Dr. Benet serves as Senior Vice President of Clinical Operations for Community Health Systems. His responsibilities include the areas of safety and quality, capacity management and optimization and clinical data science. Dr. Benet received his medical degree from University of Michigan and completed an anesthesiology resident program at Harvard University in Brigham & Women’s Hospital, serving as Chief Resident in his final year. He joined CHS in 2021.
My responsibilities start and end with people. I am responsible for supporting leaders in their efforts to develop high performing teams who can provide high quality care to communities we serve. Some of my top priorities include developing platforms that can be leveraged across the company like the Process Improvement program which supports quality & safety efforts, capacity management processes to support capacity optimization and clinical data science to support our journey as a continuously learning organization.
The pandemic forced an acceleration of innovation in how we deliver care and we have made efforts to meet patients where they are in our communities and on their devices. Digitally enabled care will likely continue to mature with positive prospects in how we manage chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension. These platforms will continue to enable growth in how we support patients with home-based care in their homes. While the shift to outpatient and home based care continues, we can expect increased concentration of acuity in our hospitals supported by demographic trends. As a comprehensive healthcare delivery organization, we are charged with developing community, outpatient and home based health services while increasing our teams’ capabilities to care for higher clinical complexity in our hospitals.
CHS is working to optimize capacity and deliver high quality care through workforce management workflows and care models. Workforce development efforts are quickly ramping up including training programs for new nurses, patient care techs, pharmacy personnel and physicians through expansion in residency programs. Workflow improvement efforts are focused on improving coordination of care through practices like interdisciplinary team rounds (IDT) and resolving barriers to discharge and EMR upgrades for better functionality and efficiency in how clinicians document care. We are developing better data ecosystems to identify throughput bottlenecks while decreasing the amount of time clinicians spend performing non-clinical tasks. Some of the workforce changes accelerated by the pandemic are likely to be permanent, but it is important that we continue to innovate with our models of care so nurses and physicians can practice at the top of their abilities supported by trained, multidisciplinary team members. We have piloted and evaluated four different models in the last year to learn which is best to provide high quality care.
The CHS Clinical Data Warehouse (CDW) provides a platform to do many impactful things. This improved data ecosystem, created in partnership with Google, enables enhanced analytics via our new Clinical Scorecard, abilities to develop deep machine learning, AI applications and clinical support systems. These support systems can help with everything from quality & safety, throughput, early warning systems and surveillance of acutely ill patients to avoid clinical deterioration. It also better positions the organization to determine the impacts of social determinants of health, health disparities and matching individual patient needs to available resources and support. The promise of big data in healthcare is predicated on how well our data scientists partner with clinical leaders to develop useful tools in the delivery of care.
My dad. He is from Cuba and has overcome major challenges like revolutions, moving to new countries with new languages, discrimination and helping raise children in new cultural settings. A lot of those experiences left him resentful and angry, but he kept learning and growing to the point that he became a loving and supportive father to my siblings and me. You have to admire someone who overcomes hardships like those and continues growing into old age.
One phrase that has been on my mind lately is “it’s later than you think.” Recently, I have been giving attention to items on my bucket list that were put off due to the pandemic. This summer, I sailed one of those tall ships with big wide sails. Next, I want to set foot on all seven continents. We are going to Antarctica late next year marking the final continent on my list.