NEJM Catalyst editor-in-chief Tom Lee, M.D., talked with Amy Compton-Phillips, M.D., executive vice president and chief clinical officer of Providence Health & Services, the huge Seattle-based chain, with 51 hospitals and more than 800 clinics in western states, about clinical leadership as the company navigated the health crises of the past year, including COVID-19, hurricanes and massive wildfires, and got back to pre-pandemic volumes.

Among her remarks:

“….{W}e have this large-scale change infrastructure of vision, trust, data, capacity, and alignment. In COVID, the vision was very clear: survive COVID… so everybody knew exactly where we were going — we were trying to get to the other side of a pandemic. Trust. We had all worked together and trusted that each was doing their own job and not try to manage it but allow it to happen. Data. We built an amazing data architecture that has allowed us to have not only insight into what the outcomes are that we’re seeing, but also predictive analytics, and now we can see with pretty good fidelity about 2 weeks into the future….  Capacity. We were very creative in creating capacity, and now that capacity generation is going to serve us well into the future. Alignment has been really essential for us to be able to flex people into the roles that we need [in order for us] to [provide] care in a new way. [In terms of] the platforming article, I’m really glad we had that model before COVID hit because it allowed us to go from 0 to 60 very rapidly when we needed it.

To read the whole interview, please hit this link.