Sometimes the title of a podcast picks itself. Today, our two favorite outspoken insiders, Kim Fox, and Tim Stewart, take on the vaccine rollout. It’s been rocky, and there’s plenty of blame to go around, but there’s still time for hospitals, health systems and other healthcare providers to swerve around the potholes.
Be sure to listen and subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
That’s the acceptance rate for the COVID-19 vaccine at Glens Falls Hospital in Upstate New York. Moreover, the organization has already completed its administration of first doses. Remarkable milestones, certainly.
Glens Falls has some advantages – most significant being that it’s a small hospital with 400 beds and 2,500 employees. Even so, the level of vaccine acceptance among the employee base is stunning – especially in comparison to nearby hospitals that are sitting at 50 to 60 percent.
We wanted to know how they did it, so we chatted with Ray Agnew, vice president of hospital and community engagement, who explained his organization’s secret sauce. (See video for full conversation). Here are his top takes:
As the healthcare industry begins mobilizing for the massive vaccine push, every move that providers make is under scrutiny. Yes, caution is warranted. But you can’t be cagey. In this tense moment, you must carefully calibrate words and actions to provide clarity without going too far.
Our most important communications advice here: Don’t make promises or statements that suggest your organization has signed off on the safety of vaccines. Instead, cite authorities and couch safety statements in terms of the information you’re relying on from other others: “We only recommend vaccines that are deemed to be safe by their developers and the CDC…” Then, explain what those organizations have found and how they reached their conclusions. Don’t put yourself in the risky position of affirming safety – talk to your counsel to see where you could end up with legal liability.
Other tips to help you walk the line of responsible transparency:
Don’t shoot yourself in the foot. Consider this: A $15 billion merger was just wrecked because a CEO bragged about leaving his mask at home. Foolish behavior won’t be tolerated – whether that’s hypocrisy from leaders or legally loose promises. Be careful, be responsible. Think before you speak.
Yes, HHS, CMS and DoD have developed a skeleton plan for distribution and monitoring. But there’s no unified playbook for getting hundreds of millions of Americans inoculated against SARS-CoV-2. Detailed decision-making has been left to states. Some have chosen to be hands-on in their recommendations and others are taking a back seat, tossing the operational hot potato to providers themselves.
The resulting patchwork of guidance complicates the already daunting task facing healthcare providers charged with the quick and efficient administration of whatever doses are allotted to them. With that responsibility and a compressed timeline, we turned to Roger Ray, M.D., the chief physician executive at The Chartis Group, for how healthcare executives can act quickly and responsibly without clear guidance. Then we added a couple of notes regarding the communication of your plan.
We pride ourselves in looking around corners here at Jarrard Inc., but even we aren’t 100% sure where we’ll all end up. Still, we’ve got a lot of thoughts on the types of conversations that will be taking place around the election and healthcare. That includes some of the hotspots that will erupt but, maybe more importantly, areas where providers could temper their expectations – things aren’t going to happen overnight. (Probably.)
We got our in-house political junkies together to riff on what’s going on. Here, we’ve taken some highlights from that roundtable discussion. The conversation was moderated by our CEO David Jarrard. Joining him were vice president in our Regional Practice Justin Gibbs, senior vice president in our National Practice Tim Stewart, and partner and COO Kevin Phillips.
Justin Gibbs: The short answer is no. Nobody’s diving into the policy weeds of how care is going to be paid for what it’s going to look like in the future. The president is not a policy heavy kind of guy and given Joe Biden the luxury of not having to be a policy heavy guy.
Kevin Phillips: Kaiser Family Foundation did a poll a couple of weeks ago that rated the most important issues for voters in this cycle. Healthcare came in fifth – and that separated out COVID-19, which came in second behind economy. In contrast, healthcare was the number one issue on voters’ minds in February. And the percentage of Republicans who say that the repeal of the ACA is very important has dropped from around 30 percent in 2016 to five percent today.
Kevin Phillips: Civil unrest, racial justice and the economy jumped into the top spots. They’re dominating. Even COVID-19 is starting to decline.
Tim Stewart: I’m not sure it says anything about healthcare. I think healthcare has probably stayed the same and it just underscores the seriousness of everything else happening across society.
Kevin Phillips: Two things: With Kamala Harris on the ticket Medicare for All could come back up. And with the passing of Justice Ginsburg and the upcoming hearing for Texas v California, repeal of the individual mandate could return as a political issue.
Tim Stewart: If Biden wins, it’s not going to be his first priority. It wouldn’t be even in a world where we didn’t have COVID-19. It would be foolish for a Democratic president, even with a Democratic Congress, to pursue a major overhaul of healthcare as their first priority, because it would end up being their only priority.
Justin Gibbs: If Biden is elected and the Democrats keep the House and take the Senate, it’s plausible that Biden will be pushed to push towards Medicare for All. I agree that it’s not a first priority because we’ve got to get the economy back on track and that’s where I would spend my political capital, but the left wing of the party is going to be pushing hard for this. It took a unified government to get the ACA passed 10 years ago. It’s going to take the same now and they won’t want to miss their chance.
Justin Gibbs: Providers have to enter the fray but in a way that rises above politics. They need to talk about their mission and delivering on that mission for their employees, for their patients, for the communities that they serve. They shouldn’t get into specifics of a particular plan. Keep in mind Obama was sworn in January 2009 and the Affordable Care Act didn’t become law until March of 2010. So regardless of who the next president it is, it’s going to be a while before there are any big sweeping changes.
Tim Stewart: Take it out of national politics. The bill is going to come due on a lot of this year starting next year. What does this look like when patients are receiving literal bills for COVID-19 tests they thought were covered care? And then all of the care that people have put off this year. It seems like somebody is going to get blamed for the costs that individuals and groups are going to incur.
Justin Gibbs: The big insurance companies, all posted record gains over the course of the last few financial quarters. At a time when the economy is struggling, when people are struggling, and out of work, it doesn’t pass the smell test for insurance companies to be making the amount of money they are making and then sticking patients with huge bills. That’s an important narrative for hospitals to continue.
It’s also important to continue outreach to your state and federal legislative delegations to continue the conversation about all of these bills coming due – including the advance payment for Medicare. If we’re looking for a bipartisan issue here, Democrats and Republicans have both been working to make sure that hospitals have the resources that they need to continue.
Justin Gibbs: Leaders of provider organizations need to be having concerted conversations with their employees about funding because those employees represent a huge voter block and nothing speaks to elected leaders like a base of support from the people who keep them or kick them out of office. They also need to have that conversation with the media as much as they can.
Justin Gibbs: There doesn’t need to be anything ideological about it. It’s straightforward: This is the revenue that was forfeited to prepare for and provide care during the pandemic, this is the assistance that we’ve gotten to date and here’s the gap. We’re doing everything we can to absorb that, and in the future, we may be looking to you for help advocating for our organization.
David Jarrard: So you activate that support and you get to turn it into something for it to become a political force that will get you more financial support.
