This is the final part of a two-part interview with Charles Clement, the new CEO of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium, or SEARHC. Listen immediately below to the condensed version of the interview, or to the entire conversation, which is posted at the very bottom of this page.
SEARHC is Southeast Alaska’s largest private employer, and it’s working to address a $4 million loss from 2011. Yesterday, you heard about how SEARHC lost money and some of the steps managers are taking to bring the organization back into the black.
Still, Clement says despite the immediate situation, he has “incredible optimism” about the organization’s future.
KCAW: I want to make a medical analogy if you’ll forgive it. When you’re dealing with a crisis, I’m guessing there are a lot of short-term fixes you make – treating the symptoms as they present in the emergency room. What are some of the long-term changes? How does SEARHC prevent itself, once it’s cured of this particular ailment, from getting sick again?
Clement: That’s part of my top secret strategy, I guess. (chuckle) We have a leadership team here that’s new to SEARHC and brings a fresh set of eyes, you see a fresh set of opportunities here. There are a lot of things we have done, as a matter of practice, and they’ve been iteratively changed over the years, that are fundamentally unique to SEARHC. What you have now are a set of people who are in questioning why these things are the way they are – how we do billing, how we do insurance, how we do benefits. I think those have the opportunity to fundamentally change this organization for the better. Those are foundational, fundamental changes. To me, by addressing those, we’re building the foundation for long-term success. If we just address the short-term problems by doing RIFs, that doesn’t necessarily solve the long-term organizational dysfunction.
RIF is an acronym for “reduction in force.” Layoffs, basically. SEARHC has not taken that step, opting instead to look at long term fixes. In that way, Clement says doing this job is a little different than he thought it would be when he sought this job.
Clement: The challenges are great and the resources are few. My working understanding is that the opportunities were many and the resources were some. And so, it’s just a degree of — it’s on a scale, and it’s just a different end of the scale. The extreme different end. It’s just bigger. It’s not really any different, and the circumstances are compressed, and the considerations are tighter. But it’s not like I thought it was blue and it’s pink. It’s just a much darker shade of blue. So yeah, it is different. The job itself is different, but the environment itself is different than what I thought I was getting into.
KCAW: You mentioned that you are incredibly optimistic about SEARHC’s future. What gives you that optimism?
Clement: My optimism really stems from some of the things I previously mentioned. There are just a lot of opportunities that have gone unrecognized or unutilized. We have fairly large market penetration here in Southeast Alaska.
SEARHC operates a variety of clinics and community health centers, and Clement says they’re being underutilized.
“If you look at how they perform, they perform OK,” he said. “But from a business perspective, there’s a lot of financial upside perspective there.”
Clement began work Feb. 6. He and the other three executive officers at SEARHC all started in their positions after the first of the year. Clement grew up in Metlakatla, and was previously chief operating officer at the Southcentral Foundation, which co-owns and manages the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage.
This is his first tenure as chief executive officer, and he says he’s acutely aware of the responsibility that brings.
KCAW: You talked about making SEARHC a place where people want to be, want to come to work. So, when you’re driving in to your office in the morning, what are you thinking about?
Clement: I think a lot of people probably feel this way: I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders when I come in every morning. I get to work early. I get to work really early. This is a serious business. And people’s lives are on the line, people’s jobs are on the line, and largely, I don’t want to let people down. What is pushing me is the fear that I’m letting down my employees, or the fear that I’m letting down our patients, fear that I’m not meeting the expectations of the communities that we try to be good participants in. Failure is my concern. I feel like people are counting on me, counting on us, counting on SEARHC, counting on me and my leadership – however you want to phrase it. They’re counting on us for health, they’re counting on us for jobs, they’re counting on us to be community participants, they’re counting on us to lead. When I step back and look at it, and all the challenges and all the risks, it weighs heavily on me.”
One of the things Clement says he loves about his job is that he feels SEARHC has personal connections to the people who work there and the people who use its services.
“Every employee that writes to me, every patient that writes to me is not that far removed,” he said. “It’s not this large autonomous thing, this organization abstractly removed from the patient experience. Every day I hear about things that go good and things that go not so good. I can put a personal face on it. To me, that really humanizes the work that we do. It brings a different level of passion and commitment to the work we do. What does that mean? These are very challnegning times for us. You wonder, ‘Is it all worth it?’ Unequivocally: When you have that level of personal commitment, yeah, it is worth it. It’s amazing. You have a profound responsibility and a profound opportunity to positively impact people’s lives. And that’s an incredible blessing.”
Hear everything
We’ve posted our entire conversation with SEARHC CEO Charles Clement below. It is about 40 minutes long, and posted here in two parts.
Part One: The current financial situation, the short-term fixes, details on SEARHC’s current financial situation.
Part 1 – iFriendly
Part Two: Being CEO, the Anchorage arrest, optimism for the future, and more.
Part 2 – iFriendly
