WellSpan CEO Keith Noll
Monday February 5th, ACHCA partnered with the HPA club to hear Wellspan CEO, Keith Noll speak about his extensive experiences in the health care industry, and how he became the CEO of Wellspan.
Keith was a student at Penn State in 1987, and at that time, the HPA club consisted of 10 people. He is from York, PA, and decided to go back after school. His first job was mowing the grassy hill at York Hospital in high school, and he had no idea what he wanted to do. His mother was a nurse and his father was in business administration. He thought health care administration could work, and after applying to the only two schools in the state with a health care administration major, he was accepted into Penn State. From the beginning, Keith was an HPA major and never looked back.
Throughout college, he was a nursing assistant, and then obtained his graduate degree from the University of Minnesota. After graduating, he began working for UPMC in Pittsburgh, and stayed with the organization for 10 years. One day out of the blue, he got a call from York Hospital asking him to come in for an interview. Keith actually turned the job down three times before he got a call from his mother, who was working for the hospital at the time. Why shouldn't he accept the offer? He said he never thought he would end up back in York, but the community oriented culture of Wellspan is why he decided to go back.
Wellspan is the oldest and largest health care system in South Central Pennsylvania, and is also the largest employer in the region, including the government. The organization is not a hub and spoke system like many others, it is a distributed care system. Keith feels that the uniqueness of the system is one of the many things that have made Wellspan so successful.
Keith knows first hand the positives and negatives of health care system, and he shared his experience in the ever changing system with ACHCA. He said that the Affordable Care Act was supposed to increase access, but also reduce costs – it didn’t necessarily work. Despite efforts by the ACA to reduce emergency department visits. Wellspan's emergency department has already filled their new $50,000,000 emergency center. Another challenge Kieth has seen first hand is the 60% reimbursement income loss on Medicare and the 70-75% loss on Medicaid patients. So how do hospitals make money? They have to bring in enough patients with private insurance to cover the loss from Medicare and Medicaid. This is even more of a challenge when such a small percentage of patients use the largest amount of services. The young and healthy are how we pay for care in America today, and Kieth asked, "What’s the problem? They don’t want to buy insurance". The hard part about our changing health care system is that we are no longer volume to value. Now, the better we perform, the more we make(in theory). This sounds great, but has any of it worked? Not really. This i because we haven’t addressed the social conditions underlying the chronic conditions. The paradox is that we pay our physicians much more than other countries do, but we have worse outcomes, especially among chronic conditions.
Keith's advice to Penn State HPA students is this: "Don’t just take a job. Figure out what gives you passion, and don’t get into it to make money or for glory. Get into it to make a difference. Healthcare administration is stressful. I get up at 4 every morning, I'min the office at 6, and I love what I do".
The Penn State Chapter of the American College of Health Care Administrators would like to send out a big thank you to Mr. Kieth Noll for sharing your experiences and expertise with our members and faculty.
