Things You’ll Learn:

• Sutter’s unique dyadic leadership approach pairs executives with physician leaders, enhancing alignment between business and clinical goals to improve patient outcomes and clinician experience.
• Adopting digital platforms streamlines patient scheduling and communication, which helps reduce administrative burdens on healthcare providers.
• Sutter Health’s innovation lab fosters partnerships to reimagine healthcare access, digital integration, and care models, aiming to reduce complexity for patients and providers alike.
• By expanding ambulatory and urgent care sites, Sutter is adapting to the future of healthcare, prioritizing affordable and accessible care through a move from inpatient to outpatient services.

Resources:

• Connect with and follow Mark Sevco on LinkedIn
• Follow Sutter Health on LinkedIn and discover their website

Transcript:

Rachel Schreiber: 

Welcome to The Spark, a view of innovation in healthcare. I’m Rachel Schreiber, the marketing leader at Avaneer Health, and I’m joined by Stuart Hanson, our CEO.  

Stuart Hanson: 

Together, we’re your hosts, and we’ll be diving into conversations with healthcare innovators who are reshaping the industry. Join us as we explore the stories of those really disrupting the norm and creating a better healthcare experience.  

Rachel Schreiber: 

Get ready to ignite your curiosity and join the conversation on the spark. Hello and welcome to the Spark of You of Innovation in healthcare. I’m Rachel Schreiber, your co-host, and in this episode we’re speaking with Mark Sevco, chief operating Officer at Sutter Health with his long history in hospital administration and leadership. I’m looking forward to our conversation today. I’m also joined by Stuart Hansen, CEO of Avaneer Health.  

Stuart Hanson: 

Morning. Rachel, thank you for kicking us off. And Mark, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate having seen your voices in the industry and visible leaders across the space. Join us for our dialogue with our listeners, so thanks for taking the time. Really appreciate it. 

Mark Sevco: 

Yeah, Stuart, thanks for the opportunity, Rachel. Thanks for the kind introduction. It’s a real privilege to be here to dialogue with you and just share what we’re working on and just learn from others as well. So thanks for what you’re doing too. 

Stuart Hanson: 

No problem. Thank you. So before we get into some of the really exciting stuff you’re doing at Sutter, Mark, what I wanted to kick off with is something that I think our listeners are always keen to learn a little bit about the passion that leaders like yourselves have in healthcare and what keeps you so committed to changing this industry, which is really hard as you well know.  

I love the tagline that Sutter: patients first. People always. I don’t think there’s a better way to say that because the experience in healthcare is so human and usually, there’s a really human side to folks that make an impact in healthcare. We call that The Spark. That’s the name of our podcast. We’d love to hear what your personal journey has been or what ignited your passion for committing to improve the healthcare space. 

 Mark Sevco: 

Yeah, thanks Stuart. Great way to get started. For me personally, I’m passionate about several things. One is employee engagement within an organization and the culture that lives. And I will tell you why, because if employees are engaged, you’re going to have great patient experience. And that’s my second passion, which is customer service. What can we do to make it better for patients at the most vulnerable times in their lives?  

One of my reasons for getting into healthcare, my connected purpose, goes way back when I was a young adolescent. My father was a blue-collar electrician in central Pennsylvania and got called to work one night to fix an electrical pole that was knocked down by a drunk driver. Unfortunately, he was involved in an accident and was electrocuted and killed at a work-site injury. But what I always remember is being at the emergency department and they were working on my father for hours, really trying to save his life and just being there in that moment with the nurses that were surrounded by myself and my mother and some of my siblings. The compassionate care they provided, it stuck with me. It really made a difference when the physicians came out and they shared, “I’m sorry.” When they said those two words, we knew that was it. 

And at that point, moving forward, everything that hospital and their staff did to make my family comfortable with compassion was really truly ingrained in me. I started following healthcare, went to college at University of Pittsburgh and studied mathematics, then got my master’s in health administration. It led me into working in hospitals and working with physicians and getting to see how I could actually make an impact at a very young age. I had a great opportunity to spend 30 years at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Mary Butler-Everson was the one who gave me my first break out of my fellowship and hired me as an analyst at McGee Women’s Hospital. And it was really a great place to work at UPMC. Over 30 years, I worked for 8 different hospitals, multiple practice plans, service lines, and I had an impact to work with many in the insurance division as well. 

