Catholic Health World - July 1, 2021

CHA 2021 VIRTUAL ASSEMBLY COVERAGE PERIODICAL RATE PUBLICATION

JULY 1, 2021 VOLUME 37, NUMBER 11

Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

CHA leaders praise providers’ service and anticipate work ahead on social justice

By JULIE MINDA

During the 2021 virtual Catholic Health Assembly June 14 and 15, three of CHA’s top leaders heralded the work of ministry providers during the pandemic, set out a vision for the association’s work and provided encouragement for that work, including ongoing efforts to address inequity.

CHA President and Chief Executive Officer Sr. Mary Haddad, RSM, focused on the need for community-level collaboration and a global mindset to confront challenges Sr. Mary ahead; outgoing CHA Board Chair Julie Manas keyed in the importance of the ministry’s work to address racial injustice; and incoming CHA Board Chair Dr. Rhonda Medows spoke of how and Continued on 11

Leader in White House’s pandemic response says Catholic ministry is in vaccine vanguard

Romelia Navarro, 64, weeps while hugging her husband, Antonio, in his final moments in a COVID-19 unit at Providence St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, California, on July 31, 2020. The hospital is part of Providence St. Joseph Health. The pandemic has taken an outsized toll on communities of color, a tragic inequity many members of CHA have pledged to address.

Call to action: Assembly speakers urge ministry to champion justice

By LISA EISENHAUER

One of the keys to showing mercy to the nation’s most vulnerable and helping them improve their lives is for health care providers to engage deeply with the communities where the vulnerable live, keynote speaker Bryan Stevenson said during a session of the Catholic Health Assembly.

“We cannot advance justice if we isolate ourselves in spaces where we are shielded from the problems of the poor and the most vulnerable,” said Stevenson. “Justice only comes when we actually situate ourselves in spaces where there’s often injustice.”

Stevenson was one of several health equity or human rights activists to speak at

Experts on the tangled issues that force Central Americans to flee their homes and seek sanctuary in the United States acknowledge Catholic health care as a powerful ally in offering direct aid and advocating for change. Speakers at the Catholic Health Assembly asked the ministry to amplify its advocacy on behalf of refugees and immigrants.

“We need your voice to be louder to bring compassion more into the public discourse as well as policymaking,” said Yolanda González Cerdeira. “I think it’s urgent to change the anti-immigrant narrative and help people understand the root causes” and desperation of people who make the treacherous journey from Central America to attempt to enter the U.S. Continued on 11

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By KATHLEEN NELSON

John Lamparski/Associated Press

By LISA EISENHAUER

When it comes to developing best practices for ensuring equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, the Catholic health ministry is at the forefront, said Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, the chair of the nation’s COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force and senior adviser to the White House COVID19 Response Team.

In a keynote session June 14 at the 2021 virtual Catholic Health Assembly, NunezSmith applauded outreach efforts including pop-up vaccine clinics set up by Catholic health care providers in medically underserved neighborhoods and partnerships with community groups to reach those without easy access to inoculations.

“You’re experts already and I’m grateful for that, but continue to share what’s working across all of your networks,” she urged during a question-and-answer session with Sr. Mary Haddad, RSM, CHA’s president and chief executive officer.

Nunez-Smith, who is also associate dean and director at Yale School of Medicine, said meeting President Joe Biden’s pledge to get at least the first round of vaccinations to 70% of Americans 18 and older by the Fourth of July is no simple feat.

The administration has had to con-

Catholic health care aids and advocates for migrants, refugees

Migrants with children cross the Rio Grande to reach the United States from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on May 21. During the Catholic Health Assembly, two experts on refugee issues urged the ministry to expand its advocacy on behalf of those fleeing Central America in search of safety and opportunities.

Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith

Environmental champion Mary Robinson promotes climate justice Stateswoman and environmental justice advocate Mary Robinson said during her June 14 Catholic Health Assembly talk that the pandemic has shone a bright light on the inequalities pervasive around the world — between the strong and the vulnerable and the rich and the poor — and Robinson in many ways exacerbated those inequalities. But learnings from the pandemic, she said, can be extrapolated to advance climate justice.

Robinson, the president of Ireland

Elias Meseret/Associated Press

By JULIE MINDA

Ethiopian women wait in line to receive food aid due to drought conditions in the Danan district of the Somali region of Ethiopia in September 2017. That region hadn’t seen significant amounts of rain in three years at that time. Environmental justice advocate Mary Robinson said droughts like the ones that strike African nations have a disproportionate impact on women.

from December 1990 to September 1997, founded and heads the Mary Robinson Foundation — Climate Justice. That organization advocates for the rights of the disempowered and marginalized in the international politics around the effort to contain global warming. A former United Nations high commissioner for human rights, she also served as the U.N. secretary general’s special envoy on climate change. Robinson is a founding member and current chair of The Elders, a group of global leaders Nelson Mandela assembled to tackle pressing global problems.

She said climate change is impacting much earlier and much more severely the poorest communities, the small island Continued on 10

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CATHOLIC HEALTH WORLD July 1, 2021

ASSEMBLY 2021

Words aren’t enough: The health care ministry must ensure no one gets left behind Dr. Rhonda Medows 2021-2022 Chairperson CHA Board of Trustees President of population health management Providence St. Joseph Health, Renton, Washington

As we turn the corner on COVID-19, let’s pause and take stock of the journey we’ve been on for the last 16 months.

It has been a long hard road, and caregivers across the ministry have been at the center of Medows it all.

Throughout the pandemic, we’ve witnessed selfless acts of courage, love and compassion from caregivers on the front lines. We’ve seen incredible breakthroughs in science and medicine, with the rapid development of vaccines and lifesaving drug therapies. And we’ve ushered in widespread adoption of innovation and technology, such as telehealth, which is helping to increase access to care while making it more affordable and convenient for patients.

In more ways than one, the crisis has brought out the best in humanity. But it has also magnified some of our most serious

shortcomings to the point where we can no longer look away.

With people of color dying from COVID19 at disproportionately higher rates, the racial disparities that persist in society have been amplified to a level that we can’t continue to ignore. Meanwhile, suicide and fatal drug overdoses — which were at epidemic proportions before the pandemic — have soared to new highs due to the intense stress and loneliness of the times.

The mental health and well-being of our children have been another major concern given that many were out of the classroom for more than a year and still others have been affected by hunger, homelessness and poverty, all results of a strained economy.

Caregiver burnout has reached new levels as well, with health care professionals struggling to cope with the massive loss of life due to COVID-19. And if that weren’t enough, we also saw the inextricable link between health and climate change, with lives devastated this past year by some of the worst wildfire and hurricane seasons on record.

We’ve spent decades talking about all of these issues, but if the signs of the times are trying to tell us anything, it’s that words are no longer enough. As a healing ministry, we are called, as the Scripture reminds us, to “love not merely with words or speech but with actions in truth” (1 John 3:18). We are

called to be a social force for good.

As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.” That’s why the Catholic Health Association’s commitment to confronting racism by achieving health equity is the kind of “good trouble” we need in the world right now. Forging innovative partnerships to address mental health and wellness is another key step toward healing our communities, as well as our caregivers.

We must also be a voice for the most vulnerable members of our society, including our children and our seniors. In the words of Pope Francis, “A population that does not take care of the elderly and of children and the young has no future because it abuses both its memory and its promise.” And with health systems accounting for 10% of the world’s greenhouse gases, taking steps to reverse our impact on the environment is a responsibility that we must take seriously to heal the planet.

After everything we’ve been through, there’s a natural tendency to want to return to “normal.” But going back to the way things used to be is not an option because that would essentially take us backwards.

It’s time to put complacency in the rearview mirror. It’s up to our ministry to lead by example and create forward momentum so that we can get to a place of hope, whole-

ness and healing for everyone.

As challenging as the past year has been, it has transformed us indelibly. We have seen what we’re capable of achieving, and most importantly, it has reminded us that we are all interdependent on one another, that we are, indeed, one human family.

In a papal address last spring, Pope Francis said: “The risk is that we may then be struck by an even worse virus, that of selfish indifference. A virus spread by the thought that life is better if it is better for me, and that everything will be fine if it is fine for me. It begins there and ends up selecting one person over another, discarding the poor, and sacrificing those left behind on the altar of progress.

“The present pandemic, however, reminds us that there are no differences or borders between those who suffer. We are all frail, all equal, all precious. May we be profoundly shaken by what is happening all around us: the time has come to eliminate inequalities, to heal the injustice that is undermining the health of the entire human family.”

Let’s allow the words of Pope Francis to sink in as we lead our communities forward, remembering we are all equal in the eyes of God. On the journey to a post-COVID world, it’s our responsibility to ensure no one gets left behind.

CHA and its members became nimbler and worked doubly hard during pandemic Julie Manas 2020-2021 Chairperson CHA Board of Trustees President, North Region Ascension St. Vincent, Indianapolis, Indiana

When I began my service on the CHA board seven years ago, I was honored and humbled to be given such a sacred responsibility, but I certainly never would have imagined the depth and breadth of those Manas blessings, nor pictured the experience of serving as board chair during a pandemic. As with the rest of the health care industry, CHA members persevered, became creative and nimble to respond to the challenges, and worked doubly hard to accomplish our goals. CHA’s work continued as well.

Below is a summary, not meant to be allinclusive, of CHA’s efforts this past year. The association: Developed, signed, then rolled out nationally the Catholic health ministry’s Confronting Racism by Achieving Health Equity pledge, and launched WeAreCalled. org to highlight our commitment, and share resources and stories of our members’ work on diversity, equity and inclusion.

Finalized the 2021-2023 CHA Strategic Plan, with four main focus points: access to care, enhancing the health and well-being of our communities, bolstering members’ ability to thrive, and strengthening the Catholic identity of our health ministries.

Integrated Catholic CEO Healthcare Connection, CCHC, into CHA, transitioning to CHA’s CEO System Affinity Group.

Transitioned the Supportive Care Coalition to CHA operations, and began significant work developing a strategic plan to enhance palliative care services to CHA members.

Commissioned a dues task force charged with fully discerning our current dues structure and the ways we can continue bringing tangible value to our members.

Held a two-day virtual retreat with a special deep dive on Catholic social teaching as the foundation of equitable health care policy, financing and delivery, facilitated by Michael Naughton, a professor who directs the Center for Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas, as well as Carrie Meyer McGrath, CHA’s director of mission services, and Diarmuid Rooney, CHA’s senior director of ministry formation.

Convened a Well-Being Task Force, composed of clinicians, human resources/ learning and development, mission and spiritual care leaders to cascade learnings to the wider ministry in support of associate well-being and resiliency.

Launched the “Love Thy Neighbor” campaign, first to help promote maskwearing and physical distancing, and later to promote COVID-19 vaccine acceptance.

Issued a request for proposals to conduct a data-driven analysis of Catholic health care’s impact on the communities it serves. Over the coming months, the chosen consultants will focus on four key areas: access and services, patient complexity, community impact, and organizational efficiency.

As my term winds down, I would be remiss not to mention the enormous, talented team putting in the necessary hours on behalf of our ministry. Sr. Mary Haddad, RSM, although in only her second year as CHA president and chief executive officer, has performed admirably in all aspects of her role as a true advocate for health care access, a passionate voice for the poor and vulnerable, and a seasoned convener on many important issues. Of particular note, Sr. Mary was recently named by Pope Francis as a member of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, a testament to her talents and abilities.

