Latest / Becker’s Healthcare Digital Health + Health IT / Dr. Shlomit Schaal, CEO of Houston Methodist Physician Organization

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Dr. Shlomit Schaal, CEO of Houston Methodist Physician Organization · Becker’s Healthcare Digital Health + Health IT

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Welcome to the Becker's Healthcare podcast. I'm Mariah
1:17
Taylor, assistant editor, and I'm thrilled to interview
1:20
Shlomit Shaul, chief physician executive at Houston Methodist
1:24
and president and chief executive officer at Houston
1:27
Methodist Physician Organization
1:29
on the podcast today. Doctor Schall, thank you
1:32
so much for joining me. I'm so excited
1:33
for this conversation because you're one of our
1:35
upcoming panelists at our CEO CFO conference, and
1:39
we're really excited to get a sneak peek
1:40
into some of your thought leadership.
1:42
But before we dive in, I'd love if
1:44
you could introduce yourself and tell us a
1:46
little bit more about your background.
1:48
Alright. Thank you so much for having me
1:50
today.
1:51
I'm Shlomi Chal. I'm a chief physician executive
1:54
here at Houston Methodist. I'm also the CEO
1:57
of our physician organization here at Houston Methodist.
2:01
And, as a background, I'm a clinician scientist.
2:05
I'm a retina surgeon.
2:07
I've been in academic medicine my entire
2:10
lifetime.
2:12
Maybe you can hear a little bit of
2:14
an accent in my voice,
2:16
maybe a lot. I, made a journey all
2:20
the way from Israel to Kentucky
2:23
through Massachusetts
2:24
where I was the chair of the Department
2:26
of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences
2:29
at University of Massachusetts.
2:31
And then,
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that was
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really
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recent
2:36
a year and a half ago
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and
2:40
also was the President
2:42
of the Medical Group at UMASS Memorial Medical
2:45
Group. I moved to Houston, Texas about a
2:48
year and a half ago
2:50
and to take this job.
2:53
And I'm really enjoying my time here, especially
2:56
now that we're talking in August, which is
2:59
the hottest month of the year here and
3:01
the most human humid one in Houston.
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Oh, I can only imagine.
3:06
Tell me a little bit about your most
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successful project or initiative from the last year.
3:11
What did you do and what were the
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results?
3:14
So in my role here, I am responsible,
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for everything to do
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quality and patient safety in our entire organization.
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That means all our hospitals and our clinics
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in our Greater Houston.
3:30
I'm also
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responsible,
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for our physician organization.
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So I'm new to the organization, relatively new
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to the organization
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and it's a great organization.
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I'm sure you know that Houston Methodist is
3:44
really a leader in quality patient safety. We
3:47
are really leading also in
3:50
our employee engagement.
3:53
So we call ourselves leading medicine and as
3:56
an executive, when you join such a strong
3:59
team,
4:01
and your job as an executive is to
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make the organization
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even better than it is,
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because really in healthcare, we always
4:10
are on a journey to keep improving and
4:12
getting better.
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How do you do that?
4:15
And what I did together with my team,
4:18
my excellent
4:19
new team that actually I inherited
4:22
when I started here,
4:25
we went on a listening and learning tour
4:28
through the entire organization. At the beginning, we
4:30
did it
4:32
with focus on quality and patient safety.
4:36
And then
4:37
this year,
4:39
this 2024
4:40
year, we actually focused on something that is
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very close to my heart,
4:45
which is
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wellness and physicians, specifically physician well-being
4:51
physician and clinicians. So it's physicians and APPs.
4:54
And what we wanted to know is really
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how are we doing here at Houston Methodist
5:02
and what could we do possibly better
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to make our physicians,
5:08
clinicians and care providers
5:11
better because I truly believe that this is
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in high correlation
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with quality of care. If you have a
5:19
highly engaged physician, highly engaged clinician, they're going
5:22
to deliver
5:25
better quality and safer care to our patients.
