Shop Talk: Q&A with Daniel Moen, Heywood Hospital
Photo/Christina H. Davis
Daniel P. Moen, President and CEO, Heywood Hospital
After 20 years at the helm of Gardner-based Heywood Hospital, President Daniel P. Moen will be turning over the reins. In mid-January he will start a new chapter as president and CEO of Springfield-based Sisters of Providence Health System. He’s ending his tenure at Heywood with a bang, having just opened a new, 72,000-square-foot, $37.6-million addition to the hospital called the Watkins Center for Emergency and Acute Care. Here, Moen discusses what prompted his move to Western Massachusetts as well as his assessment of the health-care reform effort in the Bay State.
>> What about the new position at Sisters of Providence made it possible for you to say goodbye to Heywood?
It’s very hard to say goodbye, having been here for more than two decades and having helped the hospital move from what was a very tenuous position when I first got here to a much more stable and growing organization. This opportunity came up at Sisters of Providence Health System, which is a bigger system. It’s a $400-million-a-year operation as compared to Heywood, which is $100 million. It also has multiple sites and multiple services. I just thought if I was going to do one more good long run that this was the time to do it.
>> What was the ‘“tenuous position” Heywood was in when you joined the hospital?
I was the sixth CEO to sit in this seat in three years. The management was totally destabilized and the hospital was in serious financial trouble. My first task was to stabilize the place financially. It was headed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. That meant fairly significant cost cutting to get the bottom line back to a positive number. But my long-term strategy was always growth. No hospital can stand still and think that it’s going to survive.
>> What are the prospects for small independent hospitals?
Small independent hospitals can do well in the current market if they provide a high quality of service and have a good primary-care base. That’s the case right now for Heywood. The other thing that helps Heywood is that we do have a piece of geography that really is distinct and our own. We don’t have another hospital down the street. The future is going to be more interesting. If the industry moves away from the current fee-for-service model to a global payment system, then small hospitals such as Heywood are going to need to be part of some larger organization or have an affiliation. That doesn’t mean you’ll have to be owned by someone else, but it’ll be necessary to be part of a larger network.
>> Can you explain what you mean by fee-for-service and a global payment system?
Fee-for-service means that a hospital is paid for every service it does. There’s a lot of discussion out here and across the nation that fee-for-service medicine does not help us hold costs down and it would be better to pay systems of providers, like hospitals, on a budgeted basis to take care of all health care needs of a certain population. As payment systems change, that will impact how hospitals and other organizations are structured.
>> How would you grade health care reform in Massachusetts?
I think it has been a spectacular success at accomplishing what it was designed to do, which was to improve access to care. What the legislation really avoided at the time was any effort to reduce costs. So there weren’t a lot of mechanisms to control costs. Now we have to do Health Reform II.
>> What’s the toughest management lesson you’ve had to learn?
The lesson I learned early on in my career is that you have to make sure that you talk to everybody that’s going to be affected by a decision. I don’t own this company, I’m a steward of an important community asset. It has to be run in a very business-like fashion, but I have multiple constituencies to work with and I think I’ve learned to do that well over the years. In this job, you can’t talk too much to people about where you want to take the institution.
WBJournal.com exclusive: Daniel Moen on the new emergency department at Heywood Hospital:
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