The CHA staff has also been incredible, quickly pivoting to a virtual workplace without missing a beat. Finally, a board is only as strong as its members, and CHA has been blessed with an extraordinary board: Cynthia Bentzen-Mercer; Damond Boatwright; John Capasso; Fr. Joseph P. Cardone; Elizabeth Dunne; Jane Durney Crowley; Cathleen Eldridge; Sr. Sharon Euart, RSM; Dougal Hewitt; Orest Holubec; Joseph Impicciche; Lydia Jumonville; Laura S. Kaiser; Dr. Rhonda Medows;

Dr. Stephanie Mills; Dr. Carolina Reyes; Darryl Robinson; Gabriela Saenz; Lawrence Schumacher; Kevin Sexton; Bob Sutton; Bishop George Leo Thomas; Episcopal Liaison Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski; and participating observers M. Richard Coll; Sr. Donna Markham, OP; John Ruetz; and Sr. Carol Zinn, SSJ. It is nothing short of awe inspiring to reflect upon the challenges that our industry has faced this past year and how clinicians, support staff, leaders and communities have worked together to meet these challenges. No matter the circumstances — countless hours, long days, difficult situations — the strength of character and resilience of our health care heroes continues to shine through. We are truly blessed to be witnesses to something so special.

I look forward to the bright and dynamic road ahead with confidence that we will continue the work to reduce health disparities and bring forward new ways to improve access for those who are marginalized and disadvantaged, giving voice to the voiceless. COVID-19 has shed light on this longstanding issue, and I know that we can, we must, and we will do better.

As I pass the torch to Dr. Rhonda

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Medows, incoming board chair, I know I’m leaving the chair responsibilities in more than capable hands. I wish her, and all in Catholic health care, much success.

In closing, I offer a reading from Jeremiah, the same passage Sr. Mary recited a year ago during my installation: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11 May we all have hope for our future as we leave a difficult year behind.

Catholic Health World (ISSN 87564068) is published semi­monthly, except monthly in January, April, July and October and copyrighted © by the Catholic Health Association of the United States. POSTMASTER: Address all subscription orders, inquiries, address changes, etc., to Kim Hewitt, 4455 Woodson Road, St. Louis, MO 631343797; phone: 314-253-3421; email: khewitt@chausa.org. Periodicals postage rate is paid at St. Louis and additional mailing offices. Annual subscription rates: CHA members free, others $29 and foreign $29.

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July 1, 2021 CATHOLIC HEALTH WORLD

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ASSEMBLY 2021 ACHIEVEMENT CITATION

Our Lady of the Lake leads dramatic change in Baton Rouge with ‘opt-out’ HIV testing patients more at ease than one in which they are asked whether they want to be screened for HIV and hepatitis C. “I think maybe there’s some psychological comfort that ‘Oh, this hospital just does this, this is their thing, this is how they deliver their care so I’m just going to go along for the ride,’” he says.

About 30% of eligible patients undergo the HIV screenings, a percentage Our Lady of the Lake hopes to push higher.

The number of annual tests done through the program increased from 34,896 given at three sites in 2014 to 93,063 tests given at six sites in the first 11 months of 2020.

In those 11 months, the testing identified 47 previously undiagnosed infections and seven recent (acute) HIV infections.

Patients with acute infections are considered to be at risk for transmitting the disease to others in part because they are unaware of their infectious state.

Social worker Priscar S. Thornton and Dr. James Rhorer, emergency physician, are part of the Opt-Out HIV and Hep C Program at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Rhorer is the principal investigator for the program, which provides the screenings on a routine basis for most emergency room patients. Thornton helps connect people who test positive to treatment and social services.

By LISA EISENHAUER

A simple, stigma-reducing approach to HIV testing at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center is lowering the rate of transmission of HIV and hepatitis C in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Every patient between the ages of 13 and 64 who comes to the four emergency rooms or one urgent care center operated

by Our Lady of the Lake for any ailment is informed by their triage nurse that free HIV and hepatitis testing is routinely done and they will be tested, too, unless they request to opt-out.

The Opt-Out HIV and Hep C Program has helped the hospital identify and assist hundreds of people in the community who either didn’t know they had the viruses or didn’t know how to get treatment.

Since the HIV testing program started in 2014, the hospital says its impact has included dropping the rate of new AIDS diagnoses per 100,000 population in the Baton Rouge region from worst in the nation to 10th worst. In February 2020, Our Lady of the Lake began using the same opt-out approach to routinely screen patients in its emergency rooms for hepatitis C, a communicable disease and one that, like HIV, can be asymptomatic until it has progressed. Baton Rouge has a high incidence rate of hepatitis C, but reporting has been incomplete owing to limited resources and little public health follow-up, according to the hospital.

Scaling up The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited the hospital’s opt-out HIV testing when it recommended last year that emergency rooms and other medical settings offer routine opt-out HIV testing as part of the agency’s plan to reduce new HIV infections in the United States by 90% by 2030. The CDC says up to 40% of new HIV infections are transmitted by people who do not know they have the virus.

Our Lady of the Lake staff has assisted in replicating the opt-out HIV program in the emergency department of a competitor hospital in Baton Rouge.

For its elegant approach to broadening HIV and hepatitis C testing to get people treatment earlier and reduce the community spread of both chronic infections, Our Lady of the Lake is the 2021 recipient of CHA’s top annual honor — the Achievement Citation. CHA presented the award at the Catholic Health Assembly virtual conference June 15. Our Lady of the Lake is part of the Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System.

Measurable difference Dr. James Rhorer is an emergency physician and Our Lady of the Lake’s former medical director for emergency medicine. He leads the opt-out program as its principal investigator.

When the CDC recognized the Opt-Out HIV Rhorer and Hep C Program as a best practice, he told his staff they were making a measurable difference in the lives of patients and the health of the community. He calls the program “the manifestation of our ministry.”

Rhorer says the benefits of the program are many. Those with HIV or hepatitis get linked to treatment and services and the risk that those individuals will infect others in the community can be wiped out.

He is hopeful that research will eventually lead to a cure for HIV as it has for hepatitis C. “But until then, it’s not a death sentence and we are teaching our community as a whole to not treat people who are HIV positive like lepers,” he says. “They contracted a medical illness and we can treat it, we can keep them healthy and we can keep them from spreading the disease.”

The operating budget for the opt-out program is $317,000. The funding comes through grants, which cover program costs, including full- and part-time salaries for a staff of six. Among the grantors are a charitable foundation run by Gilead Sciences, makers of some of the most widely used HIV drugs; the Louisiana

Department of Health; and the city of Baton Rouge.

Routine orders Data shows that most of those who are HIV positive in Louisiana are people of color who face socioeconomic challenges that limit their access to early diagnosis and treatment. Because many of the people in that segment of the community use emergency rooms as their safety net for medical care, Rhorer and others who helped establish the opt-out program decided that ERs would be the best place to initiate the HIV testing.

When an eligible patient is first seen at an Our Lady of the Lake ER, the electronic ordering system attached to the patient’s electronic medical record generates a standard order for the HIV and hepatitis C tests. The ER triage nurses inform patients of the opt-out policy and draw blood for the HIV and hepatitis C tests. The hospital’s lab sends an alert to the opt-out team when there is a positive result.

Social workers who are part of the program help patients with a positive result access HIV or AIDS treatment and apply for social services such as housing and food aid as needed.

For those with positive hepatitis C results, the hospital helps provide access to treatment, including through an innovative model set up by the state in partnership with a subsidiary of Gilead Sciences.

Psychological comfort Rhorer says the opt-out process puts

Lameeka Prophet works in the laboratory at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center that tests blood samples drawn as part of the Out-Opt HIV and Hep C Program. The hospital credits the program for identifying the viruses in hundreds of patients and getting them access to treatment and needed services.

Normalizing HIV Elidia “Anne” Dewitt, a nurse prac– titioner, is the program’s coordinator.

Her training in caring for HIV and AIDS patients began in the throes of the epidemic in the 1980s, when she worked with the first physician in Baton Rouge to treat AIDS patients at a time when little was known about the virus that caused it.

“That was a life lesson because for a lot of these folks who had HIV, nobody else wanted to be around them, nobody wanted to touch them, because nobody really knew what they were dealing with,” Dewitt says.

That stigma remains, if not as strongly, she says, and is one reason some of the people in high-risk populations don’t get tested for HIV or don’t reveal a positive diagnosis to anyone. Dewitt says the optout program helps to normalize the disease as just another health condition that can be successfully treated.

Adherence to antiretroviral medication regimens can reduce the viral loads of people with HIV to undetectable levels.

When their viral load is that low, those with HIV no longer transmit the disease.

Part of Dewitt’s role is to break the news of a positive HIV or hepatitis C test to patients. “I cancel whatever I’m doing, and make time for that patient,” she says.

“I go speak to the patient, their partner, their family, whoever’s with them, to notify them of their diagnosis, counsel them, talk to them, answer their questions. And then the social workers come in with me and speak to them and make sure that they get linked to care.”

Overcoming shock Getting an HIV/AIDS or hepatitis C diagnosis can be overwhelming to patients who are often already struggling with other challenges, says social worker Priscar S. Thornton. And the shock can be compounded when the diagnosis is the unanticipated result Thornton of having come to an ER with something as minor as a sprained ankle or sore throat.

Thornton and her social worker colleagues in the opt-out program connect anyone diagnosed as having either virus but not receiving care to a clinic or a primary care provider who can begin therapy. “If they’re looking for permanent housing, if they’re looking for how to apply for Social Security benefits, if they’re looking for support groups — there’s an array of services there we try to make sure that we get them connected to,” she says. leisenhauer@chausa.org

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CATHOLIC HEALTH WORLD July 1, 2021

ASSEMBLY 2021 SISTER CONCILIA MORAN AWARD

Starcher injects inventiveness, community focus into faith-based health care

By NANCY FRAZIER O’BRIEN

John M. Starcher Jr. was in a high school history class learning about the baby boom generation when he decided that health care would be his chosen career path.

Ever the pragmatist, he had seen the adults in his life lose jobs in steel mills and other failing industries. So, when Starcher learned about the challenges of meeting the health care needs of an aging population of boomers, he “did a little back-of-theenvelope math and thinking about my future.”

“One thing that age bracket was going to need was quality health care,” he said.

A lifelong commitment to ensuring high-quality, high-value health care for all prepared Starcher to integrate the cultures and set the future path of Mercy Health and Bon Secours Health System when the systems merged in 2018 to create Bon Secours Mercy Health. As president and chief executive, he pursued a strategy focused on disease prevention, including through population health initiatives and community investments in programs that improve opportunities and quality of life for the poor and underserved.

Starcher, who is now chief executive of Bon Secours Mercy Health, believes getting upstream of disease is the right thing to do although this approach isn’t yet getting fullthroated support in most reimbursement models.

“John is an incredibly innovative leader, focused on the future of the ministry, with his commitment to the mission at the heart of all he does,” said Sr. Doris Gottemoeller, RSM, chair, Bon Secours Mercy Ministries, the system’s public juridic person.

“Our sponsors, trustees, and management all look to him to ask the forward-leaning questions and to propose new and creative initiatives.”

For his willingness to innovate and take Catholic health care in a new direction, Starcher is the recipient of the 2021 Sister Concilia Moran Award.

People-first approach Fr. Joseph Cardone, chief mission officer of Bon Secours Mercy Health, recalls meeting Starcher 20 years ago when the priest was metro director of spiritual care and Starcher, an attorney, worked in labor relations for Catholic Health Partners. (The system changed its name to Mercy Health in 2014.)

“He came to me and said, ‘Wouldn’t it make sense to you that fathers would also have paid time off when having a baby?’” Fr. Cardone said. “His concern for people and for our associates was palpable, and it has only grown stronger and more intense over the years.”

