more care is going to be needed. Yet there’s going to be a 30%, some say 35%, decrease in revenue and the funding we’re going to get as a hospital. So you need to be giving more care, and you’re going to get paid less for it,” Dr. Bauer said. “And there’s a reduction in the workforce. Physicians in their 50s are going to do other things, it’s hard to recruit nurses and this doesn’t take into account a lot of the things that are going on with the federal government.”
Length of stay is one area that Dr. Bauer is focusing on keeping hospital operations running as efficiently and smoothly as possible as it braces volume increases over the next several years.
“All of our length-of-stay initiatives are making sure that patients are getting the quality care that they need when they’re in the hospital,” he said. “And if there are certain things that don’t need [to be done] in the hospital anymore, that can be done in the outpatient setting, that can be more nimble … lots of initiatives around length of stay help not only with cost, but [they] certainly help with quality for our patients.”
Communication is another key priority for Dr. Baur as he steps into his first year as CMO, a double-sided goal that aims to improve both patient and practitioner experience at William Beaumont.
“We know that a lot of risk that occurs in health systems is because of lack of [communication.] This happens [not only] in your own family, but in the hospital workforce. There’s challenges with communication — physician to physician, nurse to nurse, nurse to physician, and then certainly to the patient,” he said. “At Corewell Health, we’re putting a lot of emphasis on communication, as well as patient experience. The way patients experience their healthcare today is very different than it was when I was a medical student 30 years ago. Now, they have a lot of expectations of what they want from their team, and we have to stay nimble with that and be able to help with that.”
These goals all tie into Dr. Bauer’s “metrics that matter,” such as readmission, decreasing risk, mortality and patient experience. But working toward these goals in a hospital as large as William Beaumont means that alignment among teams of clinicians is all the more crucial to ensure the success of new initiatives.
“There’s different types of change management. It’s always good to anchor your change management strategy around something that you can, ideally, get a lot of buy-in for,” Dr. Bauer said.
While some goals may seem straightforward and agreeable, like improving communication or reducing complications, “Oftentimes there’s things that are more difficult, and so the first thing you have to do is make sure you build a team,” he continued.
“And you need to know how to build a team. That might [include] your chiefs, but that also might just be people in frontline positions. You need some early adopters, and you need some people that are pretty skeptical about anything and who have been there for a long time. You get lots of different perspectives,” he said. “My leadership style is based on building teams and on communication, transparency and having everybody at least bring their ideas to the table.”
He said that in this style of leadership, while people might not always agree on final decisions, they will at least feel heard and be informed and educated about the process behind leadership decisions.
Implementing change as early as possible is also an essential aspect of Dr. Bauer’s approach to change management.
“These things don’t happen overnight,” he said. “Give deadlines — doctors like transparency … change is inevitable, and it continues every day. I approach it by what the problem is. Is this a popular problem, or an unpopular problem? And then I build my team around that.”
