Interview: Dr. Bill Fulkerson

Incredible year

‘Extraordinary’ perseverance in a year marked by unparalleled challenges

Dr. Bill Fulkerson

Executive Vice President – Duke University Health System

As a leader in the health industry, what are your impressions from the last year? It has been an incredible year. The one thing that has been so impressed on all of us was the enormous effort and commitment that I saw in taking care of patients with COVID and other patients. We started seeing patients in the late winter here. We cut back on our routine care considerably. We fought the battles that all healthcare systems did around supply chain, making sure to get the proper equipment for our teams. The perseverance of our teams and our staff was just extraordinary. We were well prepared in terms of emergency systems we practiced but, even with that, the performance and resilience of our team was truly heartening.

What are your impressions about the expansion of telehealth during this time? Even before COVID hit, we were dipping into telehealth. For instance, we have our Tele-stroke Network. We would do consultations, too, over the telephone or by video. But when we needed to cut back on our in-person visits, telehealth just exploded. We put the infrastructure in place very quickly to scale that up and expand it. We made 10 years of progress in just a few months.

What are you doing to ensure that access to health is commensurate with the growing population? It starts with our provider physicians, advanced practice providers and nursing workforce. We have a large physician workforce in the Triangle area of well over 2,000, as well as about 350 primary care providers, which is the largest in this area. So, it starts with them and their buy-in to the idea that we must have the best quality and that we also have to deliver care at a competitive cost. We examine our practices all the time, looking for opportunities to enhance quality even more while being as efficient and productive as we can, so that everyone can get the care they need. One of the great things about Raleigh-Durham is that it’s growing, people are moving here. One of the biggest challenges we have is trying to stay ahead of that curve and create access to care.

What are Duke Health’s near-term goals? Quality is always job one, so we will continue to stress quality and doing even more than we’re doing today. Growth is the other priority. Again, because of the region’s explosive population growth, we have to work very hard to stay ahead of the game. Growth also means more jobs. Today, the health system employs about 23,000 people. If you take the School of Medicine and the university and add all of us together, we are the second-largest private employer in North Carolina.