Starcher says he has made it a priority to ensure Bon Secours Mercy Health facilities “are places where associates want to work, clinicians want to practice, and people seek wellness.”

Drivers of health Starcher sees Catholic health care “as a social actor in the communities we serve,” with an influence far beyond hospital walls, Fr. Cardone said. “Through his leadership and commitment, Bon Secours Mercy Health is using hiring, purchasing and investing to address the underlying social determinants of health,” he added. It’s not right, he said, that conditions in “the ZIP code in which we live can impact one’s life span and overall health.”

Starcher has championed Bon Secours Mercy Health’s community health programs including investments in affordable housing as a way to address health disparities, improve race relations and foster systems and policies that advance health and well-being in the system’s markets.

John M. Starcher Jr.

Starcher is especially proud of Bon Secours Mercy Health’s involvement with the Healthcare Anchor Network, a coalition of 14 health systems that has committed more than $700 million for place-based investing to help address the economic, racial and environmental resource disparities that impact health outcomes at the community and neighborhood level.

“I’ve always appreciated (Catholic health care’s) focus on more than treating diseases,” he said. “There is more of a community focus in faith-based health care, a holistic approach more centered on the common good.”

He works to promote social and racial justice within Bon Secours Mercy Health as well by investing in diversity and inclusion training for staff. The organization’s overall diversity hire rate increased to 35% in 2020 from 33% in 2019. Its African American hire rate ticked up to 23.3% in 2020 from 21% in 2019.

‘Do well and do good’ Starcher’s career also has included stints in the academic world at the Medical College of Ohio, now the University of Toledo Medical Center, and as president and chief

executive of Health Management Associates, a for-profit acute care delivery system with 71 hospitals across 15 states.

But he gladly returned to Catholic health care in 2016 as president and chief executive of Mercy Health and two years later accepted the challenge of leading the merger with Bon Secours that made Bon Secours Mercy Health the fifth largest Catholic health care system in the nation, with 60,000 associates and more than 1,200 care sites in the U.S. and Ireland.

“I wanted to prove that we in faith-based health care could act with as much alacrity as anyone else, be as research-minded as our academic peers, that we didn’t have to be shoehorned into this nonprofit machine,” Starcher said. “I had a strong motivation to take everything I had learned and inject it with this entrepreneurial spirit. It’s not mutually exclusive to do well and do good.”

The merger of Bon Secours and Mercy was “one of the fastest mergers and integrations in the history of Catholic health care,” according to Brian Smith, president and chief operating officer of Bon Secours Mercy Health. Starcher “had his leadership team in place within the first three weeks — quite a feat,” he added.

John Starcher addresses participants and their supporters as part of the Cincinnati Heart Mini Marathon.

Smith, who has known Starcher for two decades since their time at Catholic Health Partners, said the merger “created a culture dramatically different than what we have seen elsewhere.” There was “no legacy Bon Secours, no legacy Mercy Health,” he added. “You can’t even tell who came from where at this point.”

Risk/reward At the same time, said Fr. Cardone, Starcher “regularly reminds us of the history of the women religious that came before us.”

He also tells colleagues that those women religious “didn’t have it all figured out,” the priest said. “John makes it clear we are following in their footsteps with all of the successes and learnings. His mantra is, ‘Don’t be afraid to fail.’”

In 2019 the health system signed a letter of intent to merge with the largest private health care provider in Ireland, and it restructured a joint venture in South Carolina with Roper St. Francis Healthcare.

Then, in 2020 Bon Secours Mercy Health acquired three hospitals in southeastern Virginia.

“It’s not growth for growth’s sake,” Smith said. “He’s not interested in simply adding more people to the ship. It has to be something we can do well and that will improve the health of the community.”

A singular event Then came COVID. “It tested everything about who we are in health care,” Starcher said. “Anyone who says they were prepared is being disingenuous. There’s been nothing like it in my career and it continues to stress us to this day.”

More than a year into the pandemic, though, Starcher said that “not only did we survive, but we thrived” at Bon Secours Mercy Health. “We were a respected source of truth for the communities we serve about what they should or shouldn’t do. We took unbelievable care of our associates ... and assured they did not miss a paycheck. We did a lot of reimagining of how health care can be delivered.”

July 1, 2021 CATHOLIC HEALTH WORLD

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ASSEMBLY 2021 SISTER CAROL KEEHAN AWARD

Offering a hand-up, Ross cultivates hope in beleaguered West Baltimore

By RENEE STOVSKY

One of Dr. Samuel L. Ross’ favorite quotations is this: “Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain the same.” (St. Augustine of Hippo) Throughout his 15-year career with Bon Secours Health System, Ross says he came to believe that leadership in Catholic health care is about hope and inspiration. “It can’t just be a feeling,” he says. “It has to be put in action.”

But mere activity doesn’t come close to describing Ross’ crusade on behalf of providing compassionate health and social services to West Baltimore’s poor and vulnerable population. During his tenure as chief executive of the Bon Secours Baltimore Health System, he oversaw a standalone inner-city hospital and an ambitious agenda of community outreach under the umbrella of Bon Secours Community Works.

That ministry reaches beyond usual models of health to include investments in affordable housing and neighborhood economic development, services for youth and families, job training, drug and alcohol dependence treatment and peer group recovery support, and behavioral health services. It conducts prison outreach and offers peer support and wraparound social services programs for men and women returning home from prison to the struggling neighborhoods in the hospital’s catchment area.

In recognition of his commitment to social justice, Ross is the recipient of the 2021 Sister Carol Keehan Award. The award is named for Sr. Carol, who retired as CHA’s president and chief executive officer in 2019. Throughout her life, Sr. Carol has been a champion of social justice and health care access for all, regardless of means, race, religion or creed.

The annual award recognizes an individual who valiantly advocates for a more equitable and compassionate health system.

Transformational leader “Dr. Ross was addressing the social determinants of health long before it became a cool catch phrase for connecting individual health outcomes to community health,” says Bill McCarthy, chief executive of Catholic Charities of Maryland. “In a limited time and limited place, he was able to bring transformational change by thinking outside the box. And he did so while serving with humility and a sense of humor.”

“Dr. Ross is a charismatic leader, beloved by his hospital staff, from the housekeeping unit to the physicians,” says Mike Stitcher, managing director at BRG Consulting, which advised Ross on overcoming financial hardships at Bon Secours Baltimore Hospital and improving care delivery strategies. “His stewardship helped stabilize a distressed, inner-city hospital and allow it to focus on mission.”

Texas bred Ross describes himself as a “small town boy.” Born in Brenham, Texas, he spent his early years in nearby Somerville, population 1,000. His father worked for the railroad while his mother tended to a large family, which included his six brothers and sisters.

When he was 10, the family moved to Taylor,

Bon Secours Baltimore, it would take more than faith to turn around a hospital facing significant financial challenges and positively impact the health of a community blighted by poverty, drugs, violence and more.

Dr. Samuel L. Ross

Texas, a “bigger small town,” of 7,000. That’s where he had several occasions to observe primary care doctors at work. He fractured a finger, which later became infected, while playing softball at age 12. At 13 he fell off his bicycle and required stitches, at 14 he fractured his left wrist playing football. Those experiences, plus a fascination with the TV show “Marcus Welby, M.D.” set him on a path toward family medicine.

He earned his medical degree from University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio and did a residency at St. Paul Medical Center/University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. He had a private family medicine practice for five years before his first administrative role as a medical director at Parkland Hospital there.

It suited him, and by 2000 he had added a master of science degree in medical management from the University of Texas at Dallas to his resume. By 2005 he had become executive vice president and chief medical officer at Parkland.

That’s when Sr. Pat Eck, now congregational leader for the Congregation of the Sisters of Bon Secours of Paris, first met Ross.

Perfect fit “We were recruiting at the time for the position of CEO at Bon Secours Baltimore, and I wondered why someone with Dr. Ross’ experience and knowledge, work-

ing at a prestigious 950-bed hospital in Dallas, would choose to come to a 140-bed hospital in the heart of inner-city Baltimore,” she says. “I came to believe he was interested because he saw significant need there. He is one of most spiritually grounded people I know. For us, he was the absolute perfect fit.”

Says Ross: “At Parkland, I presided over a division called Community Oriented Primary Care, or COPC, which had a large outpatient clinic network that included not only community-based but school and homeless mobile programs. When I saw what Bon Secours was involved in — affordable housing, workforce development, early childhood programs, social needs — I saw another way COPC could be manifested, much closer to the people we serve.”

Still, Ross says three things had to exist to allow him to make the decision to move east.

“My wife Carolyn had to be willing to relocate, Bon Secours leadership had to believe I was really the right person for the position, and God had to say this is where I had to be at that point of my life,” he recalls.

“It really had to be a calling.”

Rise and pray In fact, because Ross’ mission is so faithbased, one of the first things he instituted upon his arrival in Baltimore in August 2006 was a “servant leadership learning community.” Several years later he started a 6 a.m. prayer group for any interested colleague that continues to this day.

“I was raised as a Baptist; my father became a minister when I was in high school. When Catholic health care talks about the healing ministry of Jesus Christ, it is not foreign to my own upbringing,” he says. “I now consider myself a hybrid — a Baptolic.”

Though Ross says he found “a lot of good people who wanted to This circa 2017 photo of the late civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis and Dr. Samuel L. Ross was do a lot of good things” taken on Capitol Hill at a hearing in support of the Affordable Care Act. when he arrived at

Bottom line Ross’ leadership in improving operational efficiency and productivity helped to stabilize the hospital and turn a $20 million budget deficit into a positive bottom line in four years. At the same time, Ross expanded Bon Secours’ Community Works initiative, and supported the hospital’s investment developing nearby vacant properties into affordable housing and a senior housing complex. He also expanded offerings to cover a wide range of social services to target problems that affect public health, and emphasized including local residents in all decisions affecting the community.

In addition to his responsibilities as chief executive of Bon Secours Baltimore, Ross was executive vice president and supply chain leader at the health system. He also became a city leader, serving on the police commissioner’s African American Advisory Council, the mayor’s heroin treatment and prevention task force, the governor’s commission on service and volunteerism, and as board chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Baltimore branch.

In addition to his serious work, Ross is fondly remembered by Bon Secours staff and leaders for his annual autumn fundraiser, a Texas barbecue party replete with a mechanical bull, lasso demonstrations, and plenty of Western attire, from cowboy boots to 10-gallon hats. “Sam was famous for his homemade ribs and beans, and his wife wore a holster with a bottle of tequila inside, selling shots to raise money for the hospital,” recalls Sr. Pat Dowling, CBS. Rewired, not retired In 2018, Bon Secours Health System merged with Mercy Health to form Bon Secours Mercy Health System. Ross became the new system’s chief community health officer with continuing responsibilities as president and chief executive of Bon Secours Baltimore Hospital.

With the sale of that hospital to the forprofit LifeBridge Health in 2019, financial proceeds were earmarked for the continuation and expansion of programming at Bon Secours Community Works.

Ross retired on Dec. 31. A few months earlier he was appointed to SSM Health Ministries, the sponsor board of SSM Health, and that system’s board of directors.

“I’m not retired, just rewired. And I’m still plenty busy,” he says.

And he’s staying actively involved in West Baltimore as a member of the Community Works board. A major Community Works initiative — partnering with Kaiser Permanente Mid-Atlantic to convert a long-shuttered library into a $6.8 million community resource center — is scheduled to open in October. It’s a project that Ross and others have spent years developing with neighborhood leaders, and he hopes it demonstrates his philosophy that “behavior equals beliefs.”

