Episode Details

John Rodis, MD, MBA, is an OB/GYN specializing in high-risk pregnancies. He's been a board examiner and a department chairman. He's been a COO and a CEO of a 600-bed Level 1 trauma center. He's also an author working on a book to help consumers make better choices.

Dr. Rodis has said he feels an inflection point is coming in the transition to value. First, we have the pressure of large employers. Second, we've got doctors themselves who are being crushed by the current environment and who may also have realized that FFS (fee for service) is kinda risky in the middle of a pandemic. The third force toward the inflection point is the new breed of fee-only transparent brokers. And then fourth, we've got the government, particularly state governments who are struggling fiscally coming out of this pandemic and also realizing that the current health care system is pretty rigged to profit on the backs of taxpayers and firefighters and teachers.

In the face of this transition, health systems who aren't keeping up with the times are at increasing risk. Given that Dr. Rodis has held pretty much every job in health care at this point, he's probably the perfect person to ask how to quantify that risk, number one, and then what health system leaders should be doing in the face of it.

John F. Rodis, MD, MBA, is a high-risk obstetrician by training and has had a long and illustrious career as a renowned health care leader. Most recently, he was the president of Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford, Connecticut. Dr. Rodis had two stints at Saint Francis, starting there early in his career as a maternal-fetal medicine fellow in 1985. In between, he was head of obstetrics and gynecology at Stamford Hospital, served as its chief medical officer, was a faculty member at the UConn School of Medicine, and became chair of OB/GYN at Saint Francis in 2011.

Dr. Rodis took the helm at Saint Francis as a recent state provider tax was quickly expanding into a huge fiscal burden on Connecticut's acute care hospitals. In December 2015, he was named its eighth president. Dr. Rodis was the first physician to be appointed president in Saint Francis's 118-year-history. He guided the hospital through an era of consolidation and rising state taxes. His last challenge arrived in spring 2020 as he oversaw an expansion of temporary facilities as the hospital faced the crush of the coronavirus pandemic. Also, during his tenure as president, Dr. Rodis ushered the Saint Francis team through significant change and transformation, much of which has been recognized at the national and regional level. Those transformations led them to achieve an "A" Safety Grade from Leapfrog seven of the last eight grading cycles. Saint Francis was also named Best Regional Hospital in 2019 by US News & World Report and was the only hospital in Connecticut named one of the nation's 100 Top Hospitals by IBM Watson Health.

Dr. Rodis's passion is patient safety and, in particular, providing consumers (patients) with reliable data to make informed health care decisions. He departed his post as president of Saint Francis in May 2020. Dr. Rodis has now started his own consulting firm, Arista Health, and is finishing a book entitled You Put Your Life in Their Hands.

02:16 How the scales are starting to rebalance. 02:44 "There's going to be a day of reckoning." 04:18 The risk a health system is taking by not adjusting to the market. 05:20 Where are the nominal dollars coming from, and where might they come from in the future. 08:04 EP279 with Peter Hayes.08:15 EP281