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Bill Klaproth (Host): Welcome to the Latest With Lyle, Hospital Week 2019 as we visit with Lyle Sheldon, President and CEO of University of Maryland Upper Chesapeake Health. This is the Hero Podcast from UM Upper Chesapeake Health. I’m Bill Klaproth. Lyle it is a pleasure to talk with you. So, UMUCH is new to podcasting. What are you hoping regular podcasting can do to improve internal communications at your Health system?

Lyle Sheldon FACHE (Guest): As I look at podcasting, it really, we hope to serve as a compliment to the town hall meetings that we hold twice a year and those will be coming up the second week of May. And so we hope that will compliment what we are doing in those particular areas. Also it will give me an opportunity to offer updates more frequently than open meetings and can be reached easily by team members, our busy employed physicians, our community physicians and our team members that work nights and off shifts.

And if you have looked at the changes in healthcare particularly the changes here at Upper Chesapeake; it showed that we needed a more efficient way for our leaders to update our team members around the clock on the progress of our so many major initiatives. And as this work force has changed to a millennial workforce; it’s become evident that broadcasting is very, very popular among that subset of our team members.

So, it’s nice to take advantage of folks as they have their drive times and we just have so many topics and so many experts in these areas of change that podcasting gives them a voice to share their thoughts on what we’re doing as well.

Host: Yeah, that all makes sense. And it’s very easy for you to communicate your message to the staff and easy for them to listen at any time to get that message. So, Lyle, what are your top initiatives for the rest of 2019 and into 2020, that you want to touch on today?

Lyle: Well certainly one of the ones that we spent a lot of time talking about was this story that we were referring to as Vision 2020 which was our broad plans of transforming healthcare in northeastern Hartford County and we’ve decided to take a pivot point and transition that terminology from Vision 2020 to Your Health Our Mission and we will talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes.

Secondly is our journey towards HERO. H-E-R-O, a highly engaged reliability organization. Third is our transition to the Epic IT portfolio and platform. And then also for some of our team members, a gradual transition to shared services and then lastly, when we look out over the next 12 to 18 months and our plans to transition Hartford Memorial Hospital; what the plans are around our job mapping for our team members that work at that institution.

Host: Got you. So, let’s take these one by one Lyle. Tell us about the current campaign you are calling Your Health Our Mission.

Lyle: As I mentioned, we had this vision called Vision 2020 which was really targeting us, reconfiguring our services here in the county by the year 2020 and as that became tied up in the government approval processes, we thought it was important to really transition that nomenclature to Your Health Our Mission and it’s really trying to transform healthcare here in Hartford County. And it’s our vision to create the healthiest community in Maryland. And it’s really driven by four main areas. One is enhancing the access to care. Expanding services for our community to get and to stay healthy. Improving our facilities and investing in population health in disease management. So, those are the core components of this Your Health Our Mission initiative.

Host: Right. So, what’s the status of this campaign today?

Lyle: We’ve been working on this for the last five years and it’s currently to build a new modern medical campus about four miles from Hartford Memorial Hospital, an acute care facility that has been providing services in the county for over 100 years. And the new property that we are purchasing is in the city of Aberdeen just a half mile off of Interstate 95. And currently we are waiting for state approval for our plans and some important road access to the property. Once we have those approvals, we will start construction there in Aberdeen, but we will also be expanding our campus in Bel Air and adding a three-story bed tower above the Kaufman Cancer Center. And we would again, expect to start those simultaneously.

Currently, we are doing a lot of work in expanding parking here on the Bel Air campus. As we talk to team members, as we talk to patients; that is top of mind for folks about the parking needs that we have here. So, that’s going on as we talk at this point.

We are expecting to receive approval – state approvals for these projects in 2019 and plan on having the new construction completed in the fall/summer of 2021. So, that’s a big component around two hospital campuses.

Another important component has really been revolving around this opioid crisis that has been so prevalent here in Hartford County. And through a variety of community partnerships; we’ll be opening the Hartford Crisis Center in May of 2019. What many folks may not realize is that one in five people suffer from a behavioral health issue. And many of the patients that are admitted to our acute care hospitals also have an underlying behavioral health issue. So, together with Hartford County executive Barry Glassman, Hartford County Health Department, an organization called Healthy Hartford in Upper Chesapeake; we’ve developed this model of coordinated care that aligns community resources and our expertise around serving individuals with mental health and or substance abuse issues.