“People look to see not what you are saying but what you are doing,” he says. “We need to always continue supporting our mission and caring for our community.”

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CATHOLIC HEALTH WORLD July 1, 2021

ASSEMBLY 2021 LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

Better together: Sr. Doris Gottemoeller, RSM, unified hospitals and her congregation

By MARY DELACH LEONARD

together as an institute. And everybody dutifully — from the smallest to the largest — began paying into a central fund.”

The merger made sense because there was no longer a reason for the congregations to be separate. They were more alike than they were different, Sr. Gottemoeller said.

“In the days of our founding in the 19th century, travel and communication were difficult, but that was no longer true,’’ Sr. Gottemoeller said. “There was nothing to stop us from becoming one.’’

She was elected as the first president of the institute in 1991, a position she held for eight years.

Sr. Gottemoeller’s leadership style is guided by her belief in the common good, said Sr. Patricia McDermott, RSM, president of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas.

“One of the things that I so appreciate about Doris is that she builds relationships of trust,’’ Sr. McDermott said. “She does that naturally out of her own goodness and her own good spirit.”

She describes Sr. Gottemoeller as a visionary but not an idealist when it comes to fulfilling the mission.

“It is always about bringing people together and building relationships that will enhance our response to the needs of God’s people,’’ Sr. McDermott said. “How can we do better together what we cannot do alone? How can we further our mission, which is to serve the poor, the sick, the uneducated?”

When Sr. Doris Gottemoeller, RSM, entered religious life 67 years ago, she was drawn to the Sisters of Mercy by their wideranging work in education, health care, social work and foreign missions.

“And I thought, ‘Whatever the community gives me to do, that’s what God wants me to do,’’’ she said.

Sr. Gottemoeller trained to be a teacher and taught high school chemistry and math before being called to congregational leadership. During the 1980s, she guided the Sisters of Mercy and their ministries forward through drastically changing times.

Her vision of uniting 11 Mercy hospitals and 30 other facilities in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee led to the formation in 1986 of Cincinnati-based Catholic Health Partners, one of the first multistate health systems in the United States. The system changed its name to Mercy Health in 2014.

When Mercy Health merged with Marriottsville, Maryland-based Bon Secours Health System in 2018, Bon Secours Mercy Health became one of the nation’s five largest Catholic health care systems. It employs more than 60,000 people in 50 hospitals in seven states and Ireland.

Sr. Doris Gottemoeller, RSM

and analyze in her mind,’’ he said. “When she did speak, people would listen.”

Common good After being elected provincial of the Cincinnati-based Sisters of Mercy of the Union in 1983, Sr. Gottemoeller saw firsthand the inefficiency of every hospital acting alone.

“We used to deal with each hospital separately. There was no common staff or sense of being ‘one,’’’ Sr. Gottemoeller said of her province’s sponsored works. “And there were local loyalties that were difficult to overcome.’’

It took two years, but Sr. Gottemoeller persuaded skeptical hospital administrators that, by consolidating resources and leveraging buying power, they could grow their mission of caring for those in need.

“I had the experience of some hospitals saying, ‘We don’t need a system,’’’ Sr. Gottemoeller said. “If you wait until you need it, it’s not fair. Then you’re going to bring

an injured or hurting entity into a system.

If only the weak ones come together, it will never work. You have to have the strong ones, as well.’’

Act from strength Her philosophy of “better together’’ also drove her leadership of the Mercy Futures project, a 10-year process to merge 17 Sisters of Mercy congregations in North America into the Institute of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas.

When the project started in 1981, some religious orders were beginning to show signs of decline, but that was not the case with the Sisters of Mercy, Sr. Gottemoeller said.

“We acted from strength,’’ she said.

“Every congregation had something to bring to the table, and those who had more brought more. We agreed early on that we would begin taxing ourselves so that we would have resources when we came

Courtesy of the Cincinnati Reds Photo

Leading with kindness Sr. Gottemoeller, 84, is still on the job.

She is a member of the board of Bon Secours Mercy Health and chair of Bon Secours Mercy Ministries, the system’s public juridic person.

For her lifetime of contributions to Catholic health care, Sr. Gottemoeller has been named the 2021 recipient of CHA’s Lifetime Achievement Award, an honor she accepts with humility.

“I sort of pinch myself and say, ‘Why am I being honored by a health care organization?’’’ Sr. Gottemoeller said. “I never was a clinician. I never spent time in a sick room. I never worked in a hospital.”

Her modesty comes as no surprise to longtime colleagues who describe her as a trailblazer, as humble as she is wise.

“She is just a very kind person, and her kindness and intellectual prowess in combination are disarming,’’ said Michael D. Connelly, retired president and chief executive of Mercy Health. “You wanted to work with her.”

As a senior member of the Mercy Health leadership team, Sr. Gottemoeller brought perspective and balance to complicated and difficult issues, said Connelly, who worked with her for 13 years.

“She is willing to listen and then process

Sr. Doris Gottemoeller, RSM, second from right, joins the crew from Bon Secours Mercy Health on the field for a ceremonial first pitch at a 2019 Cincinnati Reds home game. John Starcher, the system’s chief executive, gives a thumbs up after delivering the pitch. Sr. Pat Eck, CBS, center, Sr. Carol Anne Smith, HM, and Sr. Gottemoeller represent the three “participating entities” in Bon Secours Mercy Ministries, the system’s public juridic person.

Ensuring the Mercy tradition Sr. Gottemoeller was born and raised in Cleveland. She joined the Sisters of Mercy when she was 16 after completing high school early. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Edgecliff College in Cincinnati, a master’s degree in chemistry from the University of Notre Dame and a master’s and doctorate in theology from Fordham University.

Sr. Gottemoeller has held governance positions in education, health care, housing and religious organizations. Among them: senior vice president of mission and values integration for Catholic Healthcare Partners, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, delegate to the International Union Superiors General, auditor at the Synod on Consecrated Life, chair of the CHA board of trustees and of the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth Health System. She was the 2008 recipient of CHA’s Sister Concilia Moran Award for her creativity, leadership and breakthrough thinking.

“The opportunities that would come to me as a result of being a Sister of Mercy — I didn’t grasp that for years. Often, I was the only woman in the room,’’ Sr. Gottemoeller said. “And I never imagined that I would be working for a health care organization when I was trained to be a teacher.”

Sr. Gottemoeller has developed programs, including the health system’s Leadership Academy, to train lay leaders to carry on the Mercy healing mission and its emphasis on Catholic principles — human dignity and the common good.

“Going back 40 years, when there were still numerous sisters in hospitals, you took that culture for granted,’’ Sr. Gottemoeller said. “People talk as if a sister was in every room, in every corridor. But that wasn’t the case. It was the habit they wore that made them conspicuous. If there were seven or eight sisters, it felt like it was a Catholic hospital run by the sisters. That’s gone. Instead, we must build a culture of care, a culture of service, a culture of compassion based on carefully prepared and integrated formation experiences. We’re doing the same in our educational ministries now. Health care led the way.”

July 1, 2021 CATHOLIC HEALTH WORLD

7

ASSEMBLY 2021

Medows

Kaiser

Manas

Sr. Codey

Schlenker

Tahir

Fr. Cardone

Holubec

Sexton

Crowley

Dr. Rhonda Medows is 2021-2022 CHA chair; three new members join association’s board Dr. Rhonda Medows was formally installed as chair of the CHA board of trustees June 15 in a ceremony at the association’s annual meeting. A few days earlier, the Membership Assembly officially elected Medows and three new board members.

Both meetings were held virtually.

Medows is president of population health management for Providence St. Joseph Health and chief executive of its subsidiary Ayin Health Solutions, a popula-

tion health management company.

Laura S. Kaiser, president and chief executive of SSM Health, was elected vice chair and chairperson-elect. Julie Manas, president of the Ascension St. Vincent North Region and the immediate past chair of the CHA board, will be speaker of the Membership Assembly during 2021-2022.

The new trustees are: Sr. Patricia Codey, SC, president,

Holubec, executive vice president and chief communications officer at Providence St. Joseph Health. All of the trustees serve three-year terms.

The terms of two board members ended.

They are Kevin Sexton, the retired president and chief executive of Holy Cross Health and a recent chair of the CHA board, and Jane Durney Crowley, senior partner of the O’Brien Group consultancy.

Catholic Healthcare Partnership of New Jersey.

Shelly L. Schlenker, executive vice president and chief advocacy officer, CommonSpirit Health.

Fahad Tahir, chief strategy officer, Ascension Saint Thomas Health.

CHA members reelected two trustees: Fr. Joseph P. Cardone, chief mission officer at Bon Secours Mercy Health, and Orest

Champion justice

bution; and, as a result, we’ve been missing the link between the social determinants of health and their policy roots,” he said.

Catholic Health Assembly co-hosts Carol Daniel, left, and Sr. Mary Haddad, RSM, greet keynote speaker Daniel Dawes prior to his presentation on how public policy and politics shape the social conditions that generate health outcomes. Dawes directs the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Morehouse School of Medi­cine. Daniel is a broadcast journalist in St. Louis. Sr. Mary is CHA’s president and chief executive officer.

Politics of fear and anger He said the high incarceration rate is the result of a long-standing political narrative that makes nonwhite Americans the focus of fear and anger. That narrative is rooted in beliefs by whites going back to the nation’s origins that people of color are less worthy and less capable, he added.

The narrative has led to policies that rely on punishment rather than on providing opportunities or treatment to improve society, Stevenson said. “We should have been reaching out to the Catholic Health Association rather than building more jails and prisons and creating more punishment, but we didn’t do the right thing because we were, I believe, corrupted by the politics of fear and anger,” he said.

To reverse this course, Stevenson said the nation must embark on an era of reckoning aimed at promoting truth and justice, as happened in South Africa after apartheid was dismantled and in Germany in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

“I have no interest in punishment,” he said. “My interest is in liberation. My interest is in restoration. My interest is in repair. It’s how we move forward.”

Mercy

the assembly, delivering a powerful commentary on June 15, the last day of the twoday event. The annual meeting brought together about 700 senior leaders of Catholic health systems, hospitals and long-term care providers. The gathering’s theme was “All God’s Children” and much of the event was focused on how CHA and its members are confronting racism by addressing disparities and inequities in health care and Bryan Stevenson in their communities. Because of the pandemic, the gathering was held virtually for the second year in a row.

Stevenson is a lawyer and the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization based in Montgomery, Alabama. He has dedicated his career to helping those who are poor or incarcerated. His book Just Mercy looks inside the nation’s criminal justice system and its disproportionate impact on minorities. It was made into a movie in 2019.

Stevenson offered some staggering statistics on the nation’s criminal justice system, including that the prison population has grown from 300,000 in the 1970s to 2.3 million today, that 70 million Americans have criminal arrest histories that diminish their opportunities to get jobs and mortgages, that the number of women sent to jails or prisons has increased by 800% in the last 25 years and that the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated in 2001 that one in three Black male babies born in the United States would serve time.

Karen Elshout/©CHA

From page 1

A woman gets inoculated against COVID-19 at a clinic that Mercy hosted specifically for residents of a largely minority neighborhood of Kirkwood, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis.

Addressing disparities Earlier in the year, CHA launched a major initiative, We Are Called, with a goal of elevating ministry members’ work on diversity, equity and inclusion.

About two dozen of the nation’s largest Catholic health care systems have committed to the Comforting Racism by Achieving Health Equity pledge that is part of the initiative. The pledge calls for signatories to ensure equity in COVID-19 care, examine all aspects of their organizations,

build right and just relationships with communities, and advocate for polices to end health disparities and systemic racism.

