Dear Colleague:
Good afternoon. I hope each of you enjoyed a blessed and peaceful Thanksgiving holiday. Personally, this is my favorite time of the year, when the best of humanity can be seen through generosity and love. I hope you experience both in the coming weeks.
I have a couple of really great things I want to share with you.
First, I’m pleased to announce that Lindy White, an accomplished healthcare leader with more than 20 years of experience in healthcare leadership in Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia, is being named today as the president of the Ballad Health’s Kingsport operations. In this role, she will serve as chief executive officer of Holston Valley Medical Center and Indian Path Community Hospital, and all outpatient services.
Lindy grew up in our region, having been born in Marion, Virginia. She maintains farms in both Smyth County and Gate City, and absolutely loves this region. She is coming to Kingsport from Columbia, South Carolina, where she has served as CEO of Providence Northeast Hospital, which is part of Lifepoint Health.
Monty McLaurin, who many of you know as a dedicated part of the Kingsport community for two decades, will step down from his role as Interim CEO of Holston Valley Medical Center and Indian Path Community Hospital, but will continue as President of our Northwestern Operating Division. Lindy will be reporting to Monty. Whether it was serving as Chair of FunFest, or the Chamber of Commerce, no one has been more of an advocate for Kingsport and the medical community in the areas served by Kingsport, and we are grateful to him for his service.
Monty and Eric Deaton, our Senior VP for Market Operations, conducted the search, and their key priorities in the search were that they wanted someone who would engage in the community, focus on the patient experience, collaborate with doctors in a meaningful way, and provide good operational expertise in the ongoing management of the hospitals and outpatient services. In the process, Lindy stood out as an exceptional choice.
We are grateful to the physician leaders at both Holston Valley and Indian Path for their participation in the process, as well as the Community Board members, who also participated. Lindy will hit the ground running with the support of the leadership, which will really help advance the goals of Holston Valley and Indian Path.
Specifically, I want to thank Dr. Marta Wayt, the chief of the Holston Valley Medical Staff, and Dr. Cheryl Stanski, who has the same elected role at Indian Path. Both have commented about the inclusiveness of the process as well as their belief that Lindy will be an inspiring leader.
Second, I want to congratulate our incredible colleagues at Holston Valley Medical Center, which IBM/Watson has named as among the top 50 hospitals in the nation for cardiology. This is a fantastic statement about the terrific program there.
It validates and reinforces our belief that investing in the strengths of our hospitals will make our entire system stronger for the patients we serve. There have been many accolades for all three of our tertiary hospitals, Johnson City Medical Center, Bristol Regional Medical Center and Holston Valley Medical Center, as well as many of our other hospitals. I can’t get into them all here, but suffice it to say, our trophy case is pretty full. This ranking is the latest in an ongoing story about the commitment to high quality for our hospitals. I’m not big on rankings, typically, because each of them are different, use different data and there is often variation with them. But I also believe we should celebrate what we know – and that is that we have great hospitals.
Those hospitals are merely bricks and mortar without the people inside them, and so each of you, whether you are a physician, a nurse, or any of a number of support and ancillary folks (like me), we each contribute to these great outcomes. So, I hope you will join me in just taking a moment to pause and reflect on the great things we are doing.
And after you pause and reflect, remember this…. the rankings are outside validations of the good things we do. But the MOST IMPORTANT thing we do is take care of people, one at a time. Let’s just focus on giving each of them, and their families, our best. Put ourselves in their shoes, identify what they need, and generously provide it from each of our talents.
Lastly, I do want to comment a bit on the public controversy around the recent announcements we made. Our board unanimously voted, based on the unanimous recommendations of a committee of the board, which was composed of physicians and leaders from throughout the region, to make some changes that will result in an improved likelihood of positive outcomes for our patients. There are certainly some who don’t agree with this decision, and I respect that. What is unfortunate is that some have chosen to attack our board, members of our management team and even make assertions about the motives of our board and management team.
Let me assure you of something that I can represent to you in no uncertain terms. Your management team and Board of Directors are focused on what the evidence shows would provide our patients with the best chance at good outcomes. Why wouldn’t we? Our kids and grandkids live here, too. Our conscience and moral responsibility is to constantly determine what would improve the overall health of our region. This is something we are accountable for.
Many of the folks who are choosing to make ad hominem comments about these decisions have no accountability for the health of our community, these critical hospital assets, the well-being of our team members, or navigating a very difficult environment for hospitals which has seen nearly 100 rural and non-urban hospitals close in the last few years. Just recently, Mission Health – a local not-for-profit system based in Asheville – was sold to a for-profit company, whose strategy is determined based on their stock price, not the health of the community. A large hospital in Knoxville (formerly known as St. Mary’s, a Catholic hospital) just announced it is closing.
While those things are happening all around us, at the same time, we just opened America’s newest rural hospital. We are investing in technology and improvements at our major hospitals, for instance a brainlab technology for neurosurgery at Holston Valley, a new da Vinci robot at Bristol, new MRI and other diagnostics at Johnson City Medical Center. We just recruited a full-time cardiologist to Norton, and to Wytheville. And now, we are planning on bringing a host of pediatric specialists here to advance pediatric trauma and other programs. And I cannot leave out the amazing 40-percent reduction in C-Diff that we’ve experienced since February, thanks to the partnership with our doctors and team members who have focused on this.
And our approach to systemness is working. As we promised when we started down this path, we are now directing patients, appropriately, to the closest hospital to them, as opposed to directing them based on who owns which hospital – which quite honestly used to happen all the time.
By way of example, since we merged, Bristol Regional Medical Center has seen an increase in volumes of 3.84 percent over the prior year, while Holston Valley Medical Center has seen an increase of 1.4 percent. The volumes at JCMC are down 3.5 percent. Why is this happening? Because now, rather than Indian Path referring patients to Johnson City, Indian Path is collaborating more on transfers where appropriate. The patients from Kingsport are not being referred to Johnson City as much as they were before. The same thing is occurring in the northeast market, where the hospitals in Russell, Smyth and Washington counties are now referring more to Bristol Regional Medical Center than to Johnson City.
So, I think our approach is working. And the evidence shows that if we approach healthcare more regionally, investing in the highest acuity services where the evidence supports the potential for a better outcome, this is what we are going to do.
I know there has been a lot of discussion about NICU. (See three letters here which were provided to the state of Tennessee this week from independent experts and Child Advocates, endorsing our decision.) Our decision related to NICU is evidence-driven. We stand by the decision, as we believe it is best for the babies and the moms. I realize there are disagreements, perhaps even among our own team members, but thus far, I have not been presented any evidence which would contradict the findings of 30 years of research. Our decisions MUST be research-based, and supported by evidence. When we depart from this practice, the ultimate results could be something less than what we would all want for our neighbors and families.
Are we perfect? No way. We are humans trying to shoulder the responsibility of making important decisions. Are we always right? Of course not. But we don’t gamble when we make these decisions. We follow the evidence.
I want to thank each of you who have sent me emails and messages with prayer and support. As a person, I do worry about you, our system and the decisions we make, because we want them to be right. So, every now and then, it is really nice to have folks whom I’ve never met let us know that you are lifting us up as well. You really are special and I can’t thank you enough.
Onward! Let’s make Ballad Health known among the healthcare leaders like Cleveland Clinic and others as a top-decile performing system in everything we do!
Alan
Alan Levine
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Ballad Health
