Member Spotlight: Dave Jenkins on Behavioral Health, Staffing and Lifelong Learning
Download MP3Hi, everyone. I'm Daniel Williams, senior editor at MGMA and host of the MGMA Podcast Network. Welcome to another MGMA member spotlight podcast. Today, we have the guest, Dave Jenkins. And Dave and I met recently, and I just wanted to share him with the MGMA audience here.
Daniel Williams:Dave is an accomplished health care executive. He has more than twenty years of leadership experience there, including roles in hospital operations, behavioral health services, and military leadership. He currently serves as the executive director of market operations at Cone Health, overseeing hospital campuses and behavioral health services. That's not all. Dave is also an adjunct faculty member at Winston Salem State University where he teaches health care administrative courses.
Daniel Williams:Dave, welcome to the show.
Dave Jenkins:Thanks, Daniel. Thank you for the invitation, and I look forward to sharing this time with our MGMA members.
Daniel Williams:Great. Great. So with the MGMA member spotlight podcast, we always like to get to know those MGMA members a little bit better. Just talk about your maybe a couple of the highlights of your pathway into health care and what that looks like.
Dave Jenkins:Sure. I think my pathway is probably not that much different than a lot of folks where there's many forks in the path and curve balls, and sometimes you just be at the right place at the right time and be prepared to step into that next opportunity. Really nothing special stuck out. It was certainly not a linear direction that I saw nor did I ever envision myself being in healthcare leadership, say twenty, twenty five years ago. But everything's a journey and I just go with it.
Daniel Williams:All right. Thank you for sharing that. Now tell us a little bit first about Cone Health, size and scope of the practice, any of the specialties there, and then where your focus is at Cone Health.
Dave Jenkins:Sure. So Cone Health is a medium sized integrated healthcare system. It's got six acute care hospitals, a couple ambulatory outpatient facilities, and well over 100 provider based practices within our network. We are in a partnership with Ryzen Health, which is a subsidiary of Kaiser Permanente, and that's fairly new. So we're still learning more about that relationship and what the longtime future is.
Dave Jenkins:But within Cone Health, it's a Greensboro based system, a not for profit founded in, really around the Moses Cone Memorial Hospital in the early 1950s and has really just grown across the triad. We incorporated a behavioral health service line in the late '90s. And so my role within the health system is to provide the executive leadership for our two acute care behavioral health facilities, as well as the whole service line portfolio within the Cone Health footprint.
Daniel Williams:Okay. As far as your day to day, how would you describe that? What's going on in Dave Jenkins' world? I know that you also juggle the teaching as well. We'll get into that.
Daniel Williams:But just as far as your work at Cone Health, how would you describe a typical day or maybe it's an atypical day? Just talk about that.
Dave Jenkins:I'd be wary of any health care leader that can accurately describe a typical day. I feel like that's why we get into this field is no two days are alike, for sure. And that's no different for myself. And being part of a large health system, I have to really balance the needs of what's going on in the hospitals. How does that affect what's going on in our outpatient clinics?
Dave Jenkins:How is our providers and the work that they're doing inpatient and outpatient and ensuring that we're in tune with the overall health system operation? And that's in the day to day space, right? But my role's a little bit more in the strategic side, whereas I'm having to constantly look at our programs and our practices and how we're doing business today versus what are the market trends, what are the needs going forward, and how do we see ourselves doing business in the future.
Daniel Williams:What do you identify as some of the major challenges there or opportunities, however you wanna look at it, that you're dealing with there at Cone Health?
Dave Jenkins:I think like everybody else, it's just balancing a scarcity of resources. We have come out of the COVID thinking post COVID would be a sort of reversion to mean, and it has been anything but that, especially within the mental health space. The demand for mental health services was really exasperated by the pandemic and has maybe plateaued at best, but there has definitely not been going back to how things were conducted beforehand. And even the nature of our work has changed significantly. So it's how can we do more telepsychiatry?
Dave Jenkins:How can we do more integrative health? How can we do more collaborative care? And so a lot of our time and energy right now is spent just optimizing what resources we have to meet the community needs, knowing that the demands of the community far exceed our capacity right now.
Daniel Williams:Wow. Okay. That just hits me hard. I am with y'all and hope that you can get the help that y'all need there. Yeah.
Daniel Williams:Thank you so much for sharing that. Let's look at, as far as leadership in healthcare, you have extensive experience, as I was talking about earlier, leading teams in both hospital operations and in behavioral health. What are some of those guiding leadership principles that have really directed and shaped your life as a leader?