I’m here in northern California in a very similar organization. We have 25 hospitals and huge ambulatory presence, 8 medical groups, 5,000 physicians. And to go back to your point, the spark is in the organization that I’m at now is a focus on how we make this to be the best culture by putting patients first and people always. This is a vision we refreshed with the new CEO and myself and the organization has given us a purpose on how we could help our employees, giving them the right resources, lifting them up, celebrating them, and getting the right people in the right roles. And that’s my spark, which is employee engagement. And I do love our new mission of patients first. People always. It really aligns with myself, with our team, and we’re just really looking forward to making a difference. 

Stuart Hanson: 

I love that. Thanks first of all for sharing such a personal and tough experience. What a great shout out and inspiration that your father has provided for your career. I remember tracking you years ago when you were at UPMC and some of the stuff that UPMC was able to accomplish with your leadership was really inspiring. I never knew that source story. Sometimes those spark stories are tough moments, but usually they are maybe not as tough as that. I can’t imagine as a young adult or a young teen experiencing that. But sometimes those are the greatest pivot points to really make an impact and to link that back to. So thank you. So a little bit of a tough one, so I’ll pause there for just a second. 

Mark Sevco: 

I appreciate that. 

 Stuart Hanson: 

But we would love to hear about all the great stuff that’s underway. I know you’ve been at Sutter for a couple of years. I’d love to hear how you tie that mission of patients, first, people always to innovative things that you do in the healthcare space and ways you’re trying to really improve and maybe link that to some of the stuff going on with your innovation lab. 

Mark Sevco: 

We set up an innovation lab here and it’s like an incubator firm where we’re bringing people together in a collaborative fashion to have conversations about not only doing it better but doing it differently. And many of us truly believe that healthcare, in many ways, is broken, which means that we put a lot of complexity on patients, on how they access healthcare, how they navigate healthcare, how the billing system works. Our team understands this and we’re very focused on doing things better in every segment of our business. Engagement, people, quality scores, are our growth paradigm right now. However, we do believe that the best healthcare industries and the best systems are actually looking to do it differently. And the innovation center we set up here in San Francisco, in close proximity to Silicon Valley, brings individuals together that have ideas around technology, around the digital platform, around new models of care. 

We’re around new pharmaceutical medicines on clinical trials so that we, at Sutter Health, we’re blessed to have a large system, to have a scale, to do things rapidly. So we’re in six divisions across Northern California. We’re not only in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, but we have a huge provider presence in the East Bay, which is Oakland, up to Sacramento, Modesto, and all the way down to Santa Barbara. Each of those areas have divisional presidents and CMOs and a dyadic partnership. And actually they’re managing everything within those divisions. And so I’m blessed to help have a dyad partner to lead all of those. That’s kind of our structure, but we’re looking to deploy new models of care, hardwired best practices, and really accelerate something that’s different for our patients. So that’s a little bit on the innovation center. It’s new. We’re looking to invest in companies that we’re aligned with and we’re really excited about where we’re going with that. 

Stuart Hanson: 

Very cool. Is there maybe an example of something specific that your teams are working on that you’d like to highlight for our listeners? 

 Mark Sevco: 

Well, one early one there is getting to know a company called Abridge, which is a an artificial intelligence company. That’s a big part of healthcare as well. And Abridge is a company that is an ambient listening device that allows our physicians to use a mobile device. And so if you get the patient’s approval, you turn on the mobile device, it’s embedded in Epic, it just listens and records the conversation on the exam, which is very confidential. When that exam is done, Abridge documents a very structured note. It takes care of some aspects of coding. It actually saves our physicians up to an hour and a half a day on documentation, puts them back to the bedside face-to-face with the patients, allowing them to interact. They don’t have to sit at a computer and type notes. And they really like that. It’s good for the physicians, it helps them with taking the burden away from them. And so we’re getting a lot of enthusiasm around that. That’s just one of many examples that we could talk about.  

We’re looking to certainly deploy Abridge across our enterprise. As an example, we’ve invested in the company itself through our innovation center. We sat down with the leadership team there and said: Hey, we believe in this company, we’d like to take an equity position in it. And these are different examples of just aligning around products that we truly believe are going to make an impact in the industry. 

Rachel Schreiber: 

That’s great. That really impacts the patients, that patient experience as you were explaining. So you’ve mentioned dyad leadership. Can you explain what that is and then how that philosophy helps improve the patient experience and the experience for the clinicians as well? 

