Penn State Health Aug. 24 town hall highlights Lancaster market, organizational goals, employee engagement and more
Penn State Health leaders discussed the health system’s growth in the Lancaster market, organizational goals and employee engagement, among other topics, during the Aug. 24 town hall. Steve Massini, Penn State Health chief executive officer, opened the gathering by welcoming the 1,638 new employees who have joined the health system since the last town hall on May 25.
Approximately 400 of those employees are from Penn State Health Lancaster Medical Center, which is set to open on Monday, Oct. 3. He provided a quick overview of the hospital and also highlighted the June opening of Penn State Health Children’s Lancaster Pediatric Center.
Watch the replay. (Click on the “CC” icon to activate closed-captioning.
Other questions will be answered in the next few weeks and added to the Q&A document, which is posted on the Office of the CEO Infonet page.
Massini reviewed Penn State Health’s strategic journey, which is now in the optimization phase. Part of that includes unifying electronic medical health record systems. Holy Spirit Medical Center will migrate to Cerner in October.
Briefly addressing the pandemic, Massini said that COVID-positive patients at Penn State Health’s four medical centers have been steady over the past few months. He said that the health system’s work with COVID prepared it well for monkeypox. To date, Penn State Health has tested 20 patients for the virus, with four confirmed positive. All have been treated and released.
Organizational goals
The health system achieved its 2022 organizational goals for quality and safety, as well as diversity and inclusion. Two goals that fell short of their marks were patient experience and financial performance.
“It was a tough year,” Massini said. “Inflation, supplies, shortages, use of agencies — all contributed to the challenges we had on the financial front. But we did have a positive operating margin of 1.5%,” he said, adding that the team’s work to have some margin that enabled the continued support of the health system’s mission and vision was “pretty incredible.”
Abdominal transplant program status
Deborah Addo, chief operating officer, discussed the status of Hershey Medical Center’s voluntarily paused abdominal transplant program. Massini shared that one of the issues that troubled him was staff did not feel comfortable raising their concerns about the program. He stressed that everyone in the organization has a responsibility to speak up when they observe something that concerns them. Employees can always raise issues with their manager, an upline senior leader or via the Penn State Health Compliance Hotline at 800-560-1637 or the online report, which has an option for anonymous reporting.
Employee engagement survey results
David Swift, senior vice president and chief human resources officer, provided an overview of the employee engagement survey results, stating that participation was good and that managers were finalizing their improvement plans. He said that the health system would focus on safety culture and respect. Swift also reminded town hall attendees that employee performance appraisals are due Friday, Sept. 16.
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