Penn State Health Oct. 11 town hall highlights Lancaster Medical Center, organizational goals, open enrollment and more

Penn State Health leaders discussed the health system’s progress with integration projects, fiscal year 2023 organizational goals and open enrollment, among other topics, during the Oct. 11 town hall. Steve Massini, Penn State Health chief executive officer, opened the gathering with a video of the ribbon-cutting celebration at Penn State Health Lancaster Medical Center. He thanked its staff, physicians and nurses and also “hundreds, if not thousands” of other Penn State Health employees who worked behind the scenes to get the hospital ready for patients Oct. 3.

Already a “significant number of patients” who’ve accessed care at Lancaster Medical Center have been transferred to Hershey Medical Center due to the level of specialty and subspecialty care they needed, Massini said.

Watch the replay. Click on “CC” to activate the closed-captioning.

Read employee questions answered during the town hall. Questions that were not answered during the meeting will be answered in the new few weeks and featured in a future edition of The RITE Stuff.

Shared mission

Massini stressed the shared mission between Penn State Health and Penn State College of Medicine, from the clinical care of patients to the research, education and community outreach the organizations are engaged in. “We cannot have a healthy clinical enterprise without also having a healthy College of Medicine, and we cannot have a healthy College of Medicine without a healthy clinical enterprise,” he said.

Massini provided a brief summary of Information Services’ ongoing integration projects. On Monday, Oct. 24, Holy Spirit Medical Center and outpatient locations will move to Penn State Health standard applications, services and technologies, including from Epic to the CareConnect (Cerner) electronic health record system.

Organizational goals

David Swift, senior vice president and chief human resources officer, highlighted Penn State Health’s 2023 organizational goals. Financially, the health system seeks to achieve a combined .50% operating margin across all entities so that it can continue to invest in patient care, discovery, education, community outreach and in its workforce.

Quality and safety goals vary by entity: Hershey and St. Joseph medical centers will focus on maintaining their level for prevention of serious safety events and lower their serious safety event rate, respectively. Hampden and Holy Spirit medical centers will work on training. Penn State Health Medical Group will strive to increase patient safety event reporting. Patient experience goals are to improve ratings by 2% across the whole health system. Lancaster Medical Center is still establishing its baselines and will not have a specific quality goal for this fiscal year.

Swift reviewed the health system’s goal to improve employee engagement and provide a culturally diverse and inclusive environment. Lynette Chappell-Williams, vice president and chief diversity officer, shared results from the employee engagement survey. “Although we’re doing well in a general sense to advance diversity and inclusion, there is a difference of perceptions in how we’re addressing it from a racial and ethnic perspective,” Chappell-Williams said.

Open enrollment

Jennifer Sarff, vice president of Human Resources, provided an overview of the 2023 Benefits Open Enrollment, launching Tuesday, Nov. 2 and continuing through Tuesday, Nov. 16. Despite the health system incurring a 13% increase in costs over the previous year, it will not increase rates for employees in 2023.

Other topics addressed included Penn State Health and the College of Medicine’s updated employee masking guidelines and the health system welcoming international nurses to its hospitals in the coming months and through 2023.

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