Dismantling barriers Another keynote speaker, Daniel Dawes, called CHA’s equity pledge “one of the boldest calls to action that I have seen.” Dawes is director of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine and is its associate lead for government relations. He’s also an author whose newest book, The Political Determinants of Daniel Dawes Health, addresses the question of how policy and politics influence the social conditions that generate health outcomes.

Dawes said that the social determinants of health in communities, such as economic stability and access to health care, can be traced back to political decisions.

“Simply stated, the nation’s health is not an organic outcome,” he said.

He said the structural barriers that have disadvantaged minorities and other vulnerable groups have been as blatant as slavery and Jim Crow laws and as covert as the redlining done by government agencies and banks decades ago that denied access to mortgages to buy homes in many neighborhoods. Banned by federal law more than 50 years ago, the practice has, to this day, taxed minority communities with lower rates of home ownership. Home equity typically makes up a significant portion of household wealth.

“You see, too often we’ve been stopping at the social drivers of health inequities, failing to look back and dig deeper to see and understand its root causes and distri-

Urging leadership Dawes urged CHA and its members to continue the leadership they showed in advocating for the Affordable Care Act as they push for other policies that will foster health equity. He mentioned the current debate in Congress over a wide-ranging infrastructure plan as an example of policymaking that could have a deep impact on communities.

Working to shape political determinants is “not a movement for the faint of heart,” Dawes said. He added: “We must have the courage to do enough, and we must persevere until the job is done.”

Another keynote speaker, Dr. Gloria A. Wilder, also encouraged CHA members to continue to boldly lead the charge to end health disparities. She said COVID-19 laid those disparities bare.

“We’ve experienced the atrocities of a virus that took hold and awoken us all to the very difficult situation that many people were Gloria Wilder suffering through — and that situation was social injustice,” said Wilder, a pediatrician and expert on poverty and social justice.

She has served as the chair of Mobile Health Programs at Georgetown University and Children’s National Medical Center in Washington. In 2005, she founded Core Health, a health and wellness company dedicated to assisting underserved communities in gaining access to quality holistic health care services.

Road to equality Wilder said that the larger push for equality and social justice will not succeed without equity. “Equity is the path, it’s the road to equality,” she said. “It’s the very thing that you walk upon to achieve it.”

Health organizations can promote equity in several ways, Wilder said. They include investing in the communities that surround their hospitals, uplifting primary care providers who work in poor communities, and appointing chief equity officers to foster reforms inside and outside of their organizations.

“Health equity is not something that’s going to change overnight,” Wilder said. “It took 400 years of racism to create the disparities that we see every day in our country and it’s going to take time to change it, but I’ll tell you, we’re not waiting 400 years.

Change will come because we will make change happen.” leisenhauer@chausa.org

8

CATHOLIC HEALTH WORLD July 1, 2021

ASSEMBLY 2021 TOMORROW’S LEADERS

Emerging leaders find deep purpose in advancing ministry’s mission

By KATHLEEN NELSON

S

harp intellect, a strong work ethic, emotional intelligence, resourcefulness and enthusiasm are qualities that the 2021 honorees in CHA’s Tomorrow’s Leaders program have in common. Each has traveled a distinctive path to advance and secure the mission of Catholic health care. This year, the program spotlights 11 dedicated individuals, age 40 or younger at the time of their nomination, who use their exceptional talents to strengthen Catholic health care.

Andrew Arai

Executive director of mission and innovation, Providence St. Joseph Health, Renton, Washington

As a seasoned project manager, Andrew Arai brings technical and analytic skills to his essential task of integrating Providence St. Joseph Health’s mission into all it does to care for its patients and its communities.

“We’re a relaArai tively small department, so I get to wear many hats — including developing strategy, building implementation plans, facilitating program launches and evaluating our progress,” says Arai, 41. “The variety and the opportunities to respond to new challenges brings joy and meaning to my work.”

Described by colleagues as humble, open-minded and collaborative, he facilitated the work that engaged more than

“The variety and the opportunities to respond to new challenges brings joy and meaning to my work.”

— Andrew Arai 60,000 caregivers, along with partners and community members in a process that culminated in a new mission, vision and values statement after Providence Health merged with St. Joseph Health.

“He is emerging as a great leader for our organization, as well as for Catholic health care,” says Denise Bowen, chief of staff for human resources at Providence St. Joseph Health. “He truly bridges our mission and key strategic priorities in a relevant and tangible manner.”

He brought his technical and interpersonal skills to bear when he partnered with behavioral health leaders in the development of the Providence Community Care Center in Olympia, Washington.

People who are homeless come to the center to access behavioral health, substance abuse services and housing aid.

Arai is overseeing the ministry identity assessment process at Providence St. Joseph Health. “One of our initial findings is that we don’t always talk about all of the good work that we do,” he says of the systemwide initiative. “I hope that we’ll be able to share the incredibly rich stories of service and compassion that we are uncovering.”

Providence is employing the CHA Ministry Identity Assessment tool to evaluate performance in areas essential to Catholic identity. Arai was involved in the first pilot of the tool and is now part of a CHA workgroup to update the tool for its second edition.

Doug Baxter-Jenkins

Community integration program manager, Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, Tacoma, Washington, a member of CommonSpirit Health

Doug Baxter-Jenkins is a conduit for the practical ideas that percolate from public health and nonprofit organizations working with the underserved in Seattle and Tacoma. He was hired in 2012 to direct the Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. The program was recognized as a best pracBaxter-Jenkins tice across CommonSpirit Health, the parent of Virginia Mason Franciscan Health.

“There is a recognition that as a health system, we cannot create a healthier, safer community alone. We must work together with community partners,” he says.

In 2018, Baxter-Jenkins helped form the system’s Community Integration Office and forge partnerships that improve health outcomes, especially in underserved communities. He also is implementing CommonSpirit Health’s Violence and Human Trafficking Prevention & Response Program as an expansion of his work with vulnerable youth.

“The best part of my job is helping people have a voice in big systems,” says BaxterJenkins, 40. “I can get a foot in a door or be a voice, especially for grassroots nonprofit groups. I can get to people who make decisions and have resources.”

Through the spring, in addition to coordinating COVID-19 vaccine events at all the system’s hospitals, he worked with community partners and faith communities to set up pop-up vaccine clinics in the lowincome and immigrant communities and neighborhoods hardest hit by the virus.

“I have watched this amazing man assemble a team and guide them with the true grace of a servant leader,” says Laura Krausa, system director of advocacy programs for CommonSpirit Health. “He inspires and guides the work.”

Catherine Kroll

Director, infection prevention, PeaceHealth, Vancouver, Washington

Catherine Kroll is named after an aunt who died of measles at age 8.

“I never got to meet her because she died of what is now a preventable disease,” says Kroll, 38. She’s devoted her life to eliminating such unnecessary deaths in Kroll and out of hospitals. When Clark County, Washington, was the center of a measles outbreak in 2019, Kroll and her team facilitated community vaccinations, vaccine education and immune globulin treatments.

She leads all infection prevention operations across 10 medical centers and the PeaceHealth ambulatory care network in three states, ensuring that infection prevention practices are followed to protect patients and caregivers. She brought all her expertise to bear during the COVID-19 pandemic. Kroll helped establish PeaceHealth’s incident command center for the pandemic and its COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force, where she works to make sure vaccines are delivered safely and equitably.

She also volunteers to aid skilled nursing facilities in Southwest Washington,

working to prevent and control the spread of COVID-19. “I was raised in a small community by a family that embraced community involvement, especially for vulnerable adults,” she says.

Since being promoted to director of infection prevention in 2017, Kroll also has guided PeaceHealth’s strategies that have reduced central line-associated bloodstream infection by 33%, catheter-associated urinary tract infection by 42% and clostridium difficile infection by 12%.

“Catherine has the rare abilities to be seriously fun without being inefficient, to be masterful without being patronizing, and to be determined without being overbearing,” says Dr. Robert K. Pelz, medical director of infection prevention for PeaceHealth. “She is a delight to work with.”

“When I look around PeaceHealth, I see everyone living the mission and values,” Kroll says. “On days when it’s tough, you have people around you who inspire you.

In turn, I want to be that inspiration to the team that I serve.”

Trent Pepper

General counsel and senior vice president of legal services, Benedictine, Minneapolis

Since leaving private practice and joining Benedictine as an assistant general counsel in 2012, Trent Pepper has broadened his portfolio to areas that include ethics, end-of-life care and canon law.

As a member of the system’s clinical ethics advisory committee he contributed to Pepper the development of Benedictine’s approach to advance directives and endof-life decision-making. He’s collaborated with leaders to make the admissions process more resident-friendly while meeting legal requirements. Pepper, 38, also leads a knowledge management team that is responsible for identifying and documenting standard practices across Benedictine’s communities.

“I have great confidence in Trent’s leadership and his passionate commitment to the future of Catholic health care,” says Sr. Beverly Raway, OSB, prioress of the Benedictine Sisters of St. Scholastica Mon-

“It is very rewarding to help shepherd an organization into Benedictine, and our mission and core values affect every step of that process.”

Trent Pepper astery. The congregation sponsors Benedictine. “Trent is committed to living and carrying forward Christ’s mission of love and healing and considers this not only his work, but a calling in the best sense of vocation in ministry.”

Since rising to the position of senior vice president and general counsel in 2019, Pepper also has been involved in the Benedictine Sisters of St. Scholastica Monastery’s work toward the establishment of a ministerial public juridic person sponsorship model for Benedictine. “His insights and advice are particularly helpful as we develop and revise the canonical documents for the petition to the Vatican” for approval, says Sr. Raway.

His legal work includes coordinating the transitions of organizations into and out of Benedictine, a system with 30 long-term care communities that serve more than

5,000 residents and their families.

“It is very rewarding to help shepherd an organization into Benedictine, and our mission and core values affect every step of that process,” says Pepper.

Kyle Prochaska

Regional director of planning, design and construction, SSM Health, Madison, Wisconsin

When SSM Health – Dean Medical Group announced construction of a $75 million clinic on its South Madison campus, it decided that the workforce to build it should reflect the diversity of the people it would serve. Kyle ProProchaska chaska was charged with meeting goals for subcontracting to businesses owned by minorities and women. He far exceeded the system’s goals; work representing over 7% of the total cost of construction was awarded to minority and women-owned businesses.

This was accomplished in part by dividing large jobs into smaller components and choosing bids from minority contractors even when it added to costs.

He also exceeded the system’s target of giving 8-10% of the total number of hours of paid construction work to minorities, women, veterans and people with disabilities.

Cara Schmitt, project coordinator of mission and ethics for SSM Health Wisconsin, says Prochaska has expanded the definition of stewardship by spending money to promote racial justice and broaden economic opportunity in the Dane County community.

“I’m excited that we can take lessons learned at South Madison and establish a standard framework for inclusion,” says Prochaska, 36. “When people think about SSM, they think about exceptional care, not necessarily the planning design and construction of SSM and how we can incorporate inclusion (of minorities and women) every day in all aspects of our business. Hopefully this project can help change that.”

Prochaska worked with the Urban League of Greater Madison to offer a sevenweek job training program to provide experience and certifications in construction trades.

“Because of Kyle’s diligence and management, millions of dollars of labor and contracting expenses are being spent more intentionally to uplift disadvantaged and minority individuals and businesses,” says Damond Boatwright, president and chief executive of Hospital Sisters Health System and the immediate former regional president of SSM Health Wisconsin.

“These are the kinds of economic opportunities that do not just change one life or one family; they contribute to improvement across generations.”

