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Michael Carrese: You're listening to Inspiring Health with Dr. Roxanna Gapstur, President and CEO of WellSpan Health as she hosts candid conversations about organizational culture, value and other pressing issues we face in healthcare and business today.   

Roxanna: On this episode of Inspiring Health, we're bringing to you the highlights of Spring 2021 Team Chats. As you know, we hold Team Chats twice a year to explore the connections every WellSpan team member has to our five-year strategy and vision. Well, we invite you to take part in a full Team Chat session for dialogue and discussion. This episode will provide you with the key takeaways that all WellSpan team members should know. So today, we'll highlight the very best of our 2025 plan in motion. We'll talk about exceptional human experiences, and finally, we'll take a moment for gratitude and wellbeing. Joining me today is Mario Ellis. Mario is our Vice President of Total Rewards. Welcome, Mario. Thanks for being here.

Mario Ellis: Thank you, Roxanna. I'm glad to be here.

Roxanna: So we've been through a lot since our last round of Team Chats. Haven't we, Mario?

Mario Ellis: Yes, we have. We've been through a lot since the fall and we've learned a lot leading up to the second surge. We've done a great job listening to our team members so we can offer them the support they needed such as providing the Working as One Reward and enhancing our family assistance funds for our team members, and setting up points of distribution for vaccinations even for our community. And we realized the importance of mental health support and wellbeing for both our team members and our community. And we continue to provide these resources. I think we have been a trusted partner for our team members in our community.

Roxanna: Yeah, it's truly been an unprecedented call to service. Every team member has played a role in ensuring that we live our vision and remain a trusted partner to our friends and neighbors. As we look forward to a healthier future, we've accelerated many aspects of our 2025 plan despite our attention on caring for COVID-19 patients.

Remember we're driven by four strategic priorities in our plan: engage, innovate, deliver, and thrive. Let's start with engage. And Mario, as part of our commitment to engage teams, you know diversity and inclusion continues to be an important area of our culture.

Mario Ellis: Yes, it is. And we continue to advance the conversation about what it means to be inclusive and to belong. But creating a culture where every member of our team feels welcomed, respected, and valued, this doesn't just happen magically. It takes purposeful work and skill. And the truth is, to attract and retain an increasingly diverse workforce and engage diverse communities and consumers in our marketplace, we must be recognized as a health system that values diversity and uniqueness.

The Diversity and Inclusion Steering Committee has really done a terrific job in generating awareness about cultural identities and unconscious bias. And now, I think we need to start to tackle the big stuff like microaggressions. Did you know that 26% of Americans have experienced workplace microaggression and 36% have witnessed microaggressions in the workplace? Microaggressions destroy safe places and prevent our employees from bringing their whole selves and best selves to work every day.

Roxanna: You've hit on a really important topic, Mario. And we're going to make microaggression, a key topic of our Team Chats program. The Team Chat's content and the New Diversity and Inclusion Annual LMS Education module that we launched for all team members in 2021 are just a few examples of the purposeful steps that we're taking to advance our culture of inclusion. Conversation and curiosity are shaping our understanding of lived experiences that are different from our own. And it's in these moments when we learn and grow together.

Moving to our priority of innovate, we saw a great energy here as a result of COVID-19. Only a few days after the start of the pandemic, WellSpan develop the MacGyver team named after the popular '80s TV show. Our team sprang into action with the goal of re-imagining personal protective equipment to alleviate shortages. The MacGyver team leveraged their engineering design expertise to create a new N95 mask. And then they've partnered with W. L. Gore & Associates, famous for their Gore-Tex products and fabric and materials.

Mario Ellis: This is a great example of asking what if to solve problems. Today, we're manufacturing and distributing the WellSpan N95 masks through our newly created joint venture called EXO. Currently in phase one, anyone can purchase a consumer-grade mask that's designed, sourced and manufactured in the United States.

Roxanna: Yes. And in fact, it's packaged right here in York, Pennsylvania.

Mario Ellis: Yes, it is. And in phase two, we'll be producing healthcare-grade masks in the rate of 10 million per month for use by everyone listening and available to other healthcare organizations to purchase. It's a great example of innovation in action.

Roxanna: Our final priorities, to deliver and thrive, are some of the most exciting for our teams this year. I'm so proud of the work being done in health equity, around vaccine distribution, along with big accomplishments in quality and safety. You can hear the highlights in two new episodes of Inspiring Health. The first is Ann Kunkel and I recently talked about health equity and the second is take a listen to a conversation with Eugenia Powell on our latest progress on delivering safe high quality care.

