As we nudge nearer to the cusp of a new year, St. Tammany Health System President and CEO Joan Coffman recently visited The Lake 98.7 FM studios to look back at 2021 and ahead to 2022.
And, as you might guess, there was a LOT to talk about.
Listen to Joan’s conversion with host Charles Dowdy in the embedded audio player below or at The Lake website. You can also scroll down for a transcript of their conversation, which has been lightly edited for readability.
Charles: So, we got the head of St. Tammany Health System, Joan Coffman, joining us this morning. Good morning, how are you?
Joan: Good morning, Charles. How are you doing?
Charles: Good. … So, I am going to let you start. Anything in particular that you want to start with as far as this past year goes? Clearly the health system, your people, have been through something no one else envisioned or thought we would go through.
Joan: They have. they have. You know, when I look back on 2021, I can only tell you I am super proud. Our team is amazing. They do extraordinary work every day. They are absolute patient advocates.
A couple of things I want to celebrate around the workforce is that we have been recognized at our Mandeville free-standing Emergency Room with the Press Ganey Guardian of Excellence Award. So, what that translates to is, they have been performing in the top 5% in the nation for patient experience consistently over the last 12 months. Now, as you know with the pandemic and just our routine medical patients that come in, it has been an overwhelming volume both at the main campus and the free-standing ED. To maintain that level of patient experience to me is to be applauded.
Charles: All right, well, that is awesome.
Joan: And then I would also say, as a health system, we have been recognized by Leapfrog, which is a national organization which ranks hospitals for extraordinary safe care for the 12th consecutive reporting period. So, that, to me, is just high reliability at its best, despite a pandemic, despite a hurricane and despite the high volumes our team is dealing with. So, I applaud every single colleague at St. Tammany Health System for their extraordinary work.
And then, hot of the presses, we were just recognized yesterday. A little over a year ago, we stood up a structural heart program in our cardiology service line. They have started doing a procedure called TAVR, or Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement. They just had the program surveyed. We are now accredited – the second facility (in the Greater New Orleans area) to be accredited for the TAVR program.
What I was so impressed by at the survey, because they are virtual – you know, we have been doing virtual surveys for a while because of the pandemic – (but) the surveyor looked around the room, which was packed. We had our clinicians, our physicians, we had our entire Executive C suite. Our partner Ochsner Health has a role in this as well; they were present. Then just our team that just really manages our outcomes and makes sure we are closing all the gaps, they just did an extraordinary job. But the surveyor commented, they said, ‘You know, we don’t normally see this level of participation in a survey. So it’s obvious you guys care about the program and are really doing a great job.’
Charles: In terms of personnel, how are your folks holding up? Obviously, getting employees has been a struggle for some people. You guys finding that to be the case or are we doing OK?
Joan: Well, we are definitely in that number. We just teed up the Invested in You workforce campaign. We have an extraordinary culture at St. Tammany Health System, but when you are supporting these high volumes with routine medical care and the pandemic and the influx of patients around that, you have to supplement your workforce with agency (staffing). Agency is expensive. They don’t know your organization and they may not be as committed as your colleagues would be. So, we really wanted to create a strategy that recognized our team, valued our team, made us very competitive in the market. .. And that also over time helps us to eliminate over time the number of agency nurses that we have at the organization.
I can tell you since we rolled this out, we were at 41 agency nurses. We are down now to 28. So, it is important for our colleagues to know that we truly care about them and want to support them, because we feel like if we invest in them, they continue to do a great job for our patients and community.
Charles: Alright, well said and if we are not going to feel good about our healthcare people right now, when are we? … Obviously, we’ve dealt with a weird couple of years here with COVID. So, we are hearing this new word (omicron) and, so, I am curious what your take is or what you have heard on that and then, kind of where we are right now. Delta is obviously still around and a big deal. So, what do you think?
Joan: You know it has been interesting. As you know, we were at a height of 114 COVID-positive inpatients in August and September. There is three weeks in there that we were just busting at the seams. That truly was attributed to the delta variant. We have seven COVID-positive inpatients today. We have hovered anywhere between five and eight for the last many weeks. The omicron variant, we are paying close attention to it, as everyone is. It looks like it is not truly going to translate into much across the country or across the nation. So we know we will be impacted. We think it truly has been in the country for some time. We just didn’t detect it. It is a different variant, but it is a very low strain.
Charles: I feel like I have let my guard down a good bit, good or bad, so where are we as a society in terms of how people should be behaving? We are going into the colder part of the year for us. What is the direction you are hearing from your doctors in terms of good behavior and playing it safe?
