HJAR Mar/Apr 2022

DIALOGUE understandably, if they’re concerned about their loved one, they don’t want them to wait either, we have had to pay particular atten- tion to the environment and the dynamic between patients, visitors, and our staff because we know how difficult it is and what the circumstances may be that are keeping things backed up or delayed. But the public, they don’t always know that. Their expec- tations are going to be that maybe their experience will be like it was two years ago when they had to come to the ED, and, in this case, it might be slightly different given the capacity challenges that all of our hos- pitals have faced. One of the things we are currently focused on is improving the reporting and tracking of these events so that we can be more proactive in protecting our employees. Editor Baptist Health has been in growth mode for a while. Do you see that continu- ing? And what is the master plan? Wells Growth is difficult in an environment with slow population growth, if any, which is certainly the case in Arkansas. New ser- vices tend to drive growth, bring something new to a community that didn’t exist before. We’ll continue to do those things where we have resources and people and facilities and the ability to bring, whether it be new tech and new procedures, recruit physicians with skills that don’t exist today in our state so that we can provide new things to people that they need. We will continue to look for opportunities to expand our health sys- tem in the new communities where that makes sense. We’ve never been an aggres- sive growth type of health systemwhere we want to go compete aggressively with other health systems or hospitals, rather more about where’s a community need? Where can we use what we have to be helpful to people in the community? Sometimes that leads to growth. Sometimes it just moves what we do from one town to another. Growth is important in any business, but you don’t want more sick people so you can grow. That’s not what we’re after. Here’s the challenge: we do have more sick people with more chronic disease, in many cases, per capita than any place in the country. That is going to create the need for a lot of health- care. That’s problematic for those individu- als, and it puts stress on the health system. It costs a lot of money for those footing the bill, whether it be the state or the employer or the premium payers. There are going to be opportunities for growth; the key for us is to make sure we’re providing the things that are most needed by people in the com- munities and by our physicians. We’ve got to recruit well. We’ve got to make sure that we provide what our physicians want and need to care best for their patients. We want to make sure that where we are growing, we are growing because there’s a need, not growing because there’s an opportunity to make more money. That’s not what we do. And, we feel like if we are good at the things we do — we do themwell, it’s what is needed, what people need and communities need, what our physicians need — then we’ll con- tinue to grow. That’s our philosophy and what we try to do — look for those types of opportunities. Editor What do you think is the biggest nonemergent health challenge to our state? Wells Well, there’s a lot of ways I could go with this question. There are some clinical things, behavioral things that would prob- ably qualify for a nonurgent challenge. Take obesity, for example, and Type 2 diabetes, where we have really high rates in the state of Arkansas. Now, you could argue that Type 2 diabetes is a financial crisis and even clini- cal to those individuals today that have it. I don’t know that it’s not even worse, though, over time as you look ahead and if those rates continue to go up or not get better. Obesity is the same thing. It’s not a problem necessarily today for that school-aged child who’s gotten a bad start and is overweight at the age of five or six, but it’s going to be a problem when they’re 30 and 40 and 50. Part of the challenge ... and let me just talk for a minute about chronic disease because I think in Arkansas, that is one of our big- gest looming challenges, whether it be from a well-being perspective of the individual or whether it be from an employer perspective with workforce — if we have unhealthy pop- ulation, we have an unhealthy workforce that’s not going to be able to compete glob- ally the way we need to compete in our state. This problem is not just a healthcare/hos- pital problem or doctor problem; it really runs through our state and through our community in a lot of different ways and has a lot of different threads to it, not the least of which is the economic impact of an unhealthy workforce. One of the challenges related to chronic disease is that the urgency to solve it doesn’t really exist. It can’t be fixed quickly, there- fore an elected official, while they want to do good, they’re going to have a hard time saying, “Yeah, I’m going to stake my political career on a solution that is going to be paid back 30 years from now.”Those politicians are very few and far between, especially when there’s no guarantee that it’s going to work. I think we have a challenge where the healthcare system is not created and set up and designed to deal well with preven- tion of chronic disease. Our elected lead- ers don’t have the incentive; they’ve got so many other problems to deal with that the thought of trying to use all of their political capital and energy to solve a problem that might get better in 20 years, that’s not very feasible. Employers are just competing for the healthiest workforce they can get in the moment. They don’t have the incentive, nec- essarily, in the short term, to fix chronic dis- ease. You have a whole lot of people doing 14 MAR / APR 2022 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS