Archive for July 20th, 2018

Integrative Medicine

July 20th, 2018
Having served in healthcare senior leadership for over two decades, my tolerance level for various “healthcare norms,” that revolved around the sometimes-insensitive treatment and care of patients and their families had reached the breaking point.  Consequently, at the end of my 40th decade when I became a hospital CEO, I arrived in the position with a quiver full of change arrows that were sure to shake up the status quo, and it did.Because I had entered the healthcare field some twenty years after most of my senior leadership peers, my life experiences were much more varied and non-traditional. For ten years, I had been a band and orchestra director in both City and Urban school districts.  After that, I ran what became a successful arts organization in a rural area, and finally, served as the CEO of a convention and visitors bureau.  It was during those years that I went back to school for another Masters degree in public management/health systems management.

When this CEO opportunity presented itself, I realized how each and every one of my life experiences could help me run a hospital, but not just any hospital. It was my vision to create a hospital that embraced all modalities used in integrative medicine with the ambiance of a fine hotel and the amenities of a health spa.  We carefully scrutinized and then credentialed practitioners specializing in massage therapy, integrative nutritional counseling, acupuncture, osteopathic manipulation, pet and music therapy, reiki, and spirituality to name a few. These practices intermixed with traditional Western medicine became our new norm.

As the traditionalists who are reading this article begin to shake and scream about a lack of medical evidence, I can only point to the 19,000 papers written supporting the efficacy of acupuncture and the thousands of other medical papers written about the healing powers of music, massage, and such. In that same spirit, there is also the fact that the head is connected to the body and provides a mind-body connection that doesn’t fit neatly into the scientific “heal to the pill” mentality of our current system.As a non-clinician, non-scientist, it was easy for me to believe in things like “the Placebo effect” as well.  It really didn’t matter to me why people got better. It was our goal to create a healing environment where people would not be immersed in fear and trepidation, where their loved ones could comfortably stay with them, and where unnecessary paging, and middle of the night prodding, and wake-ups were avoided as much as humanly possible.

It seemed to me that by training our employees at Disney University, allowing them to learn from the Ritz Carlton, and exposing them to sensitivity and emotional quotient training, we could create a healing environment. Because my philosophy was that you could not change the human condition, but you could change the condition under which humans worked, we also embraced an anti-bullying environment where employees were cherished and recognized for their contributions to the welfare of our patients.

How did implementing all of these ideas change healthcare in our little slice of Camelot?  Our infection rate dropped to below 1% and stayed there for eleven years. (The national average is nine percent.) And I know we weren’t washing our hands more than they were at other hospitals. Of our peer hospitals, we had the lowest readmission rates, restraint rates, and lengths of stay, and when the naysayers saw these numbers, they said it was because we were not a large hospital. My belief was that we successfully had created a healing environment where our patient’s white blood cells were actually able to function to fight off infection.  We were transparent, nurturing, and caring. We were not a “Healthcare FACTORY” where the patients became widgets in an Industrial Revolution model of care.

Music was always used in healing ceremonies by an indigenous man. Acupuncture has been deemed effective for over 5000 years. Massage makes you feel better, and sometimes your spine gets out of alignment and needs to be corrected. This is neither rocket science nor brain surgery. It’s about love, kindness, and caring, wrapped up in good Western medicine. Oh, and one more thing.  Even with a palliative care unit, a hospice, we had the lowest death rate of our peer hospitals. I had always wanted to put up a billboard that said, “Come to our hospital . . . you’ll die less often.”
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