HEALTHCARE LEADER: Jason M. Little

Executive VP, COO, Baptist Memorial Health Care In May, Jason Little will step into the role of BMHC president and CEO, a job currently held by retiring Stephen Reynolds, who has left some pretty impressive footprints during his 20-year reign as chief of the one of the largest not-for-profit healthcare systems in the United States. How Little will handle that responsibility is cause for speculation, but clearly not concern.As fifth president, Little has no question concerning the direction in which his philosophy will lead him through the potential changes that lie ahead: “I think the core values that guide us as a faith-based organization are still the same,” Little said.“But certainly over the last couple of years healthcare has changed dramatically. The advent of healthcare reform and reimbursement challenges, and the fact that we have not yet expanded Medicaid in the state — all of these add pressure to the hospitals. There is a call to be able to continue to work for ways to add value to the system and to maintain the highest-quality care, but also to do it at the lowest possible cost; and Baptist is not only a high-quality provider but a very cost-effective one. We’re proud of that.”In a prophetic statement to Memphis Medical News during a 2011 interview, Little said, “What has made us successful in the past is not necessarily what is going to make us successful in the future, so we are growing and developing a hospital organization with physician partners that lends itself to a multidisciplinary approach to care.”Today, preparing to take the helm of the 14-hospital system, with 4,500 physicians in a three-state area, he points to the tremendous growth fostered by that strategy: “The number of physicians who are employed as part of the Baptist Medical Group is growing,” he said. “Over just the last 2½- or 3-year period we’ve grown from about 40 physicians at BMG to over 550, and we anticipate continued growth in this area.”Little, who joined the Baptist team in 2002, expresses enthusiasm and pride regarding the progress of Baptist’s previously identified initiatives: (1) the continuing development of the new cancer center (2) the completion of the design phase and beginning of construction of the new Oxford hospital; and (3) last month’s ribbon-cutting at the new 181-bed NEA Baptist Hospital in Jonesboro, replacing an overburdened existing hospital with a state-of-the-art facility he refers to as an “incubator for the future of healthcare.”“I’m a big proponent of the team approach to caring for patients,” Little said, “and in Jonesboro we designed a facility from the ground up with integration in mind; every physician who practices in that hospital is on the team and employed by Baptist. We have 36 medical specialties there, and the building was designed around that team concept.“Just in the last year, we’ve recruited over 20 new physicians who have joined that medical group, so everything from rheumatology to oncology to neurosurgery to heart surgery is represented there.”Added to Baptist’s other projects, the $400 million medical campus — the largest construction project in the state of Arkansas — brings its current construction investment to nearly $1 billion system wide, Little said. “It’s very unusual in this day and age to see an organization building this much. It’s simply a testament to our focus on patient care and delivering the best in technology to the patients we serve.”Little’s philosophy stresses the importance of being innovative, and he promises to deliver more innovations in 2014. “I think healthcare is changing so dramatically that innovation is part of staying on the forefront of healthcare,” he said. “We have a new ad campaign that I really like. Our tag line is ‘Get better!’ For me that means three things that are very important to the future of Baptist: The first is that patients can come in and expect to get better — to get healed. It also connotes that patients have choices, and we want them to be able to get better choices in choosing Baptist.“And lastly, ‘get better’ is a reminder to all of us on the Baptist team of our call to get better on a daily basis and to improve; we have lots of plans of how we are going to do that — and yes, you will see some of those in 2014.”Among those plans are the new rehab hospital being built on the corner of Wolf River and Germantown Parkway with another partner who will work in the rehab space, and a new, comprehensive electronic medical record called Baptist OneCare — designed exclusively for Baptist by Epic, the leading EMR system in the country, and scheduled to go live in its first stage this month.“The ability to have all the physicians and all the records in all the hospitals — everything connected in one record — is a differentiation that’s not available currently in the marketplace, and something I think patients are going to quickly see the benefit of,” Little said.He anticipates an estimated $500 million reduction in government funds for Baptist over a 10-year period in terms of the cuts to Medicare, sequestration and more. “Responding to that is a challenge,” he said. But it has fueled further innovations, including Select Health Alliance, Baptist’s clinically integrated organization, which will also debut this year.“When you get everybody kind of rowing in the same direction — nurses, physicians, administrators, all members of the team thinking ‘reduced waste’ — and you bring more quality into the system, that’s really how we’re going to respond to reimbursement challenges,” he said.Little enjoys golf, roots enthusiastically for the Vols, serves as a deacon and Sunday school teacher, and spends a lot of time with his three young children and wife, Allison, a vital supporter.“It’s an awesome responsibility to be tapped to lead this fantastic team,” Little said. “But I’ve had the really good fortune of being able to learn from a legend and one of the true greats in healthcare, Steve Reynolds, and what a blessing that has been.”