Megan L. Roberts

Director, orthopedic services, CHI St. Vincent, Little Rock, Arkansas, a member of CommonSpirit Health

From her first job as a patient care technician at age 16, Megan L. Roberts felt at home in health care — and aimed high.

“That helped me connect the dots to Roberts see that there are more pieces in the puzzle than direct providers,” says Roberts,

July 1, 2021 CATHOLIC HEALTH WORLD

9

ASSEMBLY 2021 TOMORROW’S LEADERS 32. “I said jokingly I wanted to be a CEO.” Since then, she has taken a serious approach to learning about all aspects of health care. Joining CHI St. Vincent as an administrative fellow in 2015, she has taken on — and mastered — assignments across the health care spectrum.

After co-authoring a community health needs assessment in 2016, she helped St. Vincent form community partnerships.

For example, she championed a program to address obesity in low-income communities by working to help fund soccer clubs and walking paths.

But she learned the most lasting lessons by heading the Leadership Development Institute committee, developing curriculum for quarterly leadership conferences.

“In teaching others to lead, I became a better leader myself,” she says.

As director of orthopedic services, Roberts has worked with physicians on a comanagement arrangement and has led strategic planning efforts to address the shift of orthopedic and spine procedures to the outpatient and ambulatory setting, reducing overhead and the cost to patients.

“Megan works in an environment of respectful collaboration when working with a diverse group of stakeholders who may hold strong opinions on how certain solutions should be implemented,” says Forrest Whichard, St. Vincent’s former vice president of operations, now regional chief financial officer of AMITA Health.

In the pandemic, Roberts developed protocols in which hospital reception desks became COVID-19 screening stations. “I like problem-solving and improving processes,” she says. “I’m not doing the surgery, but if there’s an opportunity that’s good for the patient, I want to find a way to make it happen.”

Michael Talley

Vice president, clinical operations and virtual care, CHRISTUS Health, Irving, Texas

A frequent patient in emergency rooms as a child because of asthma, Michael Talley’s first professional role in health care was as a respiratory therapist. To challenge and change the health system’s procedures and practices, he earned a second degree in administration.

There, he found Talley that the empathy and compassion he learned from his single mother was just as valuable to his colleagues as it was at the bedside of a patient.

“To get people to work at their max potential, you need to be open to slowing down the business need and understand what they’re going through to eventually move forward,” Talley says.

“He is an outstanding influencer who has the ability to engage physicians, associates and clinical staff to advance their ability to be modern and responsive to our communities,” says Dr. Sam Bagchi, senior vice president and chief clinical officer at CHRISTUS Health. “He employs his gifts for the benefit of the entire CHRISTUS ministry, including his own team, who love and respect him for all he does to help others.”

Much of Talley’s work centers on telehealth. When he arrived in 2017, CHRISTUS had attempted just 10 ambulatory virtual physician visits across the system. At CHRISTUS Health and across the U.S., the pandemic greatly accelerated the expansion of telemedicine services. Talley and his team launched the telemedicine technology in every CHRISTUS Health ministry early in the pandemic. By late 2020, 25% of outpatient visits were done virtually.

Talley’s firsthand experience of how

discrimination and poverty can contribute to poor health outcomes has made him a champion of health care equity. He is focused on applying technology to get chronically ill patients with no resources ready access to proper follow-up care.

He’s guided efforts to make sure patients who are hearing impaired or Spanish speaking can use the telehealth services.

He helped launch remote patient monitoring for people infected with COVID-19 who were not sick enough to be in a hospital. He issued laptops for hospitalized COVID patients to use to call the nurses’

“To get people to work at their max potential, you need to be open to slowing down the business need and understand what they’re going through to eventually move forward.”

— Michael Talley station. This allowed nurses to talk to their patients without putting on full protective gear. Talley, 39, also led initiatives to centralize CHRISTUS Health command centers and standardize processes for transferring patients among the system’s facilities during COVID surges.

Wes Tidwell

Chief operating officer, Ascension Seton Williamson, Round Rock, Texas; vice president, system diagnostics and laboratory services, Ascension Texas

While in college, Wes Tidwell lost two of his grandparents to infections they contracted while in the hospital.

“It drives my passion to ensure that the work we do is of the utmost quality and that we put the patient first,” says Tidwell, 38. “We don’t just think of patients as Tidwell customers or transactions but how to serve the whole person.”

Since joining Ascension Seton in 2019, Tidwell has guided a financial turnaround that resulted in an 11.3% operating margin in the 2020 fiscal year. The income sustains the mission of the 149-bed community hospital in suburban Austin.

He is committed to building a hospital leadership team that reflects the diversity of the local community. He is the regional leader in ABIDE — Appreciation, Belongingness, Inclusivity, Diversity, Equity — Ascension’s framework to address racism and systemic injustice.

“I have worked with multiple COOs during my time at (Ascension) Seton Williamson over the past 13 years,” says Nancy Crouse, chairman of the Seton Williamson Foundation board of directors.

“He understands that to do his job he must understand what the associates need to make this a successful hospital. He looks for ways to make this hospital great. I have never seen this hospital run so smoothly.”

Tidwell led strategic planning that increased physician recruitment and access to services for the North Austin community, where more than 60% of the residents are Hispanic. He’s brought together community leaders to identify ways to plug gaps in mental health services.

“All of those things improve access to care,” Tidwell says. “We’re recruiting a workforce to make sure they are a part of that culture. That’s a natural draw for phy-

sicians, nurses and other providers to be part of the mission.”

Rainy Tieman

Clinical nurse manager, labor/delivery and OB emergency department, St. Mary’s Medical Center, Grand Junction, Colorado, a member of SCL Health

Paying it forward comes without a deadline. Born in Moab, Utah, 75 minutes after her identical twin, Rainy Tieman was rushed more than 100 miles to St. Mary’s Medical Center shortly after birth, where the natal care team nursed her through breathing difficulties. Today, she Tieman cares for the staff that provides care to new moms and their babies.

Tieman spent the first 15 years of her career bedside, tending to patients, then accepted the challenge “to make sure the nurses have everything they need to take care of patients.”

To aid both patients and nurses, Tieman, 37, helped develop a phone app that allows new moms to access information after discharge. Patients can refer to the app for information, freeing the staff from readdressing questions and confusion stemming from discharge plans. About 55% of patients use the app, 85% of whom said that it improved their overall hospital experience. Tieman won a 2020 Nightingale Award for Excellence in Nursing for her role in the app’s development and has presented her work at four conferences.

She guided St. Mary’s labor and delivery unit in implementing the Obstetric Hemorrhage Patient Safety Bundle, for which the Council on Patient Safety in Women’s Health Care awarded St. Mary’s $3,300. Tieman used the money to help 12 nurses earn national certification in either inpatient obstetrics or electronic fetal monitoring.

“It’s with fresh eyes that Rainy approaches each obstacle, large and small.

Rainy has never accepted the concept, ‘That’s just the way it’s done,’” says Emily Marutzky, clinical resource specialist in labor and delivery at St. Mary’s. “Although change is never easy, Rainy teaches new changes in a way that feels somehow more simple and manageable to both nurses and patients.”

Kimberly King Webb

Senior vice president and chief human resources officer, CHRISTUS Health, Irving, Texas

The daughter of a nurse, Kimberly King Webb couldn’t follow directly in her mother’s footsteps. “I pass out at the sight of blood,” she says.

Instead, she became a lawyer and worked for a firm with CHRISTUS Health as a client. “Seeing how the nurses and doctors worked so hard for a patient Webb reminded me of my mom’s commitment to helping others,” she says.

Webb joined CHRISTUS in 2013, steering the system’s efforts to take a proactive approach to potential human resources issues and earning praise from her colleagues for her work in diversity and inclusion. She has guided the standardization of HR policies following mergers and acquisitions, created the Lean-in Circle to address issues specific to women in leadership, assisted in creating a resilience program and helped steward resources and inform tough decisions during the pandemic.

“She is able to deliver hard messages in a fair but clear manner and to present a different opinion in a congenial way, backed by facts, without being confrontational,” says Jeannie Carmedelle Frey, senior vice president/chief legal officer and general counsel for CHRISTUS. “She is also a warm and supportive colleague, with a ready laugh, implicitly acknowledging the humanity of everyone she encounters.”

Webb says she felt she and the human resources team made the biggest systemwide impact following Tropical Storm Marco and Hurricane Laura, which hit southwest Louisiana back-to-back in August 2020. Hurricane Laura was the strongest storm to make landfall in the state in 150 years. CHRISTUS Ochsner St. Patrick Hospital was the only hospital in Lake Charles to stay in continuous operation.

“We worked with logistics and operations to wrap our arms around this,” Webb, 39, says of the system’s quick delivery of storm aid for employees. “Almost overnight, we got financial support, food and shelter for the associates who lost their homes, and gas to get them to and from work. The notes of thanks from our associates brought tears to my eyes. It was God’s way of telling me I was in the right place.”

Dr. Baligh Yehia

Senior vice president, Ascension; president, Ascension Medical Group, St. Louis

Dr. Baligh Yehia arrived at Ascension in 2018 with a wealth of experience in public health. For example, as an undersecretary with the Department of Veterans Affairs, he led a network that cared for over 2 million veterans annually.

He founded and directed the Penn Medicine Program Yehia for LGBT Health and he was a recognized expert in HIV and health disparities. He’s authored more than 100 journal articles.

Under his guidance, the Ascension Medical Group’s 10,000 clinicians reported improvements of clinician well-being scores by 33% over two years, which helped the group practice earn the American Medical Association’s Joy in Medicine award in 2019. He also established a palliative care strategy to improve patient outcomes and experiences, which resulted in an increase of almost 300% in the number of advance care planning discussions between April and October 2020.

“It’s important to always ask, ‘How do we meet patients where they are?’” says Yehia, 39. “Through the spread of clinical best practices and shared learnings across our ministry, we can cast a wide net and carry out our vision of providing personalized, compassionate care for those we serve, particularly the vulnerable.”

Yehia continues to write, authoring a peer-reviewed study published in JAMA last year that included 11,210 patients treated for COVID-19 at 92 hospitals across 12 states.

The study found no difference in all-cause, in-hospital mortality between white and Black patients with COVID after adjusting for age, sex, insurance status, comorbidity, neighborhood deprivation and site of care.

“Our findings suggest that once individuals reach the health care system, outcomes are similar regardless of race,” he says “Baligh’s leadership and great contributions to health equity exemplify the ways he lives Ascension’s mission,” says Dr. Joseph Cacchione, Ascension’s executive vice president of clinical and network services.

“I have no doubt he will continue to do incredible work in the future and be a transformational leader for our industry.”

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CATHOLIC HEALTH WORLD July 1, 2021

Robinson From page 1

states and the indigenous people of the world — many of whom happen to be Black and brown. Even in rich countries like the United States it is Black and brown people who are more impacted by environmental injustice, she told the audience.

Women in the developing world may shoulder even heavier burdens than their male counterparts as the planet heats up and weather patterns change, she said. In poor villages, women who have to put food on the table may have to go farther for firewood because of deforestation or travel longer distances to collect water. In many places in the world women have little to no property rights, and very little power. They are among those who are the least responsible for — and get no economic benefit from — the carbon-based economy driving

Nunez-Smith From page 1

front structural barriers including a lack of transportation and child care, disinformation campaigns that have led to skepticism about the safety and effectiveness of the shots, and fears that those who get vaccinations will be billed if they lack insurance or deported if they lack legal immigration status.

Nevertheless, Nunez-Smith said, about 63% of the adult population had gotten at least one shot and more than a dozen states have reached the 70% goal by midJune. “But no one is doing a victory lap yet because we know there’s more work to do,” she said.

