New episode of ‘Changes’: Aspirus Health CEO Matt Heywood

Even with changes in the healthcare industry, Matt Heywood says long-term planning can’t be abandoned.

In fact, he says it’s more important than ever.

Heywood is the president and CEO of Aspirus Health, which operates 18 hospitals in Wisconsin and parts of Minnesota and Michigan.

“Even though the world's chaotic and it's really changing … very rapidly, we’ve got to think out into the future proactively, and our organization has really been trying to do that,” Heywood says.

Our conversation with Matt Heywood is featured in the latest episode of Changes, a program from Chief Healthcare Executive®. Our new series features discussions with healthcare leaders about the evolution of the industry and how they are responding to those challenges.

• Previous episode: Hartford HealthCare CEO Jeffrey Flaks

Here are a few excerpts of our conversation with Matt Heywood.

Q: You have been consistently talking about taking steps to move forward, not so much looking at just cutting your way to security. So how do you make sure that that happens? How do you keep that forward momentum?

A: “What we realized right coming out of Covid was just like everybody else immediately coming out. I'll take me, personally, and I'd say the organization … you're almost worn out. So you're just like, relief, and then you're like, Okay, things are going to go back to normal. And I think a lot of people took longer to get through that cycle and realize maybe normal isn't coming back like the way we knew it to be. And we quickly realized normal wasn't coming back the way we thought it was. It was a little disheartening, because you just got over Covid, you were worn out, you're tired.”

“But we quickly started having discussions and using our foresight. And in doing so, though, what we found is, when people were tired, people were struggling, coming out of that tough time, to tell them the world is not going back to normal, that you see a world with more challenges and more tough decisions needing to be made. It was hard messaging for our company, and when you try to talk to other people inside and outside, there's sometimes friction. There's sometimes: ‘I don't want to accept that.’ And you have to be willing to overcome it.”

“Our organization is becoming very adept at willing to change. So we were able to take that foresight of the world we saw, deal with those emotions and that friction internally.

“And then we went and said, ‘Okay, let's use our fortitude. Let's have some willpower to get through these things.’ And we started doing it with a cycle now of being foresightful, knowing we're going to have to have to get through some frictions. Mainly now the frictions are more external, because other parties outside may not see the world we see, and then we quickly get into the cycle of fortitude, and then follow up where we then, OK, say, ‘Let's do it. Let's follow up. Let's go.’

“During these last five years, you see it in our quality, our service, our turnover, our engagement scores, our growth and our finances. We didn't dip, like a lot of other places. We had our dent that everybody went through during some of this, but we quickly came out faster and more robustly because we saw the future that differently, and quite frankly, we've been more right than wrong, so that's probably worked in our favor. And we worked through not wanting to change, because everybody was tired, and then we actually followed through with it.”

Q: A lot of hospitals and health systems are worried about Medicaid cuts. How are you preparing for those changes in Medicaid programs in the coming decade?

A: "We were not surprised that it was going to happen about a year or so ago. We actually budgeted for them. They're actually happening slower than we anticipated. And we budgeted for them, for the (Affordable Care Act) subsidies going away. We budgeted for uncompensated care going up.”

“I think it's going to be a lot more foresight, fortitude, tough decisions, a lot more standardized rigor, and you're going to have to think a lot further out, no matter how chaotic the world is.

See our previous discussions in our video series on the rapid changes in the healthcare industry. Reminder: We have an audio version of Changes made for listening on the go. Get it wherever you get your podcasts.

• Hal Wolf, president and CEO of HIMSS
• Soumi Saha, healthcare executive, attorney and pharmacist