Project Charter Part 1 (No Plagiarism)

Interview and Leadership Analysis

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Interview and Leadership Analysis

In this project, I interviewed the healthcare leaders Mr. Warner Thomas, the CEO and president of the Oschner Healthcare system. Thomas joined the company in 1998 and served as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) until 2012 where he became promoted to the CEO. Thomas boasts of significant accolades and achieved mean feats. Thomas revolutionized the adoption of the academic healthcare system by encouraging the use of digital tools and AI and a culture of empathy and care (Cryts, 2019). His primary focus is to inspire growth and development, evident through his strategic partnership and affiliation in acquiring other hospitals.

Thomas intimated that in 2014, he was appointed to the Medicare payment advisory that advised Congress on the issues affecting mediocre. He has also served as chairman of the American hospitals association council. His vast experience in executive management of different hospitals qualifies him as a competent leader to look up to and explores his ideal of leadership and extra more information about him. In an interview that id did with him over the zoom meetings, we discussed the current pandemic that has ravaged the world and the more efficient response to this pandemic. He also talked about the importance of digitization, the next generation leaders of health systems, and the scientific innovation for the future.

One of his opinions was that today's CEOs have become more attuned to digital connectivity, consumerism, digital competitors, and the need to transform businesses and focused less on making the existing business perform better. He advocated that there needs to be a closer relationship between the public health infrastructure, delivery systems, and the health systems. This tighter relationship is required to help the public health infrastructure manage the challenges of complex issues that face the HealthCare field today (Oravetz et al., 2019). He commented that today's healthcare system is more fragmented. The public health system works in one angle, so there is a need to unify all the methods to ensure they work towards one direction and have a more unified plan.

Mr. Thomas is a graduate of Boston University Graduate School of Management with a Master's Degree in Business Administration in 1994. He also holds a Bachelor's Degree in Accounting and Information Systems from New Hampshire College in Manchester (Smith, 2018). Thomas is also a member of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO) and a certified public accountant that served on the board. Additionally, He is a board member of Healthy Lifestyle Choices and Louisiana Hospital Association.

Thomas carries a vision of enabling the transition of the traditional health systems from a reactive and more proactive in providing service to the people who come to the healthcare institution for help (Cryts, 2019). He showed to embody a more assertive leadership of planning well to improve how the team works and invest in preventing problems rather than reacting to them. As the CEO of Ochsner, he has led the company in achieving extraordinary things. His company has over 17,000 members comprising more than 1,000, pursuing its mission to save the world and change lives within the state and across the globe.

Thomas is a great mentor who has incubated the teams throughout 2015. The team comprises caregivers, frontline caregivers, researchers, and thousands of individuals who lend significant support to the background operations behind the scenes. The company's core values are valued for the patients, and the five core values include integrity, excellence, compassion, and teamwork (Smith, 2018). Thomas oversaw the clinical trials programs that brought new treatment options and hoped that would help the new generation through the University of Queensland-Ochsner Clinical School.

According to Thomas, the core feature that makes Oschenque stand out is his great support system through donors. Under Thomas, the company's vision and leadership attracted a record-breaking $35 million philanthropy that included the expansion of Benson Cancer Centers and an additional $20 million by Gayle and Tom. This massive support has enabled the company to offer more clinical cancer research studies and cancer care services.

As a president of Ochsner health systems, Thomas emphasized the need to address the increasingly growing refrain shared among his many conference peers. These changes come in the form of higher out-of-pocket costs, value-based care, increasing connectivity, and new insurance changes. As a result, Thomas embraces a futuristic vision and keeps up with the technology and the internet. He talked about telemedicine and the accelerating transformation that needs appropriate measures to overcome its challenge.

Thomas also emphasized the pivotal role that organizational culture plays. Thomas began sharing the company's culture when he took the CEO role in 2012 by first understanding what the company needed and using the available resources to do things differently. Thomas did not have a physician's background and was the first non-physician leader of the organization (Cryts, 2019). He took time to understand the company's dynamics, and 20 days after taking over, he organized for a retreat and laid down his vision for the company and where he wanted to take the company in five years. His success is mainly attributed to maintaining his open communication with the company members (Smith, 2018). As the CEO, he defied his expectations of the nurses, physicians. He ensured that they talked about what they wanted to achieve and worked towards attaining the set goal.

Without a doubt, this leader is respectable within the organization and the community at large. One of the ethical issues that the leaders face in the healthcare sector is maintaining patient information and privacy, particularly in this modern world of sophisticated technologies. Even when healthcare workers have the best intention in their service, they are likely to encounter issues of informed consent, confidentiality, and patient-related outcomes.

References

Cryts, A. (2019). Featured Exec: Warner Thomas, President and CEO at Ochsner Health System. Managed Healthcare Executive. Retrieved 3 November 2021, from https://www.managedhealthcareexecutive.com/view/featured-exec-warner-thomas-president-and-ceo-ochsner-health-system.

Oravetz, P., White, C. J., Carmouche, D., Swan, N., Donaldson, J., Ruhl, R., ... & Peabody, J. (2019). Standardising practice in cardiology: reducing clinical variation and cost at Ochsner Health System. Open heart, 6(1), e000994.

Smith, A. (2018). Aapl Developing Leadership Pipeline for Expanding Ochsner System. Physician Leadership Journal, 5(5), 74-76.