Joan: You know, we are still conservative in healthcare. We are very conservative. We follow CDC guidelines. So, within our health system and across our clinics we have to be masked at all times. In terms of going out into the public, with the holidays coming around – much like we did at Thanksgiving – just be socially aware. Make sure that you protect yourself. You don’t know who may be unvaccinated or vaccinated. You don’t know who may be carrying the variant without symptoms. So, I would just say be socially aware. Wash your hands all the time and keep distance between one another. But don’t change your life. You know? Let’s get people back together.
Charles: The vaccination progress: How is that going? Are we still seeing interest in that – and I guess the booster progress, too, right? Can we talk about that a little bit?
Joan: We started the booster a couple of months ago, as the country was able to do so in accordance with CDC guidelines. At St. Tammany Health System right now, we are at about a 77% vaccination rate. We were down, as you might recall, as low 47% when this all started. But now we are up to 77%. We did not move to mandate or make a requirement of the vaccine until the CDC stepped in and CMS said, yes, all healthcare systems need to be fully vaccinated by January 4th if you are a recipient of Medicare and Medicaid funding. As we have paid attention to the news, that has now been rescinded, so we have paused that as well. But we still highly encourage our workforce to get vaccinated.
Charles: I do want to talk a little bit about the physical structures around your campus. There has been some pretty dynamic things that has gone on in the last year. You guys have had quite a few changes and improvements as we have gone through the year.
Joan: It is a pretty magnificent landscape when you come down Highway 21. As you know, we finished our South Tower, a four-story bed tower. Moved into that April of this year. One of the pieces of that that wasn’t completed in April but is now completed and our team has moved into it our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. We were desperately in need of that. We have so many babies that we deliver – 200 on average per month – and we are just busting at the seams. So, what this does is expand and nearly double the size of our footprint of our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Of course, it is all equipped with all of the bells and the whistles. The team, when you go in there to tour and round on them, they are just super excited to be in there. It gives us privacy, a lot more privacy for families to be able to be with their loved one.
We also, as you know, had two buildings through Hurricane Ida that were damaged. We needed to redeploy teams short-term. We are closing at the end of the year on two properties that will be serving us in the capacity of an administrative building for back office functions and then another big warehouse facility. We are excited to get those closed on and then our folks moved into them to offload some of the pressures that we have right now.
Charles: And then there is a building you do in partnership that is pretty magnificent too.
Joan: Oh, my gosh. You know, to me that is the gateway to healthcare along Highway 21. Our new Cancer Center is fantastic. What is most impressive about it is, we were just recently recognized by the Chamber as a “site to see,” for the architecture, for the technology, for the healing arts that are incorporated in the facility, and, most important, for the comprehensive care that patients receive in that site.
We are in partnership on that not only with Ochsner Health but utilizing our community providers to help really create that full continuum of cancer care under a single roof.
Charles: Alright, so before I let you escape. I am curious as we look toward 2022. Which sounds so weird for me to say. Obviously, you guys have plans out towards the horizon. What can we look for?
Joan: You know, we are excited. When you think about population growth here in western St. Tammany Parish and across the parish, we are excited and trying to keep pace with that.
We also see a big shift from inpatient to outpatient. So, as we look ahead, two things are happening: We are in the process right now of beginning construction on a new ambulatory surgery center. It is going to be adjacent to our Outpatient Pavilion on Bootlegger Road. We are very excited to have that come online sometime in 2023. And then the other thing that we are beginning to do due diligence on for also 2023 is a graduate medical education program.
As you know, we talked about our workforce. Our physician workforce is also something we pay close attention to. We want to create our own pipeline. We feel like standing up our own graduate medical education program, with our partner Ochsner Health as the sponsoring institution, we can create just that. Our intent is to not only build a clinic to house them; they will rotate through the clinic and hospital at Ochsner. They will also be able to have their first of eight residents in July of 2023. Our goal is to have eight residents per year.
Charles: All right, that is awesome. I am going to make this real quick because we are almost out of time. I have had more people come in here (from the health system) and talk about the spa-like features of your Women’s Pavilion. They certainly talk the talk, but my wife went in there recently and, you know, all I can say is you are walking the walk. She does not like going to the doctor and she had nothing but positive things to say coming out of there.
Joan: The Women’s Pavilion has done a dynamic job of making sure that patients feel confident, comfortable and at ease. You know, nobody wants to have procedures done or even screenings done. They wanted to create and have an environment that really is something that is something that is amenable to all people.
Charles: Well Joan, thank you for your time today. Thank you for all the good information.
Joan: You, too. Thanks so much, Charles.