And I’m really very, very proud of the Crisis Center because it has brought together so many community partners in a way to mobilize this critically important service. I’ll share some thought for a future podcast on this that I think will be very, very relevant to individuals.

And then another component of this Your Health Our Mission is actually a fund raising capital campaign that we are working on and it’s really broken out into two main categories. One is to support the continued work that we do around Cancer LifeNet and the Senator Bob Hooper House which is an inpatient hospice facility. And then the second is to reshape behavioral healthcare here in Hartford County. And I’m pleased to say that to date, we’ve raised over 12 million dollars from our team members, from our medical staff, from our board and from the community. So, very, very important community outreach again, that our community is rallying around.

Host: Twelve million dollars, that is great and one in five suffer from a behavioral health issue. I could see where the Hartford Crisis Center is really going to be a benefit to the community. Lyle, let’s move on to HERO. Can you tell us what does HERO mean?

Lyle: HERO is really a take off of a concept for those of us in healthcare in particular, about becoming a high reliability organization. And for those that are not familiar with high reliability; it’s our attempt to succeed in avoiding the catastrophes that may take place in a healthcare organization when you are dealing with a high level of risk and complexity. A couple of examples where this is very, very prevalent when you think about aviation industry or amusement parks or the nuclear industry services where any mishap could result in really catastrophic results. And today, that whole mindset is being transitioned to healthcare as well.

And it really is resulting in moving towards reducing harm to zero, driving excellence, workforce engagement and improving the overall experience of our patients. We took a little twist to this HERO concept and added the E. So H-E-R-O. And the E stands for engage. So, highly engaged reliable organization. And being proactive in what we are doing with that initiative here at Upper Chesapeake.

Our Vice President of Patient Experience Cassandra Crowe Jackson and our Vice President for Performance Improvement and Quality Management also will be speaking about this in another podcast. So, I would urge you to listen to that because it’s a very, very critical part of our journey towards excellence here at Upper Chesapeake Health.

Host: All right Lyle, let’s move on to the Epic portfolio. Let’s explore the organization’s transition to the Epic portfolio.

Lyle: To put this into context, all hospitals have an information technology platform and we currently are on the platform that’s offered by an organization called MEDITECH and as we have become part of the University of Maryland Medical System; it’s been our desire to have all of our hospitals, all of our physician practices on one robust electronic health record that we refer to in this particular case as Epic. An dour goal really is to drive excellent patient care as part of this HERO journey and being able to have all of our providers share their electronic health record between themselves and this allows for one chart to follow patients into various areas, departments and hospitals in which they receive care. We believe this will help with patient care, patient engagement, better quality outcomes and the efficiency of the workflow that we do here at Upper Chesapeake.

From a patient safety standpoint, a big benefit is that it provides timely and detailed information that can be easily shared among the Upper Chesapeake providers and it helps to develop standard workflows and best practices. From a quality standpoint, it manages population health so that we can study trends and patient outcomes and make improvements that result in better management of chronic disease. And then from an efficiency standpoint, it provides a common foundation for patients to access and engage with all clinical programs, providers and services within University of Maryland. But just as importantly, it allows those patients that want to, to be the keeper of his or her own health record from encounters at different entities within the medical system. So, for us, it truly is going to be transformational on what we are able to do here, and we truly believe that it will result in better patient and better quality outcomes as we become much more comfortable with this IT platform.

Host: So, what is the go-live date for Epic portfolio?

Lyle: Like many large transitions, and this is a large one for Upper Chesapeake Health; we’ve been working on this for the last four months and we anticipate that we will be going live in the first quarter, probably late February, March of 2020 and at that point, we will then have a long ramp up period of making sure that people are very, very comfortable with this. So, with the critical transition continuing through 2020. So, this is one of the reasons why we wanted to do this podcast and we will use this platform, the podcast platform to share further updates on where we are with Epic.

Host: It’s a very useful platform for that. So, tell me about the future of jobs at Upper Chesapeake?

