Risa Lavisso-Mourey: The Business Case for Quality
Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, MD, MBA, combines her medical and business expertise as president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
By Laura Ramos | Print the pdf of this story
Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, MD, MBA, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), has spent her entire life around health care. Raised by physician parents, Lavizzo-Mourey has seen medicine evolve considerably, beginning in her childhood in Seattle, then medical school at Harvard, and now in her own clinical practice in Brunswick, N.J. The current environment, the geriatrician says, is ideal for hospital leaders to reset their priorities.
"Hospitals are looking for creative solutions to ever-vexing problems,” says Lavizzo-Mourey, who has served as the foundation’s president and CEO since 2001. “Systems are under increasing scrutiny by the public and payers to deliver care that provides value. And frankly, that requires innovation. Innovation comes about when you have people from many disciplines coming together to solve a problem. That is the essence of what collaboration is."
In 1999, Lavizzo-Mourey joined the RWJF as senior vice president and director of the healthcare group. Before that, she was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and director of Penn’s Institute on Aging. She also has served as deputy administrator of what is now the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality in Washington, D.C.
Among the RWJF’s top priorities are improving the quality and safety of patient care, as well as designing more effective care delivery models. Both of these goals require leadership and collaboration, a fact that doesn’t go unnoticed by Lavizzo-Mourey. “Increasingly, we’re seeing that acute care patients don’t need just a day or two of hospital care. They need a connection to a medical center—one that can help them return to a higher level of functioning over time,” she says. “This means that CEOs and other hospital leaders need to look beyond what happens in the hospital to outpatient and after care. In other words, hospitals have to be more collaborative to help patients achieve their goals.”
Case in point: the foundation’s “Expecting Success: Excellence in Cardiac Care” initiative. During this 29-month-long project, RWJF researchers worked with 10 hospitals across the country to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in heart care. Much of the work involved collaboration across disciplines. At one hospital, a nurse practitioner and a cardiologist created an outpatient follow-up clinic for heart failure patients. As a result, the hospital had fewer readmissions and lower return rates to the emergency department among these patients. “This didn’t involve a lot of high-tech, but rather an understanding of the follow-up care patients need and a willingness to collaborate,” Lavizzo-Mourey says.
Lavizzo-Mourey, who has a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, also brings business chops to the foundation. Being able to make “the business case for quality” is critical as health leaders and policy makers examine outcomes and manage scarce resources during the current economic crisis.
It’s not easy work. Hospital leaders face many challenges in creating cultures of collaboration, such as breaking down silos, creating buy-in, replicating good ideas across departments, and working with fragmented technology. “These are challenges that CEOs need to face if they want to develop collaborations that pay off and lead to higher value,” Lavizzo- Mourey says. “Addressing these early on will help leaders ensure the success of their projects.”