2025 Dynamic Dozen No. 10: CoxHealth

SBJ: What has been key to your growth?
Ashley Casad: We’ve had two years in a row of record physician recruitment, almost doubling the number of physician recruits in a year. That’s been huge to allow us to expand access in Springfield, but also across southwest Missouri in a number of different specialties.

SBJ: How do you plan growth to meet community health care needs?
Casad: Springfield is a fast-growing part of the state and if we don’t continue to grow right alongside it, we know that’s going to limit access. It’s really important to continue to grow at and above the community rate to be able to create access and provide quality care for our patients. We utilize data to see where the trends are in terms of volume growth year over year, where we see additional referrals, where we see access timelines and we utilize all that data to be able to determine where we need to continue to expand, either our physical facilities or staffing needs.

SBJ: What are your top issues when it comes to managing growth?
Casad: It’s important to balance growth because you want to make sure you’re growing at a rate that you can continue to provide the level of care and the quality of care that you expect to maintain. It’s a balance of growing and supporting the needs, but also not expanding to the point that we are delivering in any way a subpar service from what we’re at. We don’t grow every service line or every region or every location all the time. We are targeting which ones are the highest priority and really focusing on those. Organizations can grow too fast and diminish the quality of products that they are producing. We have a group of leaders we call our Enterprise Leadership Council. It is made up of our physician leaders and our administrative leaders. A lot of the stuff that we do around growth and strategy and anything that’s outside of the day-to-day operations goes before the Enterprise Leadership Council to make that decision using a very structured approach on where we need to go, where we need to grow and where we need to focus.

SBJ: What has your growth enabled you to do?
Casad: We are transitioning to a new [electronic health records] system, Epic. That is a huge opportunity and is going to be so valuable to our patients and our staff in terms of the experience it provides, the type of patient outcomes we can see with it, the overall efficiency and the continued care coordination and growth it will allow to happen. We are building the inpatient rehab hospital. So, another significant investment for our organization, but one we believe is in the best interest of the community and our patients. And then, the expansion of pediatric care, which I’m so excited about. We just have a lot of exciting things going on over the next year and I’m really excited to see where we are two years from now.