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Keynote: Workforce Resilience - Burnout, Balance, and Belonging

Bill Russell: My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of This Week Health, where we are dedicated to transforming healthcare one connection at a time. Our keynote show is designed to share conference level value with you every week.

Now, let's jump right into the episode.

(Main)

 Opening – The Breaking Point Define the crisis Urgent, grounded

Bill Russell (2): Welcome to a special Keynote Rewind episode.

Over the years, I’ve talked with hundreds of leaders across healthcare, and one thing keeps surfacing, the people inside the system are exhausted.

Burnout isn’t just a buzzword. It’s showing up in resignation letters, in silent commutes, in inboxes full of things that can’t wait.

Joel Klein: It's when people start feeling powerless and that they're just, being blown around by the wind of their work. That's when burnout really can take hold. And when you can all get galvanized around a common, goal it can be transformative. For us, and I know this is true for so many people in our industry, COVID was such the, the example of that.

So we are one of the health systems that did. A ginormous field hospital. Ours ended up having, a pretty decent census for most of the time that it was open. It was in the Baltimore Convention Center, which we did with the Army Corps of Engineers. It was one of these vast places that has, just endless rows of beds and our epic stuff and our, WoWs and our telephones and our printers and all that stuff in there.

But under, what we all went through, people were just willing to do it and really go the extra mile. Now that we're past all that finding ways to give people input and say and an opportunity to participate in a project like this. It gives people hope.

Bill Russell (2): That kind of all-hands-on-deck effort brought out the best in us. But no team can operate in crisis mode forever. We talk about workforce burnout in the abstract, like it’s a line item or a trend to track. But behind every chart, every resignation, every quiet departure… there’s a person who reached a limit.

 🧠 Act I – The Human Cost

Bill Russell (2): For Erica, that limit came in the form of a caregiving crisis, one she navigated in the middle of the night, searching for guidance… and finding it in an unexpected place.

Said, Hey, Erica, you're really on the right track here and these concerns are really valid. Here are some things that we might recommend you do. I would contact his hospice and palliative team. Here is a proposed script you can use when you make that phone call. Here's something you can do that overlies the symptoms that you've been sharing with me as you've been thinking through your next steps in caring for your son.

I use chat GPT throughout our ER admission. So having the ability to outsource, not just like the practical application of caregiving, but having an emotional validation friend, I suppose as I'm going through that's available to me, without any restraint.

And the emotional validation that this application gave me was remarkable. It was unbelievable. It was like talking to a friend.

Bill Russell (2): Sometimes the breaking point doesn’t come from caregiving or crisis. It comes from the pressure we put on ourselves, to succeed, to outperform, to never let up.

Ian Koniak: I, demoted myself from enterprise to commercial because frankly, I was going to be fired. So I had to get out of there and I wanted to stay at Salesforce. So I somehow snuck into the commercial division And in that year, I grinded like crazy. I had a lot of accounts and I still misquoted this time by one deal.

I missed it the last day of our fiscal year. And it was one of the most depressing and, low moments of my career. Because at that point I knew the problem wasn't my territory. It wasn't my manager, it was me. And I had to face myself.

Erica Olenski: So I actually had to elbow my way into the conversation and say, I need to make sure that I'm being briefed on whatever it is you're discussing, because first of all, you guys don't have

easy access to context on this patient and with his history and complexity. and any other patient that's.

Complex or in a long-term, more chronic acute scenario. They're facing the same issue. And just the lack of discussion was really striking. And I think I upset one of them. The other one was like, I'm really glad that you were here because you're a really good advocate for your son.

Bill Russell (2): And for some, it’s not one moment. It’s years of pressure, decisions no one wants to make, challenges that never let up. Until finally… they step away.

It was so challenging. But today I want to talk about. being a CEO and setting the culture and all those things, was that the hardest job you ever had or was there a harder job you had?

Deborah Proctor: No. Definitely the hardest job I had. And it became harder the more years I was in the job as the environment of healthcare became harder because it forced us into some situations of con contemplating, mergers, and that was very difficult, stressful work.

It probably what caused me to retire when I did

Bill Russell (2): These stories are hard, because they’re true. But they also point us toward something hopeful. Because where there’s pain, there’s often purpose. And across healthcare, some leaders are taking that purpose and turning it into progress.

 🔧 Act II – What’s Actually Working

It doesn’t always take a massive program to make a difference. Sometimes, it’s as simple as removing the noise.