Lyle: So, I’ll break this into two broad categories. And if you look across the country, I think you will find that the growth in healthcare employment continues to be one of those high growth areas and we feel certainly the same here in Hartford County. The University of Maryland Upper Chesapeake is the largest private employer here in Hartford county and we know that that will continue to be the case.

And as we look to the employment base, we really have two broad categories. I’ll speak about one is the transition to Hartford Memorial Hospital. And we will be job mapping the current 800 team members that are there to what could their job look like in the future. With the opening of the one campus and as we come towards the closure of Hartford Memorial Hospital and the expansion in Aberdeen; we want to make sure that that job mapping for our team members is very, very clear so that individuals have a sense of what job opportunities they will be eligible for, where they may be located, whether that’s in Aberdeen, in the emergency room, in the behavioral health pavilion, in our outpatient services, whether that may be over here on our campus in Bel Air. We think that that will take about 18 months to complete and what we are anticipating is actually starting that job mapping very, very proactively once we are about 18 months from transition.

And people may ask why such a long lead time and what we want to do is make sure that we have an understanding of who may be planning on retiring, who may be looking at further job training or education and we figure with a 18 months planning window; that will give us some lead time to properly assess what our team members want to be doing or what they will be doing 18 months into the future.

Another piece about this job mapping also revolves around shared services. And these are services that we are trying to centralize within the University of Maryland Medical System. Some of these services have already transitioned for example, compliance and risk management and marketing. Others are in the que to transition over the next 12 months and those might include human resources, or finance or medical records or information technology. And so as we are working through this Epic integration and shared services; part of that will also be job mapping for individuals in those particular locations.

And we continue to work on the timelines on when to do that in the most timely fashion. And as I have these open meeting over the next couple of weeks; we’ll be speaking about that as well.

Host: So, Lyle let me ask you this. Do you expect any workforce reductions with this transition?

Lyle: No, we do not. We anticipate that every nurse and patient care technician will transition either to the new Aberdeen campus or to positions at Upper Chesapeake Medical Center in Bel Air. Any remaining positions will shift to expanded employment openings in outpatient settings in Aberdeen where more healthcare services will be delivered when we open. And as we look at our planning; we recognize that some people will retire, some people will relocate and just within the normal turnover that we have in healthcare; we are not expecting and are not planning any workforce reductions.

What we do need our team to understand is that the opportunities will be there, but there may be a different application and hiring process based on the location or the type of setting. Outpatient service areas versus traditional inpatient service areas have different expectations. We ask that our Hartford team members in particular, be aware of those opportunities and the differences. Our human resources team will work with all of our Hartford leaders and their teams to understand their career goals, their preferences and do their best to match up those requests to available positions.

Opportunities include the new campus in Aberdeen, more openings for the expanded areas on the Bel Air campus, our physician offices around the community and other positions at affiliate locations. Change is never easy, but the opportunity for growth, advancement and training comes with it. And for an increasingly younger workforce, that’s pretty exciting. It’s fair to say that we are all impacted by these many changes that are coming our way, but I have huge faith in the dedication of our team. I know we work through these transitions just fine.

Host: So, Lyle as the President and CEO of UM Upper Chesapeake Health, tell me, what are you most looking forward to in the second half of 2019?

Lyle: What I’m looking forward to are the same things that I look forward to every day as I come to work and that’s the opportunity that I have to work with a dynamic group of team members, medical staff and volunteers to provide a patient experience that is exemplary and to continue to have our community have confidence in what we’re doing from a patient safety and patient quality standpoint. As I’ve shared with folks, my wife and I have lived here for 31 years here in the county and we have three adult children that live here in Hartford county and eight grandchildren. So, these hospitals, our physician practices are our providers as well. And I have the same interests to have our community have great confidence in the care that they know that they can receive here at University of Maryland Upper Chesapeake Health.

Host: Well Lyle, this has been great. Thank you for your time and thanks for informing us of everything coming up in 2019.

Lyle: Thank you. Enjoy your day.

Host: That’s Lyle Sheldon, the President and CEO of UM Upper Chesapeake Health. And this is the Hero Podcast from UMUCH, a podcast for internal communications. Check back for our next episode soon and thanks for listening.