Mario Ellis: This really shows that the WellSpan team has been forging ahead during some challenging moments. But today, we're stronger and even farther on our journey of providing exceptional care. Roxanna, one area I'm excited about is our focus this coming year on creating exceptional human experiences, because that extends from our clinical team into every function of our healthcare system including human resources. Could you share a bit about where are we going with this?

Roxanna: Sure, Mario. When we think about human experience, it's all encompassing. Not only is the experience of our patient's important, but we're focused on every person involved in care. And that means our team members. We're talking about all humans in healthcare, patients, caregivers, and team members alike. Experience is foundational to building unbreakable relationships that patients will choose time and time again. That's our goal.

Mario Ellis: Often we think about experiences as one piece of the patient journey. But our patients experienced many touch points along their journey. Just one positive or negative interaction can change a person's perception of the care we give at WellSpan.

Roxanna: Yeah, it sure can, Mario. The WellSpan experience doesn't reside in one place in our organization. Together, we're embarking on a number of ways to restore human connection. And one of them is through an innovation that's being used for voice recognition in the exam room. A solution called Dragon Ambient Experience or DAX listens to the visit between the patient and physician or APP and takes notes so that they can focus on the human connection with patients.

We have 50 providers participating in the pilot and they're telling us it is truly life-changing. It allows them to practice medicine as it should be. It's a great example of how innovation is being used to reduce friction and contribute to exceptional experiences.

Mario Ellis: That sounds really useful for our physicians, Roxanna. However, something that is useful for our patients is the simplified journey from beginning to end. Using tools like our price estimator and visit pay to make it easier to understand costs before receiving care, then an easy to understand bill aftercare is provided. I know this is also important for our team members who are also patients of our healthcare system. These are just two examples of continuously identifying friction points, so we can give more attention to the things that matter most.

I'm eager for our team members to see the patient experience video that our leaders previewed at the April leadership forum. For our listeners, if you haven't attended a Team Chat yet, I'd encourage everyone to just go out and see the video and have discussion around human experience. The video shows how the patient's own backgrounds, perspectives, and understanding, play a part in how care is perceived. We all have the ability to make or break someone's loyalty to WellSpan based on how well and how thoughtfully we manage every moment we interact with them.

Roxanna: That's a great point, Mario. Later this year, there'll be consistent tools for all of us to uniformly approach improvement and experience. But today, there are simple things that all of us can do to create exceptional experiences.

First, we can all consider the words we choose when talking with team members and patients. Are you clearly communicating? Are you demonstrating compassion and empathy? This alone can turn a potentially negative interaction into a positive one.

Second, try to imagine yourself in the patient's shoes. How would you want to be treated? You'd want to feel safe, informed, and confident that your needs are being taken care of. Every moment is an opportunity to change the experience. And finally, seek out areas of friction. If there's something that could be changed for a better experience for you, your team members or our patients, speak up. Share these ideas with your leader. We continuously improve by solving problems raised by those who best know the work.

Mario, we've covered many highlights from Team Chats today, and I'd like our listeners to know we'll be launching an episode soon related to continuous improvement. Look for this conversation between me and Sherri Stahl in a few weeks where we'll be sharing how you can take an active role in real-time problem solving to reach our goals.

Mario Ellis: That's great, Roxanna. All of these ties together to support our goals of providing the highest quality and exceptional experiences at an affordable price.

To end our session today, we'll close with a simple act that moves us in the right direction. In our Team Chats, some sessions and with meditation or stretching. Roxanna, I'll invite you and our listeners to join me for a mindful moment.

Write down three things you're grateful for today. It might be a colleague who helped you. Maybe you're glad a patient's care is progressing well. Write down those three things, then choose one of them. Make a point to tell that person, either your coworker or the patient, how you feel. Let them know you're thinking about them. This is a great reminder to support the culture of recognition we're really striving to create at WellSpan. In the past year, we all have relied on small moments of joy and connection, and we each have the power to create a moment that can change someone's day.

Roxanna: Mario, that's a great exercise. A little gratitude goes a long way and something we can all do right in the moment. I'm grateful to have you with me today to give our teams a taste of Team Chats.

Mario Ellis: And I'm grateful to be here with you, Roxanna, and I thank you for having me.

Roxanna: That's all the time we have for today. We hope you'll join us for the next episode of Inspiring Health.