Dr. Stephen Klasko - Part 2, former CEO of Jefferson Health and President of Thomas Jefferson University

On episode 6 of season 3, I continued my conversation with Dr. Stephen Klasko, who was the president of Thomas Jefferson University and CEO of Jefferson Health from 2013-2021. Under his leadership, Jefferson expanded from 3 hospitals to 18, and saw its revenue grow from $1.8 to $9 billion. Dr. Klasko was #2 on Modern Healthcare’s “100 Most Influential Individuals”. He is also the co-author of 2020’s UnHealthcare: A Manifesto for Health Assurance with Silicon Valley investor Hemant Taneja, and is currently an executive in residence at General Catalyst. 

In the second half of this two-part episode, Dr. Klasko and I discussed some of the systemic issues in U.S. Healthcare.  We started with a discussion of behavioral health, and how we will need to think differently about clinician/patient interactions to get at the root of the problem, starting with acting more proactively.   

The antidote to much of what ails us, in Dr. Klasko's opinion, is healthcare at any address (i.e. Jefferson sent a nursing student  into the home of an asthma patient with 10 previous ED visits that resulted from asthma exacerbations. The nursing student discovered mold, and so Jefferson sent a handyman to fix it at a fraction of the cost of an inpatient admission). Nobody wakes up in the morning and says "I am going to telebank", and yet we talk about meeting people where they are (tele-health, homecare, etc.) as though it's novel.  Dr. Klasko's vision was that Jefferson would one day no longer be defined as a hospital system, but as a system that provided healthcare at any address. He asks, rhetorically, "Why would you want to be defined by the place where you've in essence failed to keep people healthy?"
 
Despite advocating un-scaling, in order to innovate, Dr. Klasko freely admits that he grew Jefferson from 3 hospitals to 18. Yet, these mergers allowed him to obtain huge geographic proximity - nobody was more than 10 or 15 minutes from a Jefferson facility. As a result of facilities owned by the hospitals they bought, Jefferson was also able to obtain massive primary care networks, further contributing to the vision of healthcare at any address. We spoke about Tandigm's partnership with Penn and IBC, and what it will take for that partnership to bear fruits for the clinicians and patients involved. Finally, we discussed mergers and acquisitions, and the future of our healthcare system. 

Dr. Klasko can be found on Twitter and Linkedin.

Please make sure to check out Society for HealthCare Innovation (SHCI) website (http://www.SHCI.org) for more information about our work.