At least one glass ceiling just got shattered right here in Vero Beach when Dr. Katherine Grichnik took over as the new chief medical officer at Indian River Medical Center on the first day of the New Year.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 80 percent of all healthcare workers are women but, nationwide, only a very small percentage of those women ever make their way to the very top levels of hospital management.
Grichnik has.
A former vice president of quality and safety at Mednax, the nation’s largest provider of maternal, newborn, pediatric and anesthesia services, with a network of more than 3,000 physicians – or 10 times the number of doctors she’ll be dealing with at IRMC – Grichnik also served two decades at Duke University both as a physician and as director of the school’s Center of Educational Excellence at its Clinical Research Center.
She earned her medical degree at Tufts, served her internship at Baylor and followed those with a residency and fellowship at Harvard.
In April of 2016, Becker’s Hospital Review named Grichnik “one of 50 top experts in the field of patient safety.”
It is an impressive resume, to say the least.
The Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University describes a chief medical officer as “a key member of the senior executive team, leading the overall clinical vision for the organization and providing clinical direction, medical oversight, expertise and leadership to ensure the delivery of affordable, quality healthcare services.”
Despite that high-powered description, Vero area residents should not expect sweeping changes at IRMC in the opening days or weeks of Grichnik’s tenure.
She says former chief medical officer and current president of Indian River Medical Associates, Dr. Charles Mackett, has “done a really amazing job over the last few years.”
And Grichnik, by her own admission, is somewhat methodical in how she approaches her new position. “One thing you should know about me,” she confides, “is I’m a big data person.”
That is a good characteristic for a chief medical officer, since “data from health information technology holds the promise of controlling costs and improving quality significantly,” according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
What that will mean for IRMC won’t be evident immediately but it’s worth keeping an eye on as healthcare in this country continues to change.
Whether those changes are Medicare-mandated, brought on by new pharmaceutical and surgical advances, or by the pending repeal of the Affordable Care Act, Grichnik says, “Every institution, every place, is a growing and learning organization. Layer on top of that the ever-changing rules and regulations that we all have to live up to and the environment of healthcare is, I would say, dynamic.”
Dynamic is an accurate description of Grichnik, too.
A mother of two grown children whose husband is the director of the Scully-Welsh Cancer Center, Grichnik says, “I bring three very different perspectives [to IRMC]. I can represent our private practice clinicians here because I’ve been in that role. I can represent our employed physicians because I’ve been in that role. And I can see the administrative piece because it kind of sits in-between.” Her time at Mednax also gives her real-world administration experience in a setting far larger than the Vero hospital.
What will Grichnik’s first orders of business be as chief medical officer? Three good bets are an amped-up emphasis on patient safety, goal-setting and team-building.
“My absolute passion is the culture of safety. The culture of safety programs that I was able to work on – both at Duke and at Mednax – I definitely would like to make sure we have that here,” Grichnik says.
Moving on to setting, meeting and exceeding goals, Dr. Grichnik adds, “Once we achieve one benchmark we set for ourselves, we’re going to raise that benchmark. It’s a process of continual improvement. I think that’s our goal. We are going to be continuously improving our organization.”
Finally, she tackles teamwork, using a medical metaphor.
“When you’re in a heart OR, you are interacting in a high-risk, very intense situation with your scrub nurse, with the circulating nurse, with the perfusionist, with the surgeon, with the anesthesiologist, with the people who come in and bring you your supplies, with the person who goes and gets your blood. Everybody has to work together. It’s a very close and tight-knit group that is constantly shifting and working together as a team,” and that, Grichnik says, is exactly what she’s aiming to have throughout the entire hospital.
Oh, and as a self-professed safety geek, it’s probably an even better bet that Grichnik has already seen to it that the shards from that shattered glass ceiling have been swept up and disposed of.