Jake Lancaster: Over the pandemic years with burnout rising and staffing shortages so how can we reduce the administrative burden on. our Physicians and providers and working a lot more with the nursing staff as well to try to decrease some of their burden.

So we've done all the classic things like decrease alerts, so that. We made a lot of progress early on. We had , a million alerts a month across our system. And we've brought that down to just slightly under a hundred thousand, which you know, is a huge improvement.

Bill Russell (2): But even the best tools don’t matter if the culture tells people they don’t belong. Fixing burnout means listening to what’s broken, and then asking those closest to the problem what the solution might be.

Theresa McDonnell: So when the frontline feels like they're valued. Their opinion matters when they're engaged.

When we ask them what the pebbles are in their shoes, that helps create that culture of empowerment, and it's that culture of empowerment that then drives the retention. You know, when people feel like they're just a cog in a wheel.

That brings me joy to know that people feel like they belong here.

Bill Russell (2): Sometimes the best ideas come from walking alongside the people doing the work, literally. That’s exactly what one organization did.

Bridget Barnes: We have what we call wellness sprints. We just initiated a program. We did a pilot the last 18 months, and we got funding to roll this out across the organization so that we'll go to all the units across the organization where we have our clinical informatics team goes shoulder to shoulder and shadows shadows, physicians and clinics and says, okay, show me how you're doing.

In order to streamline their workforce. And sometimes it could result in, personalization that would be appropriate for that particular position. So there's a large effort a couple of million dollars a year that we're spending our hope is that helps lessen the burden for providers.

So they aren't, doing pajama notes so that they can get all that work done while they're on site, as opposed to so much work that they're now doing after hours.

Bill Russell (2): Burnout doesn’t just live in the back office. It shows up in the calendar, the inbox, and the rigid systems we’ve built around both patients and providers.

Scott MacLean: Well, just to comment generally, \ think we are trying to respond to what patients want to do online but also keeping in mind that there are clinicians who are also human beings on the other side of it, right?

Build schedules that work for them that can then match up to consumer needs. Standardizing visit types something that fits into an algorithm for a consumer to interact with versus how it's been done manually for many years.

Bill Russell (2): The best leaders know — if you take care of your people, they’ll take care of everything else. And that mindset is becoming more than a mantra. It’s becoming strategy.

Marijo Rugh: What we've realized through COVID is just The importance of our employees. And so I think with, the turnover rates that we're experiencing while we're making a small dent in it, we really have to stay focused on our employees because guess what, if we take care of our employees, then we're going to take good care of our patients.

but our employee needs to come first.

Bill Russell (2): None of these fixes are perfect. Some are still in progress. But together, they offer a glimpse of what’s possible, not just to reduce burnout, but to rebuild trust, restore balance, and create systems that care for the people within them.

 🤝 Act III – Building Belonging

Bill Russell (2): Fixing burnout is the beginning. But what happens when we start building systems that people want to stay in, not just survive in?”That’s where the conversation turns to culture. Belonging. And leadership that’s both intentional and personal.

Tanya Townsend: Culture appreciates the level of change. Go live is only the beginning. It's a big family and they're doing wonderful things. They've got great recognitions in terms of awards and we don't have to rattle all those off, but they are high achieved in all of those different areas.

And everyone, like I said, is super supportive, super collaborative, very welcoming. And I would say that's not just within IS, it's really across the whole organization. So I'm really excited to be a part of it because that's not the case everywhere.

Bill Russell (2): So what is culture, really? One leader put it best.

Theo Theodosiou: The default cultures are almost always problematical, but intentional cultures, so the very idea that you set out to weave something that would be weight bearing, the very idea, the moment you decide that You have, I think, a significant advantage.

Bill Russell (2): It shows up in who you hire. How you grow your team. And the standards you set for what good looks like, not just in performance, but in purpose.

michael restuccia: My biggest challenge has been to build the team that can enable and support. These great researchers and great clinicians and keep patients coming to Penn Medicine and try clinical trials coming to Penn Medicine. And that's why I spend a good portion of my day, week, month around two things.

One is human resources and focus on the team and on employee. Ensuring we're providing the right career paths and opportunities and ensuring we have the right technology to. Keep them turned on and ready to go and advancing their career and grow.

