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Rebecca Green | SBJ

A Conversation With ... Ashley Casad

President of Springfield Hospitals and Senior Vice President of System Operations, CoxHealth

Posted online

Prior to becoming president of CoxHealth’s Springfield hospitals, you were vice president of clinical services for three years. Why were you interested in this position?
I really love hospital operations. I like the “impromptuness” in dealing with whatever comes up that day. Continuing to move up on the hospital operations side was a great opportunity for me to get to increase my scope and the different departments I was working with and the different ways that I can touch patient care.

Workforce challenges are no secret in health care. Where are some of the critical staffing shortages, and what are the strategies you guys have to fill those?
Nursing is a huge staffing shortage right now, one that we’ve known was coming for years. We still have physician shortages, too. But it’s not just those two; it’s respiratory therapists, radiology techs, medical lab scientists, scrub techs. I would generally say across the board, even in the administrative areas, we’re still having a hard time finding enough labor to support such a large system. We work really closely with the different school systems really trying to build pipelines. Getting the opportunity to speak with students when they’re 16, 17, 18 to really drive their interest in health care and also show them the many different lanes there are to go down. And then also really partnering with (schools) to figure out are there areas where previously a degree has taken longer and is there a way to consolidate it and make it easier for someone to get through quickly and more cost effectively.

What about your international recruitment programs?
Two of our directors of nursing just came back, actually. They were in the (United Arab Emirates) for about a week and a half. We are still doing international recruitment for nurses, and we’ve actually expanded that. Our medical lab scientist is another area that we’re now recruiting internationally. Then we’ve also expanded some of our schools. We are taking more students within our medical lab school, as well as with our nursing program and radiology programs.

You were the deputy incident commander of the COVID-19 response at Cox. The hospital closed the COVID floor a year ago this month. What are you using that unit for now?
We are actually using it as a hub for a lot of our virtual care and management. We house things like our transfer center and our tele-sitter program. The tele-sitter is if, for instance, a patient needs to have someone watching them, so if they’re maybe a fall risk or something where we want to make sure someone has eyes on them. Our transfer center is where we work through transfers of other hospitals needing to send patients to us. Then also, our tele-intensive care unit. It’s where we’ll have both physicians and nurses doing some additional oversight of patients.

What are some future uses of artificial intelligence that you expect at CoxHealth?
Some is around the virtual care that we’re implementing. Some of that is AI being able to look in records and further predict this person is at risk for some sort of hospital-acquired condition or this person’s at risk for a stroke because of their blood pressure. Other areas where AI will see further development is around imaging. It can do some initial screenings and basically tell us this individual has something on their image that you guys need to look at more quickly.

Are there capital investments in technology that you’ve made recently?
We added a robot maybe a year ago. We’re looking at what is the right number of robots, for instance, for surgeries and what areas are we using them in versus what could we expand to. The biggest capital purchase we’ve made is around more of this tele-ICU and virtual care. Having that support for our clinicians to be able to have more eyes on the patient and be able to have them monitoring – did the patient get the med that they needed when they needed it, do we have any signs of sepsis? That would probably be our largest capital investment that we’ve made in the last year is putting forward all the technology that is needed to put that across a 600-plus bed hospital.

What are some of your goals as you come into this position or some of the areas that you’re really focused on?
Getting our workforce the support they need in terms of having more people on their team to help them. Also, focusing on giving them the support they need from a mental health perspective. We’ve asked a lot of health care workers the last two to three years. We know that burnout has played a large role in health care the last few years, that PTSD is a real thing. It’s something that we are very aware of and trying to find solutions to and trying to be able to invest more dollars in support for. I think also just continuing to make sure that with our throughput that we are becoming more efficient because we do not want to have wait times.

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jake@carchbay.com

Great to have Ashley in such an important position in our community, she's a really good person and it's well deserved!

Tuesday, February 21, 2023
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