Mark Sevco: 

Healthcare certainly is a multidisciplinary leadership function. That’s something I’m truly passionate about, meaning that as an executive and administrator always having the respect and the advocacy for what physicians, what nurses actually do every day and trying to learn how they think, how they work. Dyad partnership goes back to Mayo Clinic and Mayo Way back in the day, who developed a model of the dyad partnership, which is taking an executive, partnering them up with a physician leader and putting them side by side in a collaborative fashion to move the healthcare industry forward in terms of the operating platform. Now, not everybody does it as formally as Mayo or Sutter. Sometimes it’s different models, but that’s what we have here and it’s really been great. So in each of those divisions, as I mentioned, I have a dyad partner who’s the chief physician executive at Sutter Health, and he’s over all the providers across Northern California. 

My dyad partner’s name is Todd Smith. He’s an orthopedic surgeon. He and I work together every day. We’re in meetings together, sometimes we cover each other, but a great, trusting relationship. And I bring the business aspect, the operating model, and he’ll bring the physician relationships and quality and credentialing. We work in tandem. One of the things Todd and I really believe and talk about is that physician alignment is really a simple phrase, which is patient-centered, physician led, and professionally managed. This partnership is really important for us to accelerate getting physicians to the table and working with them. 

Stuart Hanson: 

That’s important. Yeah, very cool. It’s a good way to do it. Very structured. 

Mark Sevco: 

Thank you. Yeah, we’re excited about where we’re going with that for sure. And it actually cascades too, Rachel, so it cascades to the point that in our hospitals where we have 25 hospitals, we have a president of a hospital. The president of the hospital is an executive who’s been trained as a leader, as an operator, but they have a dyad who’s the chief medical executive. Now, a lot of organizations have the chief medical executive report to the president who’s an executive in our organization. Even at the hospital, they’re dyad, they’re at an equal level. And Todd and I actually wrote a curriculum and trained through Sutter Health University the importance and how to lead dyad partnership. And so we actually white papered and wrote a course, and Todd and I teach the course. We focus on the importance of trust leadership and who takes a primary role in certain things and how you really have to work together. And we truly believe it’s an accelerant. It’s accelerating us faster to make change. And again, we’re really excited about it. 

Rachel Schreiber: 

And incorporating more voices and in perspectives, that’s important. So what do you think that healthcare can learn from other industries? Looking around at the way maybe other industries are operating or handling customer service, what are some things that you’ve looked at how other industries are operating and found that there’s some valuable lessons to learn in applying healthcare? 

Mark Sevco: 

We can learn a lot. Listening is learning. Learning is listening. And I think learning from other industries is really quite fascinating. I study this a lot and I use this in terms of articulating the why and the importance of us not only to think better and bigger, but clearly what I’m very focused on as an executive leader is operational excellence. We need to implement best practices to get better at what we do to be most efficient. However, there’s that second aspect, which is how do we do things differently when we get better.   

So let’s just talk about many different examples. Ford as an automotive company always focused on getting better. Their company was so obsessed with getting better, and they were really great at that. However, they didn’t focus on being different. And so Tesla came in, they were different. They had the electric car. Now Ford could have done that. They knew that, but they just were very focused on getting better.  

And you could talk about Blackberry, if you remember the Blackberry. They could not focus on being different. And then they knew that apps were coming out, then the iPhone was working on that, but they refused to change their model.  

Same thing with Blockbuster. You look at Blockbuster, they had the opportunity as a company where the individuals who started Netflix went to Blockbuster and they had this idea and they said, we could work together. And Blockbuster said, why would I want to do that? I have bricks and mortar all over the country. This is our model. It’s working well, we’re making money. How that story ended, they went bankrupt. And Netflix is probably one of the most profitable companies. We could go on and on. Amazon is a game changer. We have so many disruptors in healthcare right now where for-profits have huge capital to be able to do things differently. For us in healthcare, we typically run a margin 2-3%. 

Sutter’s doing great, and we have the opportunity because we’re having success and we’re financially stable and have a very strong balance sheet. So we’re looking to do things differently around the mobile device, around the digital platform, around meeting our patients where they want to be met. So we’re only looking to stand up a different product to be able to allow us to be able to provide the full continuum of care. And Amazon bought One Medical and they provide this virtual platform. However, when they need a specialist, and Amazon One Medical is really strong here in Northern California, we work with that and we’re partners with them because they have to refer. They’re a primary care model, virtual first, but they really need others to rely on. So yeah, I think we have a lot to learn. Rachel, it’s a great question. 

