Nemours Children’s Health’s New CEO: “The Most Exciting Time in Healthcare”

On June 5, the Nemours Children’s Health System, based in Wilmington, Delaware, and with care locations in the Delaware Valley region and Florida, announced that R. Lawrence Moss, M.D., had been named the organization’s next president and CEO. An announcement posted to the organization’s website stated that “The Board of Directors of the Nemours Foundation today announced Dr. R. Lawrence Moss has been selected to succeed Dr. David Bailey as the President and CEO of Nemours Children’s Health System. Dr. Moss will begin his tenure October 1, 2018. Dr. Moss, a renowned pediatric surgeon, biomedical researcher, educator, and health system executive. He is internationally recognized for leadership in healthcare quality and safety, including service as a founding director for developing quality standards for pediatric surgery nationally. He is also known for with tremendous achievements in academic health centers, national hospital associations, and government organizations accountable to the public. He joins Nemours after serving seven years as Surgeon-in-Chief at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and the E. Thomas Boles Jr., Professor of Surgery at The Ohio State University College of Medicine.”

The announcement went on to say that "Dr. Moss brings unique experiences as a physician leader in academic health centers, and he embodies the character of Nemours, a health system dedicated to continuous learning and improvement," said Brian Anderson, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Nemours Foundation. "In addition to his clinical roles, he brings invaluable perspective and expertise in the development and execution of value-based care focused on the overall health of children through collaboration with payers and government agencies. The Board is pleased that Dr. Moss will continue fulfilling our mission to meet the needs of children, families, and the communities we serve."

"The President and CEO role at Nemours represents a wonderful opportunity to lead an institution that embodies the values I hold as most important to the future of American healthcare," Dr. Moss said in a statement included in the June 5 announcement. "With a focus on creating health over treating disease, efficient care delivery and an alignment of the success of the medical center with the health of the population it serves, I believe that Nemours is in an optimal stage of development to offer the next leader the opportunity to catalyze a quantum step forward."

As the organization’s website notes, “Nemours is an internationally recognized children's health system that owns and operates the two free-standing children’s hospitals: the Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Del., and Nemours Children's Hospital in Orlando, Fla., along with outpatient facilities in five states, delivering pediatric primary, specialty and urgent care. Nemours also powers the world’s most-visited website for information on the health of children and teens, KidsHealth.org, and offers on-demand, online video patient visits through Nemours CareConnect. Nemours ReadingBrightstart.org is a program dedicated to preventing reading failure in young children, grounded in Nemours’ understanding that child health and learning are inextricably linked, and that reading level is a strong predictor of adult health.”

On October 1, Dr. Moss officially joined the organization, replacing David Bailey, M.D., who retired following 12 years as Nemours’ CEO. On October 11, during a break in a one-day conference presented by the Nemours organization entitled “Pediatric Moneyball: Technology, Consumerism & Population Health,” focused on the opportunities and challenges facing our healthcare system, our communities, and our society in caring for children and improving their health and wellness, Dr. Moss, along with Gina Altieri, senior vice president and chief of strategy integration at Nemours, sat down to speak with Healthcare Informatics Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland regarding their perspectives on the landscape around children’s healthcare in the present moment. Below are excerpts from that interview.

Strategic planning has never involved higher stakes than it does these days at children’s hospitals operating in the United States. Can you speak to this moment in U.S. healthcare? How does it strike you right now?

R. Lawrence Moss, M.D.: I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I have to say that this is the most exciting time in healthcare at any time in my career. I think it’s fantastic, because we have the opportunity to address and fix the two biggest problems I’ve seen in my career. We have the opportunity to align the finances of the system with the health of the patient; it’s been totally backwards. When a child needs more treatment, the system benefits. But finally, we have society’s attention and focus on, how do we create a situation where the child stays healthy, the family wins, and the system wins? Dr. Bailey, my predecessor, said it so well this morning, that health is so much more than healthcare. And we can be more than we’ve been; and we aspire to do that.

Children’s hospitals are facing payment challenges as never before. What do you see as the keys to their survival in the current reimbursement environment?

Dr. Moss: First of all, as children’s hospitals, we need to do a better job of articulating our value to society. We bring enormous value to society, and a lot of folks don’t know that. And we’ve got to get better at telling that story; it’s the greatest story in the world. Secondly, we need to more effectively partner with our government partners, because 60 percent of the children whose healthcare is funded, it’s funded through the government. Third, we need to be able to use the massive advances in technology to bring HC to the patient, in the way that the patient and family needs.

Gina Altieri: I agree that technology can enable a lot of the collaboration—even as our last panel was talking about how we get to where the children are, and partner with others, and bring the provider to the family that might be in a rural area, and might not have easy access to care, for example.

We’ve been so health system-centric, rather than patient- or family-centric, until recently, as a U.S. healthcare system.

Altieri: Yes, we shifted from provider-centric to consumer-centric, in developing [KidsHealth.org and the Nemours CareConnect]. We did that with design thinking, and we really did partner with families early on. We had our providers, families, and technical people early on, to understand their needs.

Moss: A really interesting thing I learned a really interesting thing at dinner last night, talking to a strategic consultant over dinner. He showed some data about the use of smartphones—that those are actually disproportionately used by the most disadvantaged parts of society.

Altieri: And it’s a misconception that disadvantaged people don’t use technology.

How do you look at technology, at the investment involved, and what can be achieved with it?

Moss: I look at it as a tool to achieve what we want to achieve. Innovation being the intersection between science and humanity, what Walter Isaacson said this morning [journalist, author, biographer and historian Walter Isaacson had delivered a presentation to the Pediatric Moneyball audience on Thursday morning]. It’s wonderful to have the technology, but unless we have the humanity to know how to use it, we won’t advance. What Nemours brings to the table, and the people in this organization bring to the table, is the ability to understand and care about what children really need.

Altieri: From a budget or investment perspective, we did recognize 20 or so years ago that this cost of investing in this technology was an investment in our future, and that we needed to look at this as a long-term investment. And we’re far beyond initial investment in an EMR, for example.

Moss: We’re cognizant of the investment, and it’s well worth it.

And you and your colleagues have achieved significant improvement in patient and family satisfaction, through the technology-facilitated advances you’ve made at Nemours.

Yes, we’re very proud of our patient and family satisfaction.

And how does the investment in and development of technology, for telehealth and other purposes, support the shift into value-based healthcare?

Altieri: Yes, and in addition to improving the experience for families, we recognized that we really did need to come up with alternatives that were less costly. We did surveying and found that 60 percent of families would have gone to the ED without the telehealth.

What do you see as your biggest challenges and opportunities in the next few years?

Moss: I prefer to talk about opportunities. The opportunities are to play a major leadership role in what children’s healthcare looks like tomorrow in this country. We are a multiple state organization; our patients come from the most disadvantaged and the most privileged backgrounds. We are a microcosm of the country, and when we get it right, it will be important.