In addition to an education campaign about the vaccines, the administration is working with corporations and nonprofit groups to promote access, Nunez-Smith said. For example, it is giving tax breaks to companies that allow time off so workers can get shots and encouraging and publicizing offers of free child care from day care providers such as Bright Horizons and the YMCA. “The reasons people have a hard time connecting with vaccinations range and so it has to be a very individualized, personalized approach” to overcoming barriers to vaccination, she said.

One clear finding from polling, NunezSmith said, is that across demographics people look to their health care providers as trusted sources about the vaccines. Given that, she said, it is important that health care workers share their personal vaccination stories on whatever platforms they have available.

To Sr. Mary’s question of what more the Catholic health care ministry can do to encourage vaccination, Nunez-Smith

“The reasons people have a hard time connecting with vaccinations range and so it has to be a very individualized, personalized approach” to overcoming barriers to vaccination.

climate change.

The Mary Robinson Foundation — Climate Justice has been advocating on the world stage for women, the poor in the developing world and the young to have input into public policy on climate change and protections in green initiatives.

In her address, Robinson identified some lessons from the pandemic response that she believes have applications for climate justice.

The pandemic response showed that collective behavior can protect the most vulnerable in a community. Many people who were not at high risk for COVID complications nevertheless adhered to social distancing and masking guidelines. They did this in order to reduce viral spread and protect the elderly as well as those with compromised immune systems and underlying chronic illness. Robinson said collective action for the common good will be necessary to reduce reliance on fossil fuels

into the future in terms of how we continue to provide care for our communities.”

Nunez-Smith said that goal is in line with those of the Biden administration, whose mission is about “keeping people well.” She added that while the pandemic has shined a spotlight on inequities, the nation’s response has shown “it is within our power and purview to really make a difference now and for generations to come.”

“I think that is our work heading now into the fall and into the future,” she said. leisenhauer@chausa.org

and usher in the green economy. She said it will be important to protect and retrain employees who could lose jobs in the transition to clean energy industries.

The pandemic showed that the quality of a government’s response to crisis matters, Robinson said. Governmental leaders who bungled the response to the coronavirus threat prolonged suffering in their countries and communities, whereas those who responded well, mitigated harm.

Fighting climate harm similarly will require effective government leadership.

Robinson noted that many of the world leaders responding effectively to global crises are women. She said such leaders include New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg, Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Mirella Marin and Iceland Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir.

Just as science guided the most effective responses to the pandemic, Robinson said, it also will be key to addressing climate injustice. A recent report from the World Meteorological Organization, a U.N. agency, says there is a 44% chance average global temperatures will increase by 1.5 degrees Celsius in the next five years.

That level of warming, if sustained, could bring massive flooding and storms, along with severe drought and hunger.

To prevent this devastation, all countries must transition away from fossil fueldependent economies — and quickly, Robinson said.

Robinson challenged her audience

at the virtual assembly session to make climate justice personal by taking steps in their own lives to use resources more efficiently — to recycle carefully and waste less. She said citizens should get angry and demand action from governments and corporations. “We need political will generated top-down and bottom-up everywhere in the world,” she said.

Decisive actions will come easier if everyone imagines the world as it could be — a place where clean energy results in cleaner air and economic advancements in the developing world. Borrowing a term used by anti-apartheid and human rights activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Robinson called upon Catholic health leaders to be “prisoners of hope.” She heard the archbishop use the term in response to a journalist who asked how the cleric could be so optimistic given the state of the world. “I’m not an optimist,” Archbishop Tutu said, “I’m a prisoner of hope.”

Robinson said before COVID-19 she’d worried that the global community would not rise up together to effectively pursue climate justice and stop climate change. But, she said, the pandemic made it apparent “we are all somehow in this together.”

She quoted Mandela, the late South African anti-apartheid leader and president of South Africa, on persevering to achieve great change or progress against great obstacles. “It always feels impossible, until it’s done,” he said. jminda@chausa.org

Community Benefit 101 Virtual in 2021!

Community Benefit 101: The Nuts and Bolts of Planning and Reporting Community Benefit VIRTUAL

OCTOBER 12, 13 & 14, 2021 Each day from 2 – 5 p.m. ET

Who should attend: CHA’s CB 101: The Nuts and Bolts of Planning and Reporting Community Benefit, a virtual conference, will provide new community benefit professionals and others who want to learn about community benefit with the foundational knowledge and tools needed to run effective community benefit programs.

Attendees will receive a copy of CHA’s A Guide for Planning and Reporting Community Benefit!

What you will learn: Taught by community benefit leaders, the program will cover what counts as community benefit; how to plan, evaluate and report on community benefit programs; accounting principles and a public policy update.

While it is designed for new community benefit professionals, the new virtual format now makes this meeting accessible to a wider audience, including:

v Staff in mission, finance/tax, population health, strategic planning, diversity and inclusion, communications, government relations, and compliance who want to learn about the important relationship of their work and community benefit/ community health.

v Veteran community benefit staff who want

a refresher course to update them on current practices, inspire future activities and connect with others in nonprofit health care doing this work.

— Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith urged continuing “hyper-local” efforts such as going door to door to offer shots and partnering with grassroots groups to figure out when and where to set up clinics.

“We need health care providers to be able to say: ‘We’re going to come, we’re going to bring the vaccine, we’re going to bring the vaccinators and be able to stand up a pop-up vaccination event where you are,’” she said.

Sr. Mary said she is hopeful that the ministry’s grassroots efforts will help “develop a pattern of engagement that will carry us

WE HOPE YOU’LL JOIN US ONLINE! LEARN MORE AT CHAUSA.ORG/COMMUNITYBENEFIT101

July 1, 2021 CATHOLIC HEALTH WORLD

CHA leaders take stock From page 1

Uncharted waters of the pandemic Launching the assembly, Sr. Mary invited attendees to “celebrate all that you’ve accomplished and draw strength and inspiration from one another as colleagues and friends in a shared mission.”

She recalled that when the ministry gathered virtually a year ago for the 2020 assembly, providers were navigating the “turbulent and uncharted waters of the pandemic,” challenged with supply shortages, operational disruptions and exhaustion.

She said “tired, but undaunted,” ministry colleagues carried out the healing mission. Many were “accompanying the dying in the last moments of their lives when their families couldn’t be there — providing care despite great risk to yourself and your loved ones.”

She expressed gratitude, saying courage and compassion define the people of Catholic health care and set it apart.

Tearing down unjust structures Responding to COVID built grit and flexibility throughout the ministry — attributes Sr. Mary said will propel We Are Called, Catholic health care’s ministry-wide, multiyear effort to confront racism by addressing health disparities and promoting racial and social justice.

Manas is president of Ascension St. Vincent’s North Region, part of Ascension Indiana. During her “year-in-review” talk June 14, she explained that much work to address disparities and promote justice already had been underway throughout the ministry well before COVID-19 hit. But the pandemic put in stark relief how much work still needs to be done to address significant gaps in care and outcomes. That, plus the summer 2020 outcry for racial justice, compelled the CHA board to build the new framework for how CHA members can drive best practices in addressing inequity, Manas said. She recalled that a “remarkable” outward sign of CHA members’

Advocacy for migrants From page 1

González was one of two speakers in the assembly’s closing session on the roots, realities and response to migration by the poor seeking safety and opportunity. She is a researcher and human rights advocate for ERIC-SJ, a Jesuit social institution in Honduras. She was joined by Teresa Welsh, a senior reporter at Devex, a media platform for the global development community.

Welsh’s coverage areas include refugees, migration and food insecurity.

The speakers enumerated the conditions that cause migrants to leave the Northern Triangle: Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. González referred to increased U.S. funding for security and the military for the purpose of halting drug trafficking. She contends that money, as well as financial aid for COVID response, has been misappropriated by national and local officials in these countries. She also asserted that attempts to curb corruption at the national and local level have been ineffective.

Welsh emphasized that climate change had led many people to abandon farming, which in turn has exacerbated food insecurity throughout the region. The damage from a pair of hurricanes in the fall magnified both issues.

“Millions affected in Central America had livelihoods wiped out, agricultural fields wiped out. Homes, schools and infrastructure were destroyed,” she said. “Many people endure a layered experience that

Karen Elshout/© CHA

why the ministry should focus its policy and program initiatives on improving conditions for vulnerable, medically underserved populations.

Sr. Mary Haddad, RSM, CHA president and chief executive officer, and Brian Reardon, CHA vice president, communications and marketing, chat on the set of the St. Louis production studio that broadcast the 2021 virtual Catholic Health Assembly.

commitment came when ministry leaders signed the Confronting Racism by Achieving Health Equity pledge.

In remarks during the assembly, Sr. Mary said the ministry will be increasing its focus on addressing the social determinants of health and eradicating the “unjust structures that oppress many of God’s children in our country and around the world.” The ministry won’t do this work alone. It will increase its work with community-level organizations and its knowledge of communities. “We can’t understand health equity if we don’t understand community,” she said.

and impactful change. They are investing in the public health system, reconfiguring hospital services for better efficiency and improved care delivery, leveraging technology and innovation in the most effective way, strengthening primary care and transitioning to a greater degree to value-based care.

Medows said all such work will be grounded in ministry members’ mission, vision and values. She said it will be necessary to anticipate and ward off external pressures that will be barriers to this work, and she said the tactics will need to be adaptable to evolving conditions.

Aiding vulnerable populations Medows is Providence St. Joseph Health president of population health management. During a June 15 address, she delineated five population health challenges of most concern to her: promoting health equity for vulnerable populations, investing in rural health care, bolstering eldercare, improving the delivery of mental health care, and addressing the needs of children suffering the fallout of the pandemic.

Medows then described five ways that the ministry can undertake meaningful

Partnering for change In her June 14 state of the association talk, Sr. Mary expanded upon some of the priorities ahead for CHA in the 2021-2022 fiscal year. On the federal level, the health equity initiative will include advocacy

makes it untenable to stay.”

González cheered the proposed Honduras Human Rights and Anti-Corruption Act of 2021, which she said “shines a spotlight on behaviors that have too often been excused by U.S. administrations. We believe that this is an excellent first step, and we trust that it will not remain just a proposal, but it can be approved and implemented.”

Both speakers highlighted the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, a multifaceted bill put forward by the Biden administration on its first day in office and endorsed

by CHA. González views as “a source for hope” the fact that administration officials seem to have learned from failed attempts at immigration reform. Welsh said the bill could ease the flow of immigrants because it would establish asylum centers in home countries so people could file paperwork requesting a refugee status determination without making the journey to the southern U.S. border. The bill also contains a fouryear, $4 billion plan to address violence, poverty and corruption in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Welsh, however, found that timeline for fixing root causes of mass migration unrealistic.

“Experts say it can take up to a decade to see the effects of foreign assistance on the ground if we’re looking at reducing migration as the metric of success,” she said.

“We’ve gotten into this oscillation of taking funding away and giving it back. Some of the root problems are endemic. They can be solved, but we have to recognize how long that can take.”

11

to expand health coverage subsidies, to increase Medicaid funding and coverage and to bolster safety net programs.

The pandemic has increased awareness of what it means to be a global community, Sr. Mary said during a brief interlude June 14 in which she answered questions from assembly co-host Carol Daniel, a broadcast journalist in St. Louis. The Vatican, through the work of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, is a key advocate for global health equity. Sr. Mary is a member of that dicastery representing the Catholic health ministry.

“Jesus walked the face of the Earth and told us very clearly we are all God’s children,” Sr. Mary said. “If we don’t come together collectively, we’ll never address the crisis the world faces.”

