Seattle-based Fred Hutch Cancer Center is undertaking an enterprisewide, care delivery transformation as rising patient volumes, increasing clinical complexity and tightening margins strain traditional operating structures across the industry.
Nida Shekhani, chief strategy officer and deputy COO, is leading the effort — known as Project Redwood. The project is a fundamental redesign of care delivery across the organization. The initiative focuses on building a more integrated and durable clinical model, with changes spanning access and scheduling, care team design, capacity management and revenue cycle performance. The goal is to expand access for a growing and increasingly complex patient population while maintaining a sustainable workload for care teams.
Ms. Shekhani recently joined the “Becker’sHealthcare Podcast“ to discuss the challenges of such a large-scale clinical transformation and Fred Hutch’s vision for the future of cancer care.
Here is an excerpt from the conversation:
Editor’s note: This response was lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What is the biggest challenge you’re anticipating to tackle in the coming year?
Nida Shekhani: Now that we’ve moved to implementation [of Project Redwood], the hardest thing will be driving meaningful change, doing it at scale and doing it quickly — while we have the momentum. We’re in the middle of this major clinical transformation that, as you can imagine, requires asking high-performing teams to work differently. Change is not unknown to healthcare, but change fatigue is real across healthcare.
The first year of this, the hard part was making sure that we did the diagnostic appropriately and made the right key decisions. Now that we’re in implementation, that almost seems like that was easier. While transformation is exciting, the hardest part is disciplined implementation. As we implement, [we are] being very clear to so many people across the organization what we’re solving for. We’ve spent a lot of time bringing people along with us, being transparent about why we’re changing and that it’s not just growth for the sake of growing. It’s growth for all the things I talked about: to provide enhanced access, to enable our clinical research engine, to continue to be scalable in an environment that is volatile. As we continue down this path of implementation, one of the harder things for not just myself, but really hundreds of people within our organization, is being transparent, showing people what success looks like and how it benefits both patients and our team.
Listen to the full conversation here.
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