Dave Jenkins:Sure. So for me personally, I feel like I've tried to be very consistent in my leadership approach. So whether when I was working in the hospital, when I was a practice administrator for many years now in kind of a service line executive leadership role, think what has really made a difference is really just staying authentic and connecting with people. We are in a human service, a human business. And if you're not in tune with the needs of human nature, you're gonna get disconnected both from your mission and your people very quickly.
Dave Jenkins:And I really see them as one and the same. I feel that the mission that we provide to the community is just as critical as the support and the leadership that we provide to our staff at all levels and roles. Just coming with that and really understanding our folks and getting to know our folks and listening to their challenges and providing them confidence that the leadership is aware and wants to make things better for them and the patient and then following through, that just goes a long way, especially following for sure showing folks that you heard them and that you did something about it. And that goes much further than newsletters and pizza parties and all of that sort of thing.
Daniel Williams:Exactly. Exactly. Thank you for sharing that. Now as you mentioned earlier, behavioral health is a major focus of yours. Talk about that.
Daniel Williams:How is Cone Health addressing this? Uptick is not even the right word to describe what's going on in the behavioral health side of things. There has been a major increase, as you said earlier, since the pandemic. So how are you guys addressing that?
Dave Jenkins:We're probably doing a lot of the same things that other health systems and medical groups are doing, just figuring out what works and what doesn't work and trying to do things differently. We know that there's a workforce shortage that we have to contend with, and that's not unique to us. I know psychiatry is usually in the top five list of medical specialties with workforce shortages, and that's just not at the provider level. That trickles down. Trying to find good behavioral therapists is a challenge.
Dave Jenkins:Psychologists can be a challenge in discovering. And then just folks who are willing to step out of their comfort zone and interact with mental health patients on a day in, day out basis, the nurses and the techs and the assistants, and even the folks who do registration and check-in. It really takes a special person to want to work with this population, even at a registration desk. And so identifying those people is really the challenge. And then what can we do to maximize the resources that we have?
Dave Jenkins:And earlier I mentioned integrative care and collaborative care, and those are tools that are really underutilized that I feel like are finally coming into their own. They're not new. Integrative care has been around for twenty years in a multidisciplinary practice model, but now I think there's a recognition that's essential for providing quality care and keeping care within a primary care office. Same for collaborative care. So much of mental health can be addressed at a primary care level that they're not always equipped with the skills and the abilities to do that.
Dave Jenkins:But when primary care providers are just constantly referring out to therapists and psychiatrists, it really bogs down the specialist system and it makes access a challenge for those that probably do need to see a psychiatrist because they are complex or they do have a higher acuity. And if we're able to do more in the primary care level with collaborative care, then that frees up capacity for my psychiatrist to work with those that have the most difficult needs.
Daniel Williams:So following up with that then, you talked a couple of times about staffing shortages. So how do you maintain that workforce engagement? How do you keep the team empowered and feeling good about the work that they're doing when they might feel a little bit of that overwhelm or even burnout, what initiatives have you started to help deal with that?
Dave Jenkins:Sure. As mentioned before, you know, you really gotta be in tune with with what's happening at the frontline. And there have been times where we've had to pull back on something because it was gonna be overwhelming, or we've had to use inpatient units. There have been instances where we've just not been able to fill to capacity because we did not have a safe complement of staff in order to provide quality care and just being willing to make those tough decisions because sometimes it will go in contrast with the demands of the organization, but you really also have to think about what's right for the patient as well. And you don't want patients to be in a situation that's unsafe because there's insufficient staffing.
Dave Jenkins:And we've been strategic about where we've brought in outside assistance from agency staffing and temp and things as such, which I know everybody else does, but it's a very valuable resource that you, it's not sustainable. And we'll do that to bridge gaps and fill holes while we actively recruit. But the single most important thing that you can do to prevent staff feeling overwhelmed is have staff, have staffing, have the right ratios. We really try to emphasize that with our team is we don't want you to be short staffed. We want you to have somebody on us taking assignment with you and covering the halls together, like that is in our best interest as well.
Dave Jenkins:This is not intentional. Just being transparent with our team and letting them know what recruiting and retention looks like and what our limitations are going to be. And then they're usually accepting of those boundaries.
Daniel Williams:Yeah. Wow. That is a lot of work. So you are not only involved there at Cone Health, but you're also involved with MGMA. As I mentioned earlier, you have that educator role as well.
Daniel Williams:So let's tackle those separately. Let's start with MGMA. What was your introduction to the organization? And then what is what has been something that you've gotten out of that relationship?