And that's what we promote during the recruiting cycle. We ask individuals to share with us whether in their professional or personal life, where have they exceeded expectations? What was the standard? What goes above and beyond? What would they bring to Penn Medicine in that respect? And it's curious when you hear some of the responses you might get, because that's not a question that [00:16:00] most candidates are prepared for.

They're prepared for, well, tell me about. with this tool in this job, not how you exceeded expectations.

Bill Russell (2): And connection doesn’t require a badge swipe. It requires access. Visibility. And leadership that brings people into the work, no matter where they are.

Alastair Erskine, MD: ​The problem I'm trying to solve is mitigate the fact that my staff is remote.

And you know, initially I was under the impression that I was going to be able to just. dictate that people come back to the office three days a week. And very quickly, I got some feedback that may not be as easy as I had anticipated. And so the question is, all right, well, what are we really trying to accomplish by having people be on site?

Well, we want them to have that water cooler conversation. We want to have that sort of whiteboard experience. So every Monday morning, every Friday morning, I go to some part of the hospital or clinic. It could be the basement of the hospital for the pharmacy department.

But I bring my assistant with me and she is carrying around an iPhone. And the iPhone is streaming the experience. It's not recording anything. It's streaming the experience. Only to those that are invited, and they invite my entire Emory Digital team with me. The people know that they can't watch the streaming experience in a public area.

They have to be in a private area because we don't want to... Expose any PHI, and only those invited can come to the meeting. So we have some way of containing that. By virtue of the fact that I'm not recording anything means that I don't have to keep track of where it's stored and who can subsequently see it.

So not only am I bringing the team so they can experience and empathize with the front line and appreciate the importance of doing one thing over another. But on top of it, I'm bringing my entire team to do a quick fix if necessary. And it ends up what's happening now is the team is growing. More and more people are wanting to join these sessions.

🌅 Closing – The Path Forward

Bill Russell (2): Burnout isn’t a footnote in healthcare, it’s a flashing warning light. But what comes next doesn’t have to be a crisis response. It can be something better, something built with intention.

Because at the end of the day, this isn’t about finding heroes. It’s about showing up like a pro, listening well, collaborating deeply, and solving the right problems.

Chris Harper: My role as a CIO really isn't to present the best technology. It's in collaboration with my peers, really understanding the problem at first. Right? And so today I think, a lot of CIOs want to be the hero, I'd rather be a pro than a hero.

Bill Russell (2): That also means seeing wellness not as a perk, but as a priority. Not just for doctors and nurses, but for every person keeping the system running.

Bill Russell (2): At one organization, they started with a deceptively simple question: how do we bring joy back?And the answer started in the data.

Aaron Miri: How do I bring joy back?

The actual data on usage patterns in the EMR to figure out when pajama time is and what those bugaboo workflows. Has been invaluable to be able to sit down with a primary care physician or sub-specialist and go, you're spending a ton of time placing orders.

It's that customization, personalization, taking the junk out of documentation,

Bill Russell (2): From there, it expanded. Forecasting what patients really need, and bringing care to the communities that need it most.

Bill Russell (2): And let’s be honest, no one wants to make another phone call to schedule care. These teams are proving that convenience isn’t just possible. It’s overdue.

Aaron Miri: alleviating all the manual phone calls and scheduling and all the things that that are cumbersome in healthcare that everybody universally.

And despises. If we can really automate those and manage that so that it's as easy as ordering a pizza

on Twitter from Domino's,

Bill Russell (2): None of this happens without clear insight. That’s why more organizations are building data teams that don’t just report the past, they help design the future.

Aaron Miri: What we did was reorganized our analytics team into a central function. It is underneath it, but accountable to the enterprise. We have both a data intelligence. These are the folks who are like data managers, data architects, and decision science who help write the basically lenses as to what does this data actually mean for us.

So for us right now, it's like, Walking into a giant restaurant with a huge buffet of options,

Bill Russell (2): So where do we go from here? We start by caring for the people who care for everyone else. That means more listening. Smarter systems. Better support. And a deeper belief that the future of healthcare is worth staying for, not just surviving through. Thanks for joining us for this special Keynote Rewind. We’ll see you next time.

Bill Russell: Thanks for listening to this week's keynote. If you found value, share it with a peer. It's a great chance to discuss and in some cases start a mentoring relationship. One way you can support the show is to subscribe and leave us a rating. it if you could do that. Thanks for listening. That's all for now..