5:27
So this became a high priority
5:30
in our physician organization
5:32
this year.
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And what we did, we went on a
5:35
tour and we call it a JIMMY tour.
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We're very proud of the name. JIMMY is
5:42
Joy in Medicine
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Initiative.
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We went on that JIMMY tour and we
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started we focused on our primary care physicians.
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And
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you think about why are we focusing on
5:54
primary care, because primary care physicians are really
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the door
5:59
to our organization.
6:01
A lot of our patients
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door
6:04
to our organization. A lot of our patients
6:06
are referred to our specialty physicians through our
6:09
primary care providers.
6:11
And I wanted to take a chance to
6:13
take the opportunity and get to know them
6:15
better.
6:17
And together with my team and our executive
6:20
team at the physician organization,
6:22
we went
6:23
from site to site
6:26
and met
6:27
in person
6:29
with
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all of our primary care providers.
6:33
These are both physicians and APPs and we
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really asked 3 questions. We asked,
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what are you doing here? Who are you?
6:40
Get to know them. The second question is,
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what's good here at Houston Methodist?
6:45
And then the third question is, what could
6:47
we do better?
6:49
And this was really a humble tour. I
6:51
came from a place that I thought even
6:54
though I'm 30
6:56
years in medicine and in academic medicine and
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I'm a clinician and a surgeon,
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I came from a place of I do
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not know anything about Houston Methodist.
7:07
Tell me how it is to be here
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and help me
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make your life better.
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So it was really,
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a wonderful
7:15
tour where people told us what's good about
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us and what could
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we do better.
7:22
And that helped us devise a
7:28
strategy for our physician
7:29
organization in terms of wellness.
7:32
Now we just didn't only
7:34
we're not only satisfied with these person, because
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these are group meetings, sometimes it was small
7:37
group, sometimes it was bigger groups, our smallest
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group was maybe 14 people, the biggest group
7:43
was more than 80.
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So we didn't
7:52
just settle for these in person meetings. We
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also used
7:57
a press gaining tool called
8:00
crowdsourcing
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where we could get ideas
8:04
from our own
8:06
physicians
8:07
and APPs
8:08
of how to what to focus on in
8:11
our strategy
8:12
to make their
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lives better here
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as clinicians in Houston Methodist.
8:20
And now we are in the process
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of getting information
8:25
from Jimmy Tour, from our crowdsourcing
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and also from
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surveys that we distributed.
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And this is a survey
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out of PWAAC. PWAAC,
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I'm sure you know, but PWAAC is a
8:40
professional well-being and academic consortium
8:43
that is led
8:45
by
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Stanford, but many
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healthcare systems and academic healthcare systems in particular
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are part of PWAs because physician well-being
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is a national
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priority, I would say. We are not the
9:00
only ones who are focusing on it.
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And there is no silver bullet that can
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solve
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the situation. So we
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aligned ourselves with PWAC. We
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distributed their survey
9:16
as really a site in a national survey
9:19
that is distributed
9:20
every year
9:22
in many academic healthcare systems. So
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to devise the strategy,
9:27
we are taking input from this 1 on
9:29
1 meetings in person,
9:31
from the
9:33
crowdsourcing
9:34
and also
9:36
from
9:36
the
9:37
PWAC
9:38
survey.
9:39
And we are going to have
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a big first inaugural
9:44
Jimmy Symposium
9:46
on November 1. If you want to come
9:47
to Houston, Mariah, I'm inviting you.
9:50
And we will
9:53
really
9:54
unveil
9:55
what our strategy is. What I can tell
9:58
you as a preview
9:59
is that we are focusing on really 3
10:02
major things.
10:03
One big thing is efficiency
10:05
of practice.
10:07
We heard so many times from our physicians
10:09
that a good day is a day that
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starts on time,
10:13
that all the patients show up, that our
10:16
physicians
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are able to work at the top of
10:20
their license and deliver care and everything is
10:23
running smoothly.
