The big thing is personally unique, but I think of my childhood career aspirations. I wanted to be a pilot; my first career was aviation, and my bachelor’s degree is in Aeronautical Science, which is completely unrelated to healthcare.

I entered the industry at the time of 9/11, when the market in aviation collapsed and changed. The advice I could have given myself was to not be so tough on myself. I would say: “What you pursued for 15 years isn’t really bursting the dream bubble.” It took a couple of years of searching and trying to figure out where I would go.

So I would say, “Look at it as round two and don’t focus on the one thing your heart desired because, in the end, external forces said not to isolate on the one thing and think about other opportunities out there.” That learning helped me get where I am today because I came into the healthcare space with a clear path that I wanted to be CFO, which is not what I’ve pursued from day one. And I had some pretty good mentors and advocates around me who pointed me to a different path.

That’s an important lesson to anyone at any stage in life. It’s best not to isolate and singularly focus on one thing because it can set you up for disappointment if it doesn’t work out, and you might miss other opportunities. You won’t know what’s out there if you aren’t willing to experience it.

When I became vice president at a community hospital in Pittsburgh, my service line was with trauma and burn units. I then had an opportunity to expand that into the OR.

I started at an institute workshop for healthcare improvement that reviewed perioperative flow with the chief of surgery and the OR director. We then went to Boston to go through the Institute for Healthcare Improvement boot camp, and all the work they did with perioperative flow largely involved block time optimization and scheduling.

That was my first experience working with OR leadership. I remember talking with Skip (Harry) Sell, Jr, MD, the chief of surgery at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Mercy. I was tiptoeing around starting in the emergency department. I didn’t want to insult him by comparing an emergency room to an OR at a young point in my career, but we had a great dinner and conversation.

He helped me realize from a service line leadership perspective that operations are operations. So, when you can figure out the basics of optimizing systems, matching demand and capacity, making sure you have a solid culture to embrace and adapt, and that you have a patient-centered focus, you can figure out any service. The exposure to that language, technical structure, equipment, devices, and a different set of sub-specialists gave me the confidence to go into the OR setting.

But other people I’ve worked with, mentored, and coached find it intimidating because there is a lot behind that red line that people don’t understand. So, until you get back there and really start digging into how it impacts the patient, it remains a mystery. My approach was to dive in, throw some scrubs on, get behind the red line, start to figure this operation out, and then figure out how I could ensure that people are successful from a leadership perspective.

Leaders going into the OR space for the first time tend to focus on learning about what is different in this new situation, not immediately how it impacts the patient. I’d recommend prioritizing the patient experience because it makes the transition much easier. Yes, the OR is a different set of people and training, but, ultimately, we’re still focused on caring for the patient.

It was relatively seamless since I was internal to UCHealth. In my previous COO role, I took on a lot of the day-to-day leadership for this campus and was key to relationships with our various departments at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

The biggest difference is leading a new COO and executive team in new ways since my previous relationships were more peer-to-peer. As I tell all leaders, the greatest challenge in advancing is elevating your approach and style to empower others and not migrate back to the tendency to perform in your former role, particularly if you are now leading a different individual in that role.

Since becoming CEO last August, we have been in a growth phase and will open a new tower with additional ORs next year. While we are constrained by space, now is the time to really dive into process and structure to ensure we are ready for the next phase. We are taking on a comprehensive value-stream mapping of our perioperative services to identify areas for rapid improvement events to improve the experience for our patients, surgeons, and care teams.

The most challenging part has been the continued acceleration of change and competition in healthcare. This is why good leadership is important to emerge the best ideas and drive the departments towards excellence while remaining competitive externally.

We have been through so much in the past 2 years, and our healthcare system has been tested. We will continue to face these challenges, but with the right leaders, vision, and dedicated team of caring individuals, we can face anything that comes our way.

I started as an administrative fellow in my healthcare career. As such, I am a lifelong learner, and I never presume I have the right or best answer. Throughout my leadership journey, I learned that the most important behavior a leader can exhibit is active listening.

As a student of leadership, I decided to pursue doctoral work in human and organizational learning. Social psychology is important to understand as a leader and helps you perform better for your teams. I subscribe to a leadership approach that focuses on every individual as a leader. Leadership is a social influence process. What I mean by that is that the act of leadership can occur at any level in the organization, irrespective of title or position.

What is important is setting some key objectives for yourself and the team and then creating the structures to help emerge ideas from those closest to the patient. This is where transformative change takes place. The less you promote emergence, the more you promote a hierarchical approach where change stalls and psychological safety is diminished.

The biggest initiative we worked on—and continue to work on—is culture. We believe that a culture rooted in putting patients first helps uncover our core opportunities to drive improvement. We are on the journey to a high-reliability organization.

We have a longstanding relationship with National Jewish Health. Over many decades, UCH and National Jewish have been viewed as resources for pulmonary and lung disease. We have an outstanding fellowship program in pulmonary, and it has continued to solidify our reputation and rank as the number 1 hospital in Colorado by US News & World Report. Most importantly, we believe that a focus on reducing morbidity and mortality is the key to sustaining this reputation. We also rank in other specialties, but this has been a crown jewel for us as an organization.

Our vision at UCHealth is simple––from healthcare to health. We want to change the face of healthcare and migrate towards proactive and preventive health. Our external brand promise is to help our patients “live extraordinary.”

We do not want to be viewed only as a place where acute care is provided. We want to be there for the full continuum. Our mission is to improve lives, and that resonates with me deeply.

Motivation comes from a few places. It’s not difficult to find a motivating factor for why we do what we do. We’ve been challenged with this COVID-19 environment, and that demoralized our staff. We redeployed both OR and postanesthesia care unit nurses to the COVID-19 shared space because we had to close our ORs, and the surgeons had to help care for COVID-19 patients, particularly early on.

The motivation has since been to find a new normal and realign and reinvigorate people about why we’re here—our patients. We have to step up for the patients who’ve had to defer care for 2 years because we shut down so many ORs and procedural spaces nationally.

It’s nice to come back to that mission, which, to me, is the factor that keeps us people-centered and motivated. In academic health centers specifically, it’s about the services—a procedure or speciality only we can offer in the region. That gets people excited about why they went into the OR, why they love what they are doing, and why they love the surgeons and the teams they work with.

A big part of my role has been acknowledging what people have been through from a moral injury perspective, but then getting them realigned and reinvigorated to why they originally came into this line of work, and to recognize we do special things here for our patients. That has brought us back in the game and out of the funk we’ve been in.

My proudest moment at UCHealth is specifically being at an organization that is growing and continues to open new locations and expand its footprint. With the new tower we’re opening next year, we will continue to have more patients benefiting from our services.

There are many facility options available in the Denver metro area, and Colorado has four really strong major health systems. It’s a competitive market, so we have to be at the top of our game, be sure we’re listening to our patients, and that we’re putting their needs first. The outcome of that is they continue to choose us for their health needs.

At the price point, we’re in a position where we have so much demand for services that, unfortunately, there are some capacity restraints. Still, we have relief in sight with the new tower, and we will continue expanding across the region and state.

When I reflect on what has gone well over the past 8 years since I’ve been at UCHealth, I remember we started as a large market without enough capacity. Our main academic center was the only site and location for services in metro Denver in 2014. We now have four hospitals in Denver, including UCH.

We’ve had significant and unprecedented growth—not just what Colorado has experienced, but with the fact that patients from all over are choosing us for their healthcare. I’m proud to say we’re delivering care and services that continue to attract patients who want to receive care from us.

Reference

Best hospitals in Colorado. (2022).