Stuart Hanson: 

Can I jump in? I want to link to something you’ve mentioned “broken” a couple times, Mark. So I just got back from one of the large industry healthcare conferences out west and everybody says it’s broken, right? There are things that are broken. What strikes me about connecting that to your leadership model, the dyad leadership model there, is that there’s a difference between being broken and being complicated or being complex. And I think a lot of people mistake complexity for something that needs to be completely re-engineered as opposed to just done differently. So I’m connecting a few things that you’ve just mentioned. Not even really trying to necessarily thread those together, but I think it’s really important that folks recognize the need to recognize the complexity, which is probably where your physician leaders get really heavily engaged in, Hey, we could do something totally different, but that’s not practical or that doesn’t meet our physicians or our staff or our systems where they are.  

Is there a specific example where you think maybe something came to your innovation center or some idea came up internally in terms of something that needed to be retooled or reimagined or disrupted, which is one of the big words in healthcare that always fails to recognize the complexity and a lot of disruptive ideas that are great and grounded in other industries or other examples, but fail in healthcare because they fail to recognize that complexity or adapt to the complexity?  

Mark Sevco: 

It’s a great opportunity to double click on this and go a little bit deeper on complexity versus broken. And as leaders, we cannot lose focus on what we have in front of us right now, which are patients that need us every day to take care of them. And that goes back to the patient experience, the employee engagement, and the culture that we have. At Sutter Health, we have 57,000 employees and we have 5,000 aligned physicians and work with a lot of private practitioners. That’s part of the operational excellence of waking up every day with the privilege to make them proud to work at Sutter Health and to take care of our patients that are in front of us. And so we talk a lot about, I’ll bifurcate this in terms of we as an organization know that we make it complex for patients in terms of how they access us and how they interact with us and how we communicate. 

And so that’s where we’re really focused on doing it better. How do you hardwire and best experience lift up your patient experience scores? How do you hardwire an organization to recruit, train, and retain the best? We have an operating platform and model that we’re doing that. We’re making day-to-day impact. We’re improving our metrics, and that’s a privilege. And we learn from each other and we learn from other industries. And the brokenness is terms of healthcare and where we’re going as an organization and as an industry in terms of the payer-provider, the sustainability of healthcare, it’s very expensive. It’s very difficult to access, and that’s where doing things differently is going to be important. An example of that would be where we’re setting up a clinically integrated network and moving and working with our physicians and insurers together to create a more sustainable model where we can lower the total cost of care, but enhance quality and access in the meantime. 

There’s always the insurance model and the provider model, and it’s still, in many ways, it’s a fee-for-service model. And by just natural human behavior, if you’re paid for a fee for service, the more you do, the more you do, the more you generate income. That’s where it’s a little bit broken because the inflationary measures in healthcare, the headwinds that we have with wages, with product inflation, with pharmaceutical use, those could be 5-6% per year. Now the insurance companies and Medicare for example, they’re rolling out a lot less reimbursement than that because they can’t afford to do more than that. So that’s not a sustainable model. We’re saying: let’s do some new models of care. Let’s actually look to shared incentive plans with our physicians, take shared risk — ultimately a capitation in many ways. Going back to the old days of that model, I think we can do it. It’s just going to take some time and you guys do it in stages, but again, we’re not losing focus of what we do every day. We’re focused on being different as an organization and being the best in this space.  

Stuart Hanson: 

You’re hinting at two things that I’m really passionate about. One is the move to VBC, which I think you hinted at in your comments is really going to help align some of the brokenness of the incentive structure. But the other thing that I think is really important, especially behind the patient experience, is driving administrative efficiency and just removing a lot of friction. Now, far too often, you hear examples of really great patient experiences from a clinical perspective, but those getting broken because of the financial experience or the billing process or the binder of EOBs and medical records, the patients have to carry around from one physician to another to answer their own questions. That friction has to come out of our system somehow. And that’s one of the things we’re obviously really passionate about. It sounds like even the Abridge example that you talked about is designed to help streamline and reduce some of that burden on the physicians while they’re providing care, which really resonates with me.  