CHA supports the Biden administration’s decision to bring the U.S. back into the World Health Organization, its pursuit of comprehensive immigration reform and its urgent attention to climate change concerns. The association also is advocating for equitable global vaccine distribution. “No one is safe unless all are safe,” Sr. Mary said.

“Together, we’ve achieved many great things,” she said, but “our best days are before us.”

KEEPING UP ADMINISTRATIVE CHANGES Gift Matemba-Mutasa to senior vice president for marketing for Benedictine of Duluth, Minnesota.

Jennifer Newburger to vice president of quality improvement and safety for Covenant Health of Tewksbury, Massachusetts.

Newburger

ANNIVERSARY French Hospital Medical Center, San Luis Obispo, California, 75 years.

Bishop Sylvain of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, dies at age 58 Bishop Ducange Sylvain, 58, died June 8 at Mirebalais University Hospital in Haiti. According to the Haiti Libre news outlet, Bishop Sylvain had been hospitalized there for a week, following respiratory complications related to COVID-19.

A priest with the SaleBishop Sylvain sians of Saint John Bosco, Bishop Sylvain was auxiliary bishop of

the Archdiocese of Port-au-Prince since 2016. CHA worked with Bishop Sylvain after the opening of the new St. Francis de Sales Hospital in Port-au-Prince. A massive earthquake destroyed the hospital in 2010, and CHA member organizations contributed $10.1 million to fund construction of a replacement hospital and clinic compound. The 200-bed hospital, dedicated in 2015, is owned and governed by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Port-au-Prince.

Chief of Staff CHA seeks a chief of staff. This position will support the president and chief executive officer and coordinate with the senior leadership team to maximize the effective management of the office of the president/CEO. The chief of staff will balance a mix of strategic and programmatic responsibilities and will work closely with leadership to coordinate, align, and build cohesion across the organization and to advance the organization’s priorities. The chief of staff will act as a key communicator linking the leadership with the broader organization. The chief of staff also leads specific initiatives at the direction of the president/CEO. The chief of staff will be based in CHA’s Washington, D.C., office. Some travel is required.

The Catholic health ministry is the largest group of nonprofit health care providers in the nation and is composed of more than 600 hospitals and 1,600 long-term care and other health facilities. To ensure vital sponsorship and a vibrant future for the Catholic health ministry, CHA advocates with Congress, the administration, federal agencies, and influential policy organizations to ensure that the nation’s health systems provide quality and affordable care across the continuum of health care delivery.

CHA is seeking candidates with a minimum of five years’ progressive management experience and relevant and progressively responsible professional experience in communications and/or public relations in a health-related field. Five years’ experience as chief of staff or special assistant to the president preferred. This position requires a minimum of a master’s degree in business, health, related field, or equivalent experience.

To view a more detailed posting for this position, visit the careers page on chausa.org.

Interested parties should direct resumes to:.

Cara Brouder, Senior Director, Human Resources Catholic Health Association 4455 Woodson Rd. St. Louis, MO 63134 Phone: 314-427-2500 For consideration, please email your resume to HR@chausa.org We are an Equal Employment Opportunity employer.

12

CATHOLIC HEALTH WORLD July 1, 2021

Pandemic exigencies speed development of technologies, products

By JULIE MINDA

When it became clear in early 2020 that the coronavirus could slam into the nation’s health care system with the force of a tsunami, executives and staff at the La Palma, California-based Innovation Institute and at its affiliated Newport Beach, California, Innovation Lab assembled on a weekend videoconference to brainstorm about how the institute could use its expertise to help health care providers.

The group tossed out thoughts about how to significantly speed up or adapt the development of technologies, products and ideas in the lab’s pipeline that would be of most benefit to patients and clinicians during the pandemic. One product the team fast-tracked — a closed-circuit valve for use in the care of patients on ventilators — had been in development for decades and had been in a refinement process in the Innovation Lab since 2019.

Clinicians use ports in the valve to add equipment such as resuscitation bags or suction catheter systems and are able to do From left, Matthew Ibarra, Dr. Afshin Nadershahi and Ryan Kelly are shown during filming of training vidso without temporarily disconnecting the eos on the BayWin valve. The May 2020 filming was at Orange Coast College in Southern California. Ibarra ventilator. (See sidebar.) is a design manager at the Innovation Lab; Nadershahi was executive director of clinical and market intelThe Innovation Lab put the product ligence at the time; and Kelly is the lab’s general manager. development process in high gear. Within seven weeks, it Koazie, a digital platform where health care had a finished product and staff, patients and patients’ families can had shipped almost 5,000 of search local nursing homes to see which the valves out to some of its have open beds, which have the highest member hospitals. Francisquality ratings and which have the features can Missionaries of Our Lady the patient is looking for.

Health System, Avera Health, Thai worked with the Innovation Lab to Bon Secours Mercy Health refine the product and began rolling it out and Providence St. Joseph This image from a demonstration video shows the BayWin Closed on a limited basis about two years ago. It Health’s Covenant Health Circuit Valve in use during manual ventilation. The Innovation Lab pulls in publicly available information such used the valve and their cli- helped to refine the valve and made it available to hospitals duras nursing homes’ contact information and nicians provided the lab with ing the pandemic.

Medicare quality ratings. Nursing homes feedback about the product’s can pay a subscription that enables them to efficacy. the valve and gave input while it was being add additional information, such as marketThrough their involvement in the Inno- refined. ing language and facility photos. vation Lab as well as through independent Thai says during the surge in COVID-19 efforts, these Catholic health systems and Care handoff in Southern California it was extremely chalfacilities have proven to be fertile ground Dr. Michelle Thai is medical director lenging to figure out which nursing homes for invention during the pandemic. (The for a rehabilitation program at Providence were admitting patients and what their Innovation Institute was spun off from St. St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, Cali- admission policies were, given evolving Joseph Health, a legacy system of Provifornia. About five years COVID-19 protocols. dence, in 2013.) ago, frustrated by how The Thais and Innovation Lab staff “When it’s routine business, everyone difficult it was for her and assigned to Koazie contacted nursing sticks to a routine, but when COVID hit, other staff to locate high- homes to ask them to add bed availability that routine was disrupted, and everyquality nursing homes for information and COVID-19 policy details one’s eyes were opened to being innovapatients being discharged, to their Koazie profiles. A COVID-19 edutive,” says Dr. Hollis O’Neal, a pulmonary she began working with cation section was added to the Koazie site and critical care medicine specialist at Thai her son Johnathan Thai, a for patients and families to counter confuBaton Rouge, Louisiana’s Our Lady of the computer science gradu- sion and misinformation that have been Lake Regional Medical Center. He used ate, on a solution. The duo developed rampant.

Closed-circuit valve protects patients and clinicians

T

he closed-circuit valve that the Innovation Lab and its member health systems sped to market during the pandemic has multiple benefits for care delivery. Chief among them: It enables clinicians to perform certain treatments or turn a patient without first having to disconnect the ventilator tubing and flow of oxygen.

Dr. Harry Bayron, a retired pediatric cardiologist, and Neil Winthrop, a respiratory therapist, came up with the concept for the valve, eventually partnering with the Innovation Lab to refine the design.

The BayWin Closed Circuit Valve has multiple ports that clinicians can easily open and close so that the ventilator circuit need not be broken when new devices are added or taken away during patient treatments. Some of the ports allow connection of equipment such as resuscitation bags for manual respiration.

Dr. Hollis O’Neal, a pulmonary and critical care The BayWin Closed Circuit Valve medicine specialist at Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, says the device increases maneuverability when turning a ventilator patient onto their stomach to improve oxygenation. That proning procedure came to be used commonly with COVID patients.

Like O’Neal, Dr. Anthony Hericks, director of respiratory and critical care at Avera McKennan Hospital & University Health Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, field tested the valve and provided input on its functionality. He says there is an increased risk of pneumonia and other infections when traditional valves are disconnected — the BayWin valve aims to reduce that risk. He adds that when traditional valves, which are located near the patient’s airway, are disconnected, patient respiration can become aerosolized and airborne. With a highly infectious condition like COVID, this increases the infection risk for nearby clinicians.

— JULIE MINDA

Chatty Grace Maryam Gholami is senior vice president and chief product and technology officer at Providence Digital Innovation Group. She says in mid-March 2020 Providence prioritized a COVID-19 update of a chatbot called Grace that the Digital Innovation Group had been working on since 2018.

Providence’s prodGholami uct development team used artificial intelligence and natural language processing to develop software with a symptom-checking feature that could answer patient questions about common, low-acuity conditions such as flu. The chatbot can connect with Providence appointment scheduling software, and — based on patients’ symptoms and conditions, appointment availability and wait time — recommend care options.

These options can include virtual and in-person visits. The chatbot also can book appointments for patients. For COVID-19 specifically, Grace provides the option to choose on-demand virtual visits and lets the providers know that the patient has been pre-triaged for COVID-19 using the chatbot’s assessment flow.

Gholami says the Digital Innovation Group recognized Grace’s potential utility

during the pandemic, when people were highly concerned about any symptoms they were experiencing, didn’t know whether they should be tested for COVID-19 and were confused by conflicting information they were receiving from various outlets about the virus. Overtaxed clinicians were ill equipped to field all the incoming calls about the virus.

Working with Microsoft and other technology companies, the Digital Innovation Group spent long hours in March 2020 “teaching” Grace to field questions about COVID-19 and testing the chatbot for prime time. The team completed the retool within a week.

Since its update, the chatbot has answered questions from more than 370,000 people. Gholami notes that Grace also has supplied Providence with vital information. By analyzing Grace’s millions of chat session notes with analytics software, Providence can detect patterns in what people are asking about and can in some cases predict emerging concerns. For instance, Providence was able to determine when people were growing worried about reports of serious but rare COVID-19 vaccination side effects, especially after the second dose.

Heat maps Dr. Ari Robicsek, Providence chief medical analytics officer, said at the start of the pandemic people had a lot of questions about what they should and shouldn’t do to reduce their risk of contracting COVID-19. Was it OK to visit a friend indoors?

Was it safe to have an inperson socially distanced meeting?

Robicsek Robicsek, an epidemiologist, says the answer to many such questions is contingent upon the level of viral caseload in a person’s potential destination.

However, he adds, the county-level maps available in the U.S. that plot viral spread are based on potentially outdated information and are too geographically broad to be of use to consumers during the pandmic.

His team devised a platform that aggregates Providence patients’ COVID-19 test results and symptom notes from their clinicians mined from the electronic medical record system. It matches that information to the patients’ home addresses, deidentifies the data and plots it to a heat map that uses color intensity to show a neighborhood’s level of infection for a specific timeframe.

Robicsek says Providence publishes the heat maps online as a public service. He sees many potential uses for the platform for mapping other infectious diseases. He adds that Providence employed a third-party vendor to crack the deidentification privacy protection as a test of its security, and they could not.

“They say to never let a crisis go to waste, and we found this crisis was an opportunity to learn to do something we’d never done before” to benefit the community, Robicsek says. “We learned a lot about how to present data to the public at the right level and with the right level of privacy.”

Vaccine passports As the number of vaccinated individuals grew in the spring and “vaccine passports” entered the vernacular, Lumedic, a Providence company, adapted an app to create a type of vaccine wallet for patients. The Lumedic app that will soon be available to Providence patients throughout that health system’s seven-state service area allows users to access their vaccination records from the Providence electronic medical record and their state’s vaccine registry.

Lumedic plans to expand the app’s features beyond COVID-19 vaccination verification in the future, to give patients the choice to access other medical records and information, and is expanding beyond Providence to offer it to other systems.