Leading with resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic

August 9th, 2021| By Suja Chandrasekaran, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Digital & Information Officer, CommonSpirit Health

The COVID 19 pandemic disrupted the operations and plans of many business organizations around the world. While some industries were able to take advantage of the crisis, the challenge was significantly amplified for healthcare providers as they found themselves at the frontlines in the fight against the pandemic.

As a leading care provider, CommonSpirit Health massively scaled up capacity and operations of care providers and labs in the service of the community. These frontline efforts were backed by a robust IT function that catered to the needs of more than 150,000 technology users including more than 35,000 physicians and 50,000 nurses. As we navigated the crisis to emerge stronger than before, our efforts across 5 focus areas enabled us in maintaining resilience in IT operations while also managing to keep the employee morale high.

Resilience became a key focus during the times of crisis. As we served our clinicians that served our communities, burnout was a common theme. Our providers across the nation served our communities in surge after surge. Our people had impacts on our very own and their families being impacted. When we reflect on resilience, we certainly reflect the kintsugi bowl, coming out stronger from some of the toughest moments in time.

• Human resilience
• Technology resilience
• Organizational and talent resilience
• Partnerships
• Rising to the occasion and seizing the moment
• Being savvy about fiscal management

Leading for human resilience, during moments of crises, holding a team together, in toughest darkest moments, a team that is serving from the front line of the pandemic has been the biggest blessing of all.

Building new clinical and patient capabilities

We built new clinical and patient capabilities that enabled a rapid response to the unique and urgent requirements of the pandemic.

• Established Virtual ICU, Virtual Companion and COVID-19 triage and served more than a 1000 customers through our COVID-19 chatbot.
• Enabled > 1.5M virtual visits on virtual platforms.
• Founded a community vaccination program in partnership with local and national health agencies and leveraged interoperability and data platforms to gather vaccine data and enable vaccine outreach, scheduling, & tracking.
• Developed vaccine management solutions to manage doses and disburse communication to respond to the safety needs of our front-line workers.
• Built foundational capabilities of integrated information availability to support our operators and clinicians lead with currency of actionable information as a tool.

Creating a digital workplace

We created digital spaces of work for 20% of our staff who transitioned into a digital workforce to provide support and assistance to our frontline staff.

• Developed infrastructure that enabled these remote workers to connect and collaborate effectively. Some examples are 5X expansion of network circuits at 50% of our locations acute hospitals and 10X upgrade of corporate internet to support Telehealth.
• Adopted technologies and consolidated legacy platforms; executed the largest migration to Google Workspace in history (190,000+ users) and ramped up the use of video conferencing applications such as Zoom throughout the organization in a short span of 1 month.

Investing in internal and external talent

We executed an organizational pivot to shift from a traditional IT centric organization and become more product focused while developing an engineering mindset.

• Prioritized employee efforts on creating technology inspired products that service the needs of our customers rather than on delivering projects within functional silos.
• Invested heavily in training and development of our staff, accumulating more than 93,000 staff development hours.
• Hired additional external talent including senior executives as needed in alignment with our vision and strategy, while achieving an impressive 41% representation of minorities and women in our new hires.

Leading with empathy and compassion

The leadership at CommonSpirit Health were exemplary in their calm and focused approach to the crisis as they continued to communicate and engage with the employees to give them hope.

• Established employee focused approaches, created flexible working conditions and limited core working hours to reduce employee burnout.
• We orchestrated a speaker series on important topics apropos for the moment — lifting hope, emotional intelligence, compassion, humor and stress management. We met with tech experts in a Tech Talk speaker series.
• A culture of appreciation as fundamental way of interaction and working together — emphasized on human appreciation — peer to peer, leader to employee, all division recognitions. Creating an environment of celebration was crucial to lifting the spirits of our people. When a culture roots for each other and lifts each other up, what a team can accomplish is limitless.
• Creating informal virtual water cooler moments — thru chat rooms, people showcasing their passion and expertise in areas other than work — our people taught others photography and lighting, music — a variety of topics to break the monotony, laugh together. (We had our people sing at our Christmas event , just that it was entirely on Zoom across locations. The drama of the moment accentuated by the team getting back to setting up tech abilities for employee vaccines in December 2020, right after the event.)
• We had leader roasts — while still staying true to our spirit of Human Kindness, our teams burst into rip roaring laughter while hearing leaders roasting each other. #LaughALittle

At CommonSpirit Health, we were successfully able to overcome the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our people have been our biggest strength in creating a purpose driven environment and fostering companionship. We have been prudent in upgrading and transforming our technology solutions to ensure a smooth and secure employee experience. As we continue to transform our technology capabilities, our journey continues. There are several muscles we built during the darkest moments of the pandemic. While we pray and hope the most recent Delta variant surge is contained soon, our lessons in resilience have positioned us to be unfragiled, well almost !!!

We will continue to elaborate on our tech journey in future editions of Digital Edge. Follow us in our weekly posts on Linkedin, Medium, Twitter and our company website https://commonspirit.org/

Digital Edge is a series of industry leading thought papers from a practitioner’s point of view, spanning all areas of value creation, digital, tech, AI, talent, new business models and cybersecurity. Follow “Digital Edge” for our weekly posts. You can access the previous article with following links:

July 21, 2021 — DNA for Digital Health

July 30, 2021 — Key success factors for accelerating Digital 2.0

Aug 02, 2021 — Technology Transformation at Scale for Digital Health