Nationwide Children’s Hospital works to close gaps in care

Salt Lake City - Donna Teach chooses to refer to challenges as opportunities.

She’s the chief marketing and communications officer for Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. While acknowledging problems to solve, Teach also sees enormous potential in offering more help to patients and families. She cites exciting developments in genomics and the prospect of AI accelerating research and offering more ease of access.

“I don't think there's ever been a more exciting time to do what we do,” Teach says.

She talked with Chief Healthcare Executive® in a conversation at the Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit.

Nationwide Children’s Hospital is working to expand access to care, including initiatives to help children stay healthy.

“Closing care gaps for patients is huge right now,” she says. “I think a lot of what we're really trying to do is to start to work upstream, which is some of the most challenging work in the preventative spaces and the wellness spaces.”

“So, Nationwide Children's Hospital has a very large accountable care organization where we're working with our patients who are in capitated Medicaid plans, which allows us to really do that work upstream to be preventative,” Teach adds.

Nationwide Children’s Hospital, based in Columbus, Ohio, has been doing significant work on population health and addressing whole child health.

“The thing that's unique about Nationwide Children's is we're one of the largest providers of pediatric care in the country,” Teach says. “We're also one of the most diverse, because we serve children in urban, suburban, rural, Appalachian settings on a very large scale, almost 2 million patient visits a year. So we're able to see behavioral health and population health on a very large scale.”

Teach points to the hospital’s wide-ranging efforts, from genomics research to tackling housing issues. The hospital is working “to really surround kids with what they really need to have their best outcomes and to have that integrated into an academic setting,” Teach says.

Behavioral health needs

Teach says that she’s particularly proud of the pediatric system’s efforts to help meet the behavioral health needs of patients. Leaders of children’s hospitals around the country say they are seeing more kids and teens in hospitals with behavioral health needs.

She also says that Nationwide Children’s Hospital is working to help parents have the tools to help kids with their mental health. And Teach says the need “has never been greater.”

“We're never going to ‘access’ our way out of it,” Teach says. “We're never going to have enough behavioral health providers to meet all the needs. So the idea is that we want to provide the best systems of care, but we also want to try to work upstream to help parents be empowered with tools to raise a generation of kids where their mental health and their physical health are treated the same way.”

Nationwide Children’s Hospital created The Kids Mental Health Foundation, which provides free resources to communities to understand and promote the mental health of children. Teach calls the foundation “the largest movement dedicated exclusively to promoting kids' mental health and wellness.”

“We reach millions of households, but that's where we're really working, is in that upstream mental health space, because mental health services really need to be delivered in a community-based setting, especially for kids,” she says.

Adopting AI

Nationwide Children’s Hospital is adopting artificial intelligence across the system.

“We have a number of teams and a number of leaders that are really looking at, how are we integrating into all levels of experience across our stakeholders? So I think it's really exciting to see how AI is starting to get used in the clinical setting now in our day-to-day encounters with patients,” Teach says.

“But I really want to make sure that we're integrating it into the patient journey in ways that are really helpful, not just additive, because I think the tools can be additive. We really want them to be meaningful in an environment where it's already confusing.”

She says she is spending a lot of time thinking about AI and how a “digitally native generation is really going to help us transform healthcare.”

Building the culture

Teach also points to what she calls the most important job of marketing professionals in healthcare right now: cementing the culture.

She says building a strong culture is “job number one.”

“Our most important marketers are our staff: what they're saying, how they're feeling, how they're delivering on the patient care experience,” Teach says. “So if I only had $1 to spend, that's where I would spend it, is on my internal culture, my internal comms, and I think sometimes that's overlooked as a strategic function in healthcare, and I think it's probably the most important.”

Nationwide Children’s Hospital rolled out a strategic plan last year, and Teach says a top priority is helping staff understand how they contribute to the “line of sight.” For staff members, that can be how they contribute to the patient and family experience.

“That is really the secret sauce of how we roll out our strategic plan, and that ‘line of sight’ language is something that we've really adopted into our culture … It's a great, great way for uniting our entire organization, which is more than 18,000 people,” she says.