 Mark Sevco: 

I think Epic is one of the electronic health medical records out there. We’re fully embedded in Epic throughout organizations. They’re a great partner who is bringing technology and tools. They know where the industry needs to go now. They’re actually doing a better job than I’ve ever seen them do in terms of working with organizations like Abridge and embedding those tools within Epic to accelerate, I think the digital platform on how patients want to interact.  

In terms of going back to one of your earlier questions, the airline industry, can you imagine calling an airline industry, get on the phone and say, I need to schedule a flight. I’m going here. And that’s the way it used to be. You can go to your mobile app, you can schedule your flight wherever you want to go. You can change it, modify it, and healthcare. We’re only trying to catch up. We’re launching at Sutter Health. If you want to schedule an appointment with primary care or with a specialist or an imaging appointment, you go to a mobile app, you can schedule an appointment. Now, that might not be for everybody, but we have to move our organization to the digital platform, and we’re making great progress in doing that. 

Rachel Schreiber: 

So just to wrap up, what key phrase or how would you describe the vision briefly of what you’re working to create at Sutter Health?  

Mark Sevco: 

At Sutter Health, we’ve refreshed our mission, vision, and values, which gives us a lot of sparking internally to be honest, around putting patients first and people always. And we live that, we start every meeting with a win. As it relates to one of our taglines that you would see in our marketing campaigns, getting better never stops at Sutter Health. From a science perspective and from a center of excellence perspective, we want to be viewed by our patients as we’re unstoppable in terms of our relentless pursuit of excellence. And I think that as an organization, we truly believe that we can make a difference, and it’s a privilege to be in a leadership role today in healthcare. 

I would say one of my personal phrases, Rachel, if you want to go someplace you’ve never been, you have to try things you’ve never tried. And I say that all the time to my team and allow them the opportunity to think big, to think bold, to try new models of care, to try new things. Now we can learn a lot in our industry around best practices, and I’m very focused on that from a leadership development perspective. What is a best practice? How do you teach it? How do you hardwire it? And then you’re going to get more efficient. You’re going to remove the waste from the system. This is a very strong platform that myself and my team are working on. The operating calendar, the operating rhythm. We meet on a monthly basis to do business reviews with all our divisions. And then we have weekly a cadence on some meetings and a daily cadence on some meetings. 

And so the process of what we put in place to lift up and do better for our employees, for our patients, if we do those things fundamentally getting better, never stops, our quality would be good. And our growth mindset here at Sutter Health is we’re building 20 ambulatory sites right now and we’re going to build 30 additional urgent care sites. We believe in the platform of ambulatory as a more affordable model. We’re moving business from inpatient to outpatient purposefully. We’re preparing for the future. And I think that takes purposeful leadership. Warner Thomas is one of the best CEOs in our industry. He’s just really relentless about these things. As am I and my team, and I really appreciate the opportunity to dialogue with you today about this, and also listen to your other podcasts to see how we can learn from others. 

Rachel Schreiber: 

Well, thank you for sharing that all today. It’s really inspiring and continue that transformation and that focus in healthcare, that patient experience, and that physician collaboration is really important. Thank you for joining us today. 

Stuart Hanson: 

Patients first people always — really appreciate it. If folks want to follow the stuff that you’re working on, Mark, I noticed you’re pretty active on social medias. LinkedIn is probably your best profile for our listeners to follow up and watch the ongoing progress you make. 

Mark Sevco: 

Always looking to pay it forward. And I like a head coach would say for their team, well, we’d say here as we close something up, patients first, people always. 

Stuart Hanson: 

Awesome. 

Mark Sevco: 

Thank you both for the opportunity to share our story, a little bit of our journey. And again, the opportunity to pay it forward, if ever given the opportunity, is really something that we look to do and learning from others as well.  

Stuart Hanson: 

Thanks a lot for your time. Thank you, Mark. Take care. Thank you for tuning in to another enlightening episode of The Spark. We trust our discussions have sparked new and fresh perspectives on healthcare innovation and encouraged you to find ways to reinvent the healthcare experience. 

Rachel Schreiber: 

Don’t forget to explore the detailed show notes for this episode. Share the insights with fellow innovators and email us at thespark@Avaneerhealth.com to share your thoughts, comments, or reactions. Your engagement fuels the flame of innovation, and we look forward to continuing this transformative dialogue with you. Until next time, keep this spark alive.