HJAR Nov/Dec 2022

DIALOGUE 14 NOV / DEC 2022 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS   wellbeing? And as an individual patient, what are your whole health goals? That’s what we are in the process of doing. Obviously, this effort, a lot of this vision, the Alice Walton Foundation created. Alice already had an agreement with Cleveland Clinic to work at expanding access. What were some of the specialty care that were leaving Northwest Arkansas, and howmight we improve that access? Partnering with Washington Regional, being a locally gov- erned, locally led health system, provides a great platform for practicing these whole health principles and a platform in which we can really change what that healthcare model looks like moving forward. I think ultimately, our hope and our goal is that the overall health and the overall well-being increases as you begin to engage and focus on a health system that looks at what one’s goals are. As we can meet those goals, then our hope is that overall health improves. As you know, Northwest Arkansas is growing quickly. I read last week, even, that Tyson Foods has talked about bring- ing a thousand new corporate workers to Northwest Arkansas. I think one of the chal- lenges Northwest Arkansas has had is scale. How do we scale our healthcare infrastruc- ture to keep up with that growth? I think what we’re doing is very consistent with the work the Northwest Arkansas Council took on, which is also around how to transform the healthcare system. The last study that they did estimated that one billion dollars a year of care migrated from our area, so the entire area benefits if we can keep people here closer to home. Editor In a transformative healthcare system, what’s different from the current system from a patient’s perspective? Shackelford For patients, there are two things that I hope we can improve rela- tively quickly. One we’ve talked about, which is access and access being timely. Also, right now, there are different silos of care. It is oftentimes not as coordinated as what the care can be. Our hope is that we can build a multidiscipline care system that’s patient-focused, that we can improve access, and that we can have a patient who feels engaged in their healthcare helping set what their goals are. I think those are elements that patients will look back and say this is healthcare done differently, done transformationally. Editor What does the Cleveland Clinic relationship look like to your physicians or to your practitioners? Shackelford As I mentioned, theAliceWalton Foundation already had a partnership with Cleveland Clinic, working to improve what that access to care looks like in our region. I’m very proud that Washington Regional is always one of the top-ranked health sys- tems here in Arkansas. Cleveland Clinic is not only a top-ranked health system in our country, but they’ve pretty successfully inte- grated healthcare programs globally. I think what makes a good partnership is when every partner brings something meaning- ful and the partners are stronger together. That’s what we hope this looks like working forward — taking the good care that hap- pens at Washington Regional every day and improving access to that care and, again, helping bring services here to Northwest Arkansas that people leave for every day. Editor So is the Cleveland Clinic connection live right now? Shackelford It is live in that there are lots of work groups that are meeting regu- larly. We’re looking at details in those work groups, which include doctors and leaders at Washington Regional, those from Alice Walton Foundation, and Cleveland Clinic. From the time that we signed the MOU in April until we hopefully get this launched, all three of those groups have been meet- ing jointly, working on what care needs to be grown and expanded, working on how we can increase both undergraduate medi- cal education and graduate medical educa- tion. The ideal is that we will take these con- cepts and formwhat operating and strategic plans looks like, and when we launch our new health system, those will be the plans that we put into play. Our hope is our new health systemwill be launched in early 2023, but I think we are already looking at whole person care and patients are seeing things different even now. Editor Will the new health system have a new name? Shackelford Yes, we will be looking at brand- ing, and I suspect that each of those brands —AliceWalton Foundation, Cleveland Clinic, and Washington Regional — have value. I suspect there will be some co-branding, but that our new health systemwill have a new name as we move forward. Editor Let’s switch gears. The demand for physicians and nurses in Arkansas outpaces supply. Let’s start with nurses. UAMS’ dean of the College of Medicine, Susan Smyth, MD, PhD, recently told the Healthcare Journal of Arkansas what we really need to do to change healthcare “is to magically produce five times more nurses.” Do you agree with that assessment, and, if so, how do we get there? Shackelford Yes, and it’s not just nurses. We need to grow and scale all workers, but there is no doubt that nurses are at the top of the sphere in terms of taking care of patients every day. We are blessed in Northwest Arkansas, particularly, as all of our educa- tional institutions have grown to see the number of students that want to go into nursing grow. As we look at what we can do moving forward, I think there are two or three things that are going to have to hap- pen if the programs grow. One key to those programs growing is that faculties have to be increased. The other thing that I hear