10:25
And as we know
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an integral part of our work as physicians
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is really technology.
10:31
So
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we in the physician organization are
10:35
here at Houston Methodist, we are focused on
10:38
acquiring
10:39
and piloting technologies to make
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the life of our physicians better. Something like
10:46
some technologies for example
10:48
like ambient listening
10:50
where you don't have to document while you're
10:52
with the patient.
10:54
There is
10:55
an artificial intelligence
10:58
voice recognition
10:59
software
11:00
that really documents
11:02
for you. And we have already
11:05
piloted that and are piloting different
11:07
companies and so far it's been a tremendous
11:12
response
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from our physicians, but not only from our
11:15
physicians,
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all of the teams that are taking care
11:17
of patients.
11:18
And there are other examples, but this is
11:20
one efficiency of practice.
11:22
The other thing is
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personal resilience.
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And when we talk about personal resilience and
11:28
you read the literature,
11:31
personal resilience is not only delivering
11:34
yoga lessons
11:37
and community events and book clubs. We are
11:39
doing all this, but this is also something
11:42
that we discovered during our tour.
11:45
Personal resilience is also to teach our physicians
11:49
how
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to delegate
11:51
and trust others
11:52
and feel that they can let go when
11:55
they are on vacations, when they are using
11:57
their time off from their organization
12:00
that they feel that it's okay to trust
12:02
somebody else
12:03
to take care of their patients while they're
12:06
gone.
12:07
And
12:09
it's very telling that our physicians take their
12:13
laptops everywhere and they really can't feel that
12:16
they can't
12:17
really connect. So we are going to help
12:19
with that
12:20
and
12:21
it's really a priority for us to teach
12:24
these behaviors, so they can recover,
12:27
because our physicians are human beings like all
12:30
of us. We are all human beings and
12:32
we all need to unplug
12:34
sometimes. And then the third thing, we said
12:36
efficiency of practice, we said personal resilience. The
12:39
third thing is really the culture of wellness.
12:43
I really want everybody to know that here
12:45
at Houston Methodist Physician Organization,
12:48
we care
12:49
not only about the patients and their family,
12:52
which is obvious, this is why we exist,
12:55
but we also care deeply about
12:58
our people, the people who work for us
13:00
at the physician organization. And this is including
13:03
physician, but not only physician, everybody that is
13:06
our employee,
13:07
we care about them because caring for our
13:09
employees
13:10
translates into good care for our patients. So
13:14
this was a long way of answering your
13:16
question
13:17
about a successful project
13:19
from the last year.
13:22
Excellent. Looking ahead, what is the biggest challenge
13:25
you're expecting to face in the next year
13:26
and how are you preparing?
13:29
So one thing that is,
13:31
really,
13:32
important to me personally because I have experienced
13:35
this on my,
13:36
my own skin if you will, is really
13:39
preparing
13:41
the leaders of the next generation, specifically physician
13:44
leaders.
13:46
A lot of time
13:49
when we choose physician leaders,
13:52
we just take the most experienced one,
13:55
maybe the most dominant ones, maybe the one
13:58
who speak louder or care the most.
14:02
But to me,
14:04
physician leaders can come
14:07
from anywhere in the organization.
14:09
They don't need to be the loudest. They
14:12
don't need to be the ones that are
14:14
close maybe to the
14:15
senior executive team. They can come from anywhere
14:19
and they can really make a big
14:21
difference in our organization.
14:23
But
14:25
usually
14:26
when somebody finishes,
14:27
graduates from medical schools, go through internships,
14:32
fellowships
14:33
and then becomes an attending,
14:36
they don't they're not trained
14:39
we as physicians are not trained to be
14:42
leaders.
14:44
And
14:45
once we are looking to identify
14:48
a leader within our organization,
14:50
it may be
14:52
a hit or miss.
14:54
Usually, they are very good people, but there's
14:57
a difference between being a good person or
14:59
a good physician or a good surgeon
15:02
and a good
15:03
leader. Really leadership, I truly believe is something
15:06
that can be learned, that should be learned.
15:08
It's an expertise
15:10
like every other profession.
15:13
And so
15:15
in this
15:17
year 2025,
15:19
we're going to focus on physician leadership
15:22
development. We're going to do it in really
15:24
3 different
15:26
avenues. 1
15:28
is focusing on our employed physicians,
15:31
physicians who are employed by the Houston Methodist
15:33
Physician Organization
15:35
and identify
15:36
people who want to become leaders or who
15:39
are already
15:41
leading in some capacity. They may be chief
15:43
quality officers. They
15:46
may have a responsibility as medical directors.
15:49
These physicians come from all over the Greater
15:52
Houston, from all
15:54
over our
15:56
healthcare system
15:57
and they come from different specialties.
15:59
They can be primary care, neurology, neurosurgery,
16:03
orthopedics, everything.
16:05
And we developed a nomination
16:08
process
16:09
and we're going to select
16:10
the best ones and this is a program
16:13
that we developed in collaboration
16:15
between
16:16
us
16:17
and Jones
16:18
Rice Jones Business School here in Houston.
16:22
We did
16:23
one
16:25
iteration of this
16:27
physician leadership program
16:29
this past year
16:31
and now we are improving it, enhancing it
16:34
and putting it into motion and we're going
16:37
to start another cohort of physician
16:41
leadership development
16:44
here in Houston starting in January 2025. So
16:47
very excited about that.
16:49
But not only that, we are
16:54
also
16:55
investing
16:56
in our existing leaders all the way up
16:59
to the level of department chairs
17:02
and also
17:03
department administrators. So we developed something that is
17:06
called
17:07
the Chair Academy and the Administrator
17:10
Academy.
17:11
And these
17:13
are really sessions
17:15
that are tailored
17:17
towards
17:18
our really senior
17:20
leaders. Department chairs are not
17:23
are not new in
17:26
their experience in this organization
17:28
or in their journey in medicine.
17:31
But we think that they still need to
17:34
learn and they can still develop. And also
17:36
perhaps most importantly,
17:39
we're going to give them the basic education
17:41
in parallel to their department administrators,
17:44
so we can align everybody
17:46
to become the best leaders that they can
17:49
be. And this is very important because
17:52
the entire organization
17:54
is inspired and moved forward
17:58
by leaders. And in order for the organization
18:01
to move straightforward
18:03
like a vector in one direction,
18:06
we need all our
18:07
leaders to be aligned. So last year, we
18:10
had 3 topics that we discussed in this
18:14
chair and
18:16
administrator academy. The 3 topics were leadership,
18:19
philanthropy and communications.
18:21
This was last year.
18:23
And this year, we already designed the 3
18:26
topics and these are going to be everything
18:29
that a leader needs to know about
18:31
human resources,
18:34
the art of storytelling,
18:36
how to give a presentation that is engaging.
18:39
And
18:40
the third topic is diversity, equity and inclusion.
18:43
And I have to say that these topics,
18:46
they came to us by the
18:49
our own leaders.
18:50
This is our own leaders, our own chair
18:53
saying I need more education and I need
18:56
more training
18:57
to know about these topics. So very excited
19:00
about this, and I think it's,
19:02
I'm looking forward to this in 2025.
19:05
Absolutely.
19:06
So many exciting things happening over there in
19:08
Houston. This has been such a great discussion,
19:12
and thank you for joining me on the
19:14
podcast today.
19:15
If you wanna catch more of doctor Shahl
19:18
at our upcoming
19:20
clinical leadership forum, you can join us at
19:22
Becker CEO and CFO roundtable November 11th through
19:25
14th in Chicago.
19:27
We have limited space available for attendees and
19:29
sponsors, so contact us at agenda team at
19:32
beckershealthcare.com
19:34
to learn more.