Christiana Care Health System Chief Medical Officer Dr. Janice Nevin will succeed Dr. Robert Laskowski as the organization’s chief executive officer, becoming the first female CEO in its history.
After a grueling interview process over 18 months, Christiana’s board of directors selected Nevin out of over 200 applicants from all over the country for her commitment to Christiana and her passion for work on the ground in the community.
Nevin recognizes the need to approach health problems through a population-based health lens to know exactly what socioeconomic factors may be influencing a person’s health decision, Gary Pfeiffer, chair of Christiana’s board of directors, said during a meeting with The News Journal’s editorial board on Tuesday.
“She had a burning passion for this position, for this community and wanted to lead this organization. She was the consensus All-American candidate coming out of the search committee,” Pfeiffer said.
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Gov. Jack Markell applauded the committee’s efforts for choosing Nevin; he said in a statement that she is an extraordinary leader with a vision to lead the way toward improved health care for Delawareans.
“Dr. Nevin will assume her role at a critical time for the future of health care in our state as we are working together with health care professionals, insurers, businesses, community organizations and others on a State Health Innovation Plan to transform the way we provide and pay for services. Her focus on patient-centered care and improving the health of our state as a whole will be indispensable as we move forward,” Markell said.
Nevin, 54, is a 12-year veteran at Christiana Care, having served as chief medical officer and chief patient safety officer since 2011. Previously, she held the reins to Christiana Care’s Wilmington campus as senior vice president and executive director, where she monitored the hospital’s clinical operations and shift in patient care.
Before her tenure at Christiana Care, she was a faculty member and the residency director for family and community medicine at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. But, even when she worked in Philadelphia, she lived in Delaware.
She’s spent most of her life in Delaware, watching the community evolve from the time she was a ninth-grader at St. Andrew’s School in Middletown.
“I can’t think of a better way to serve my community than to lead Christiana Care Health System,” Nevin said.
As CEO, she said she looks to embody Christiana’s “triple aim,” to improve quality outcomes, patient experience and value.
“I love the word partnership in the Christiana Care way. A lot of the work I have done in the system has really been thinking about how can we more fully engage patients and families not only in their own personal care journey, but in helping us design a system that really makes a difference,” Nevin said.
The notion of community engagement was instilled in her from a young age. Nevin moved with her family to the United States from England in 1970. Her father was a priest with the Church of Ascension in Claymont; her mother was a secretary for the Brandywine School District.
“They lived a life of engagement in their community,” Nevin said.
Now, as CEO, she will further that engagement under an organization that has a substantial footprint in Delaware. The organization has almost 11,000 employees and 273 medical residents. As of November 2013, there were 53,621 admissions, 173,857 emergency department visits and 206,503 cancer center patient visits.
Nevin touts that center, the Helen F. Graham Cancer Center and Research Institute, as an example of what is possible in Delaware.
“The experience, the care that is delivered, it’s not only patients and family-centered,” Nevin said. “You get the absolute cutting-edge treatment in clinical trials … it really embodies the kinds of partnerships that are possible, outcomes achieved, worked across the state and across the community.”
She pointed to the $210 million Wilmington Hospital patient-centered expansion and the organization’s early intervention program to help hospital patients with substance-abuse problems connect with community treatment options and other community engagement initiatives.
Still, there is work to be done, Nevin said, especially since Delaware health officials have the goal of making the state one of the five healthiest states in the country. But the state’s health statistics have been a little shocking as of late – a recent study reported that more than 287,900 Delawareans are considered obese.
It will be a challenge to attack the obesity problem head-on, Nevin said, but the key will be crafting programs in innovative ways, specifically using technology.
“What might work for somebody who is 60 or 65 will be very different from somebody who is 20 or 25. We’ve got to figure out how to individualize our approach so everybody can engage and everyone can benefit from that,” she said.
Another piece to the health care transformation in Delaware is moving from paying for medical services on a need-by-need basis to a more holistic model that is centered on paying for value. The Affordable Care Act has helped with that transition, but there’s still a long way to go. Preventative care needs to come first, rather than knee-jerk reactions.
“We have a culture of reaction to acute illness and we are really, really good at that and we need to continue to be good at that. … But what we have to start to do is really embrace the culture of health and preventative health. It’s not about just being a strong acute care hospital system; we’ve got to evolve to be a system that impacts the health of our communities in ways we haven’t before,” she said.
Nevin said it also will be important to incorporate government programs like Medicaid and Medicare with the hospital’s health care model.
“We see it as an opportunity, how can we redesign, how we deliver care. They are not insignificant resources,” she said.
There’s clearly a lot of health issues to tackle for the billion-dollar health care organization, but Nevin is up to the challenge. She may get a bit of a pay bump, too. According to Christiana Care’s IRS 990 financial form, Nevin’s salary was $483,139 from July 2011 to June 2012. Outgoing CEO Laskowski had a salary of more than $2.2 million.
From the time she was a little girl, she wanted to be a doctor. A physics class at Harvard University almost derailed her, but she held on to finish a doctorate in medicine with honors from Jefferson Medical College in 1987. She then completed a residency in family medicine at the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, as well as a master’s degree in public health in community health services from the University of Pittsburgh.
At the end of the day, she’s looking to leave her mark on Delaware, to lead Christiana Care forward. She recalls her time at St. Andrew’s, where she was a part of the first co-ed freshman class. Twenty-six girls and 180 boys, she remembers.
“As I like to say, it prepared me well for the rest of life,” she said.
Date: September 10, 2014