Dave Jenkins:Sure. So my journey with MGMA started well over ten years ago when I was a practice administrator. And for me, it was just about growth and development, just learning more about the industry. I didn't grow up in healthcare. I was a career changer.
Dave Jenkins:So I just wanted to be a sponge for knowledge. And I looked to the industry leadership to provide that. So that was a great outlet. And Cone Health is a organizational member of MGMA, so that helped as well. Many of my practice administration colleagues were certified medical practice executives.
Dave Jenkins:And so I was like, Tell me more about that. And then the more I learned, I said, oh, I want to do that too. And so I did, and then here recently completed the fellowship program. And so now a fellow of American College of Medical Practice Executives, and the journey continues. I'm still learning and enjoy all the live webinars that you facilitate.
Dave Jenkins:Those have been a valuable tool to deepen my toolbox and tackle the problems that we encounter every day.
Daniel Williams:Yeah. That that is awesome. Now this other part, you're also an an educator at Winston Salem State University. Talk about, one, I'm let's talk time management for a minute here because you already explained everything going on at Cone Health, and then you're finding somehow time to get that fellowship. And then on top of that, also teaching.
Daniel Williams:So what is the code that Dave Jenkins has that you can share with the rest of us to be able to do all these different things?
Dave Jenkins:Sure. I wish that I had some insightful guidance on time management, but I am probably the last person that you would want to take any advice from on time management. Time. Because there's never enough time to do it all. You just eat the elephant one bite at a time and keep going through it.
Dave Jenkins:And for me, teaching is more of a hobby than anything. It's great that I'm on payroll, but I just enjoy the experience and really enjoy being around the students. And I learned from them. For me, teaching is a learning opportunity, especially with the MHA program, because many of them are either career changers or they are wanting to progress their career. So they are bringing knowledge and experience to the classroom.
Dave Jenkins:And I tap into that for my own personal growth. And so it's a symbiotic relationship.
Daniel Williams:Yeah. What do you enjoy most of it, or what's something really interesting that you've learned either about yourself or learned about health care and how to be a better leader through working with these students?
Dave Jenkins:Is that you never stop learning. You just you don't. You can't. If you do, then you're in the wrong place. If you're not a lifelong learner, this is not the industry for you.
Daniel Williams:Yeah. Wow. All right. In our remaining time then, I've got a couple more questions for you. This is more one of those crystal ball kind of questions, but what do you see as the major trends that are shaping the future of healthcare administration?
Dave Jenkins:It's technology. Yeah. It's technology. It's being able to leverage it not just for operational improvement and retrospective analysis and fine tuning processes. I think we've been in that space for a long time as an industry, but now technology is is becoming forward looking.
Dave Jenkins:You think about adaptive technology. You think about artificial intelligence, predictive modeling. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then you're already behind. And it's just leveraging those tools to improve outcomes, improve quality, improve your employee experience, improve your patient experience. In Cone Health, we really try to be involved in being out of front.
Dave Jenkins:One of the AI tools that we're looking to onboard in the near future in our provider practices is ambient listening and dictation. And that's gonna be a huge win for physician engagement and a huge win for just being efficient and being able to generate more patient encounters with our limited amount of slots. Who knows what's five years down the road from now, but whatever it is, you need to be involved in it or else, you know, you're gonna find yourself as I used to be.
Daniel Williams:Wow. Final question then. Advice for aspiring leaders. What's one nugget of advice you'd share with any of those young professionals, those early careerists trying to carve out a health care leadership role?
Dave Jenkins:Sure thing. It's something I tell the students in the MHA program all the time. Your career journey is gonna be full of so many things that are out of your control. But what you can do about it is take control of the things. You can control your growth plan.
Dave Jenkins:You can control development. You can control learning. You can control networking, you can control learning more about your organization and the industry and your specialty, whatever it is, there are many things that are within your control. And I have seen that the leaders that recognize that and really take control of the things that they can control, it puts you in a much better position to respond and react and take advantage of the things that are out of your control. Dave
Daniel Williams:Jenkins, thank you for joining us on the MGMA Member Spotlight Podcast.
Dave Jenkins:It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Daniel.
Daniel Williams:Yeah. That is gonna do it for this episode, everyone. But in the episode show notes, I'm gonna be sure and provide several links to the fellowship program, to MGA mentorship, to perhaps even Dave's courses that he teaches at the college. So be on the lookout for those, and we'll also develop an article based on this so you can read more about what Dave's doing in health care. Until then, thank you for being MGMA podcast listeners.
