His Wife’s Car Crash Changed The Way A Hospital CEO Sees His Job
Two years ago, a truck barreled through a red light at 50 miles per hour and rammed into Paula Shaw’s pickup, totaling it and knocking her out. Her husband Terry, who would become the CEO of 46-hospital Adventist Health System 6 months later, got a call informing him that she was unconscious in the emergency department.
Terry Shaw, president and CEO of Adventist Health System, with his wife Paula and sons Devin (far left) and Kyle (far right). COURTESY OF TERRY SHAW
system and realize it was no better. So Adventist started a care navigation program to help patients and caregivers with their discharge instructions, scheduling appointments for their follow-up care and getting their prescribed medications. It’s a growing trend for health systems. For Paula, “I had to use my position as a CEO of a large healthcare system to navigate a very complex post-acute environment,” Terry says. “After going through it for about six months we made the determination that this should never happen to people.” He says Paula is doing “great” now.
The truck Paula Shaw was driving when she was in a car accident two years ago. COURTESY OF TERRY SHAW
The care navigation program, which began for inpatients and the most acutely ill emergency department patients in May 2018, isn’t the only change Shaw has initiated as CEO. Today Adventist Health System is announcing a rebranding, effective January 2, 2019, to AdventHealth. That may sound less obviously faith-based (“Adventist” refers to the Christian denomination of Seventh-Day Adventists), but one of the other new initiatives that began in May was expanding the health system’s spiritual care resources to people getting care in outpatient settings, not just those admitted to the hospital. There’s also an app through which patients can schedule appointments, get virtual care, access medical records and pay bills.
2018 is a “learning year” with the new care navigation program, Shaw says, and the plan is to expand it throughout the whole system within three years. There have been growing pains. “One of the lessons we had to learn is that in order to get people seen by a physician, many times you have to spend more time working on schedules than you may have thought,” Shaw says.
But he also has success stories that make him confident the program will work. A blind 41-year-old Florida woman came to an Adventist emergency department after she’d lost her Medicaid coverage, hadn’t seen her doctor in more than a year and hadn’t taken her $1,000/month medication in more than eight months. “Instead of treating her in the ER and letting her go, we said, Listen, we really need to do something about how it is we help you,” Shaw says. The care navigation program helped her get her Medicaid coverage back, find rides to her doctor’s appointments, and get her medication for free.