HJNO Mar/Apr 2022

DIALOGUE 10 MAR / APR 2022 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS   Dianne Hartley, Editor Thank you for the Warner Thomas mind space today. How are you, and what is the condition of your team? Warner Thomas I am fine. I think our team is tired and fatigued — it’s been a challeng- ing couple of years — but I also think that we’re energized about a lot of new and inter- esting things that are going on. We had our system kickoff meeting about 10 days ago for 2022 and talked a lot about how we’re going to continue to reintroduce our sys- tem-wide culture and new culture initiatives across our organization and, really, are very focused on our workforce, around making sure we’re very intentional about showing gratitude to our workforce and thanking them for all the great work they’ve done over the past couple of years and certainly in [2021] with the two surges and the major hurricane that hit up here in the bayou, New Orleans and the river region. But, I would say overall, we’re very fortunate to be in a good position to continue to help the state and help the patients that we serve live healthier and more productive lives. At the same time, many of our healthcare work- ers have been through a lot. Our physicians, our nurses all of our clinicians have been through a lot, and it’s been a very challeng- ing time. Editor As the leader of Louisiana’s largest healthcare system, what are the five most important things on your radar screen right now? Thomas Number one, I would say, is work- force and being able to continue to have enough workers to take care of the patients that we serve every day. We’ve seen signif- icant growth in new patients across our entire system, and having enough clini- cians to staff all of our beds, to staff all of our clinics, to be able to take care of all of our patients has been, frankly, a major chal- lenge. We’ve recruited nurses and other cli- nicians from all over the country to come and help us in this situation, but even with that, it’s been hard to fill all of our spots. I’d say workforce is number one. Number two would be building our digi- tal businesses and our digital platform. We are very focused on how we connect with patients with digital solutions, both tele- medicine and also an expansion of vir- tual care — how we connect our chronic disease platforms with patients and allow them to have a very automated and digital connection to us. We can now track their chronic diseases every day and make sure they’re doing what they need to do to take care of themselves and to take care of their chronic disease. We’re also building more digital tools to go into the home, and we’ll be launching those in 2022. I would say the third area is really around patient and consumer focus. They’re being very focused on reducing challenges or issues or problems in our system around access or experience. We want to continue to make it easier and easier to access Och- sner. We did over 800,000 online appoint- ments in 2021, and we think that will grow again in 2022. We have over 1.3 million users of MyOchsner patient portal, which allows us to connect with patients and allows them to view their clinical information in a detailed fashion, check results, book appointments, look at billing information,