Building Relationships: The Foundation for a Successful Service Line

This is the second of a monthly series on how the author created a streamlined oncology service line within her health system. In her first post, Amanda discusses how she came to help head the formation of the first integrated system service line at Baptist Health. Amanda describes how she embraced the concept of “systemness” in her role, in which she helps bring together Baptist Health’s clinical, operational, and financial efficiencies to facilitate reliable, quality patient care across all sites. Here, she addresses what it took to achieve that systemness on a practical level.

Although my position as the system vice president for oncology services at Baptist Health is still relatively new, to me it feels like the logical outcome of a natural evolution that started nearly 10 years ago. In 2011, I was the executive director for cancer services at Baptist Health Lexington, where I helped organize an oncology summit that included physician and administrative leaders from all our hospital cancer programs. This half-day meeting was intended to break the ice between the leaders of all of our separately run cancer programs and begin identifying ways we could work together more collaboratively. We met regularly during the subsequent years, discussing topics ranging from growth strategies to clinical research to patient quality. The relationships that meeting participants built among themselves helped create a foundation for a formalized system service line structure in 2019.

Upon assuming my role in Baptist Health’s new oncology service line, I knew it was essential for me to continue strengthening my relationships with the physicians and leadership at the nine Baptist hospitals across Kentucky and Southern Indiana. I felt it important to meet these program leaders and physicians in their own environments, so I immediately started taking road trips to visit each site once per month. That frequency allowed me time to really listen to the challenges and opportunities each program faced, better understand their market, and look for ways I could build their trust with me and this new role.

Learning by Example

Early on in this process, I realized the importance of intentionally connecting our site leaders and physicians so they could learn from one another. Nearly every conversation I had with staff at a Baptist site about a programmatic initiative they were working on, I could connect with staff at another Baptist site who either had successfully implemented or were working on the same initiative. By simply connecting leaders and physicians to their peers across the system, we started to see more collaboration.

Although listening and figuring out how to connect one site’s problem to a solution at another site seems simple, it had a significant impact on building trust and collaboration across the sites. Particularly for our smaller markets, being able to share best practices from our larger market programs really helped accelerate their ability to adopt and implement changes. For example, one of the smaller market programs had success implementing a nurse practitioner-led chemotherapy education visit for all new oncology patients based on APRN training, patient materials, and Epic documentation already established at one of our larger sites. During the course of a year, this became a standardized visit across the system for all new oncology patients beginning chemotherapy.

Uniting Leadership

Under the direction of the Baptist Health Medical Group president, and in partnership with the oncology service line physician chair, I now help facilitate monthly oncology service line meetings. These meetings, which are much more intentional, frequent, and structured than the ones initiated at the start of the service line, serve as the backbone of a physician-led service line governance structure, and they include select physician representatives from across all Baptist Health oncology programs. The physician chair of the service line is elected every two years, and in my role as service line vice president, I support the chair and ensure the content and action items discussed are completed.

Upon the formation of the service line, we developed a comprehensive oncology scorecard that aligned with Baptist Health’s four pillars: excel, expand, align, advance. As leaders of the service line, the physician members select oncology-specific metrics, market growth metrics, and patient satisfaction metrics that align with our accountable care organization/clinically integrated network (ACO/CIN). The scorecard, which is continually populated with metrics by location, allows sites to compare best practices and understand their own data in relation to their peers and national benchmarks.

The momentum I felt building in much of my first year leading this service line was a direct result of physician engagement and the system’s senior leadership vision for service line development across the health system. I never thought when I left my corporate office on March 31, 2020, that momentum would shift completely.

I look forward to talking in my next post about how the cancer service line worked together to protect patients and staff during the darkest months of COVID-19.

Amanda Henson, MSHA, MBA, FACHE, is the system vice president of oncology and cardiovascular services lines for Baptist Health, the largest not-for-profit health system in Kentucky, with nine hospitals throughout the state and southern Indiana. Amanda has served in oncology leadership roles for more than 15 years, ten of those with Baptist Health. She earned her master’s degrees in business administration and healthcare administration from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is a fellow with the American College of Healthcare Executives, and she serves on the board of trustees for the Association of Cancer Care Centers.