July 10, 2024
Hospital district marks major milestones during Dr. Pat Lee’s first months at the helm
When Dr. Patrick Lee became president and CEO of Travis County’s hospital district in early 2024, “My goal was to bring new energy to Central Health’s mission and let the district be creative and strong in meeting community needs,” he said recently. “Central Health today is definitely not the same as it was 20-years ago, or even one year ago.”
Lee started with five main goals:
- Building trust;
- Creating a shared vision;
- Figuring out where Central Health is now and how ready it is to change;
- Identifying quick wins that create momentum; and
- Getting the Central Health Board of Managers and executive team to agree and focus on these priorities.
During his first 100 days at Central Health – from early February to late May – Lee spent over 380 hours in more than 400 one-on-one meetings with staff, elected officials, healthcare partners, and community leaders. He also visited 42 locations in the Central Health system, which includes CommUnityCare Health Centers and Sendero Health Plans.
This thorough orientation helped Lee, who held prior executive posts at public hospital systems in Boston and Brooklyn, see Central Health’s strengths and its opportunities to do more and better. He found a 20-year-old organization with a strong mission, dedicated people, well-managed finances, and a commitment to grow to meet the healthcare needs of Travis County residents with low income.
Those needs, and strategies to strengthen Central Texans’ healthcare safety net, form the foundation of the district’s Healthcare Equity Plan. Implementation of this seven-year roadmap with $750 million in new investments began in 2023.
Lee expressed his gratitude for the work that went into building this strong foundation for what is happening now.
“I tip my hat to Mike Geeslin,” Lee’s predecessor as president/CEO, “for setting the stage for all we’re doing now. Our new board chair Ann Kitchen” – a healthcare policy expert, former Austin City Council member and state representative – “has provided bold leadership, and our executive team and staff has stayed aligned, committed, and diligent in transforming good ideas and plans into realities that build up our reservoir of trust.”
But Lee also saw ways Central Health, CommUnityCare, and Sendero could work together better. He learned of the legal, political, and financial challenges that the Central Health system faces as it endeavors to meet big community needs with finite resources. Some stakeholders wanted proof that the district could achieve the goals of the Healthcare Equity Plan while also fulfilling Central Health’s core responsibility to plan, pay for, and provide health care for Travis County residents with low income.
Quick Wins Lay a Foundation of Trust
With these insights, Lee and his executive team moved fast to secure those quick wins – so quickly, in fact, as to reach Healthcare Equity Plan milestones years ahead of schedule. A powerful driver of change has been Central Health’s expansion of its own practice of medicine, to provide specialty care that has long been in high demand among all Central Texans, sometimes unobtainable for Central Health’s patients with low income, and needed by primary care providers – including at CommUnityCare – to treat the whole person properly.
“We saw that the needs were big and growing right now, and our providers and partners trusted us and told us we could move faster,” Dr. Lee explained. “Because Central Health has carefully managed its cash reserves in prior years, we’ve been able to really push this work forward.”
New specialty practices opened quickly, first at the old CommUnityCare clinic on East 2nd Street – now home to a specialized podiatry and wound care practice. When Central Health’s services quickly outgrew the East Clinic, the district added more space at Capital Plaza in Northeast Austin for an interim clinic location. This summer, specialty care services will be provided at the renovated Rosewood-Zaragosa health clinic on Webberville Road.
The Healthcare Equity Plan goal of providing 5,000 patient visits in eight service lines by the end of fiscal 2024 (September 30) was met earlier this summer. Today, there are 14 different new Central Health-provided specialty and diagnostic lines of service, each of which is working through a waiting list of patients who’ve needed this care for months or even years.
“Almost right after opening the East Clinic, we had to expand,” said Lee. “We opened Capital Plaza, which is helping us meet these needs while we finish Rosewood-Zaragosa, set to see its first patients in August,” In the upcoming fiscal year 2025, beginning Oct. 1, Central Health could potentially conduct 40,000 specialty visits.
Building Bridges, Brands, and Connections
One of Central Health’s success stories has been the provision of medical respite care for people who don’t have safe places to heal once they leave the hospital. Under the leadership of Dr. Audrey Kuang, Central Health’s director of care for high-risk populations, the respite program has served hundreds of patients over the past two years. Those patients, most of whom lack stable housing, have been able to not only rest and recover but also access wraparound services to help them get housed, find sources of financial support, reconnect with family members, and more.
This simple service has made a truly lifesaving difference for some of Travis County’s most vulnerable residents. “But Dr. Kuang and Central Health also had an ambitious goal here—creating bridge and mobile medicine teams to provide more advanced care to people in respite,” Lee said. “Again, we aimed to start this service by the end of this fiscal year in September.” Instead, the new Bridge Clinic saw its first patients in early June.
Other wins have included Central Health’s forging partnerships to improve healthcare for inmates at Travis County jails and to create medically sound diversion services that offer an alternative to incarceration for people who need treatment. These initiatives were brought to Central Health by Travis County stakeholders during last year’s budget cycle. This year, Lee has invited the Board of Managers to bring new ideas to the table for staff to evaluate as it puts together its spending plan for fiscal year 2025.
One overarching focus for Lee has been to create more fruitful collaborations between Central Health, CommUnityCare, and Sendero. Topics being discussed now include a sustained campaign to increase colorectal cancer screening, a straightforward way to make a substantial difference in community health. In May, for the first time ever, the three organizations adopted a shared branding system that reinforces their roles within an integrated healthcare system.
Lee noted that “This fixes an issue pointed out five years ago in our first outside review [by Germane Solutions] and confirmed by our research since: People don’t know who we are, that we’re connected, and that we work together to improve the health of everyone in Travis County. We’re on the same page now more than before, and we’ve removed a barrier to care for people who didn’t know how to navigate our system.”
While Dr. Lee is happy with the strong start, he knows there’s still a lot of work to fully achieve Central Health’s vision of transforming care for underserved Travis County residents. But if his first days at the helm are any sign, he has energized the organization with clear purpose, a drive to act, and a spirit of collaboration needed to deliver on its critical mission. “This would not have been possible without the ongoing commitment of this community to invest in providing the best safety-net care possible for our neighbors with low income. People want to trust us to carry out that mission.”