(upbeat music) - We are honored to be joined for the first time by Saad Ehtisham, who is the President and Chief Executive Officer over at Atlantic Health, one of our longtime underwriters and healthcare partners.

Good to see you, Saad.

- Nice to see you, Steve.

Thank you for having me.

- You got it.

And by the way, for those who don't know Atlantic Health, describe the organization.

Please, Saad.

- Yeah, Atlantic Health's been here for 20+ years.

Some of our hospitals, you may recognize, Atlantic Health Morristown Medical Center, Atlantic Health Overlook Medical Center.

We also have our regional hospitals in Chilton Medical Center, and then out on the western side of North Jersey, we have Hackettstown and Newton Medical Center.

And we also have a partnership in Freehold with CentraState Medical Center.

So 24,000 employees, team members.

We have six hospitals.

We got about 1,000 physicians.

We got 50 sites of care.

We got a big, strong GME, graduate medical education program.

We train about 360 odd residents each year.

We got close to a couple of hundred medical students coming through.

We have a partnership with Jefferson Medical School as well.

So a little bit about Atlantic Health.

- How did you come into and why did you come into healthcare, please?

- You know, the journey for me to healthcare started really in Fort Worth.

So watching my grandmother go through ovarian cancer surgery.

I was 13 at that time.

And the way the care was delivered, my brother, older brother, we witnessed that and we talked to the grandmother, you know, "How is all this?

How do you feel?"

And she was just kind of blown away with the personalized care and the compassion that was shown to her.

And at that point, we decided this is a great profession, we want to pursue healthcare.

At that point, we both wanted to be physicians.

And well, one of us achieved that goal, my older brother.

I went a different direction.

(laughs) - What's his specialty?

- He's a neurointensivist.

He's double boarded.

- Wow.

Well, thank you for his service and all the clinicians, the physicians and the nurses and all the other folks on the clinical side who make a difference every day.

So let me try this with you, I'm curious about this.

I often ask people who are in top level leadership positions what their most significant challenge is, and what is the most significant leadership challenge you face?

And is it a healthcare-related challenge or just being a leader in any industry?

- You know, I'll give you a lot of respect.

I think the biggest challenge being in this seat, you know, we've all held different leadership seat, but when you sit in this seat of running an organization, I think the biggest challenge is making sure that your team knows that you care about them.

You gotta get that message to them.

They gotta feel it.

The authenticity has to be there, that you care about them, you care about their wellbeing, and your day is consumed with how am I making their life better or am I making their life worse?

I think the key success for any leader is if he or she can do, create an environment where people go home and they're excited to come back, especially on a Sunday, are they dreading coming back or are they excited to come back?

I think that's the challenge that is before us.

- In terms of challenges, Saad, to what degree do you see artificial intelligence, AI, as a significant challenge and/or a threat?

- I see that as an opportunity, not the challenge to me, it's an opportunity.

It's because for me, it's not about the shiny object or the new thing, it's not about the headline we're gonna get that Atlantic Health is deploying AI.

Well, no, it's not about that.

We gotta know what problems are we trying to solve?

And so if we know what problem we're trying to solve and there's a solution and that happens to be an AI solution, we need to bring that in and then embed that in our workflow.

And at the end of the day, we're bullish on AI when it comes to back office functions, agentic AI, when it comes to ambient AI, which we're about to deploy, we deployed agentic AI for scheduling to reduce friction.

We also want to develop AI assistants to work alongside our leaders who can do the mundane work off processing a lot of information and then just giving it to the leader who will make them scale a little bit faster and bigger and make them more available to be there in front of their team to talk to them and connect with them instead of sitting in front of a computer.

So that's where I think the value of AI really is.

I am cautious about using AI in making clinical decisions because you got to have a cognitive decision-making person, physician, clinician in between the patient and the technology.

- In the effort to keep costs down, particularly when there are so many questions about federal funding and where money is coming from, state funding, federal funding, reimbursement, all of it, how the heck, Saad, do you keep costs down?

You're laughing, why?

And still do the personal human touch and be as caring for patients and their families as you just described, and I know it's so important to you.

How the heck?

- Yeah, I'm laughing because it's easy to say, "Well, what's the biggest component of your expense structure?"

Well, salaries, wages are gonna come up, they're gonna be anywhere from 45% to 55, someplaces 60% off your expense line item, right?

Then you got supplies.

So it's like, "Well, that's costing you a lot of money, should we focus there?"

I tell you what, your frontline is your bottom line.

You start focusing there, you've already lost the battle, right?

You need to think about how you enable your team to think differently.

This is where technology also comes in, right?

And part of our iteration is going to be using Lean Six Sigma in reducing waste within the organization.

There's a lot of waste in most organization.

There's duplication that happens within the organization.

What do I mean by that?

Specialist comes in, cardiologist orders a test.

Here's another one, specialist comes in, they order another test.

Two similar tests being done, money going testing.

And so that's where we're gonna focus on.

We're gonna focus on access as well.

There's a lot of, you know, can we get the patients when they wanna be seen by a clinician in the clinic office, physician office in a timely manner?

You're having some chest pain, your wife, you know, my wife nags me every time something happens, she's like, "Hey, you need to go see a doctor."

I don't wanna go see a doctor.

- (Steve laughs) (Saad laughing) - But she makes me go see a doctor.

So I make an appointment and I can't get in, in a timely fashion, yes, I'm going somewhere else, and so we gotta fix those type of things.

So I think for any leader, think about what you're doing and how you're operating and focus on those things.

Reduce the friction between the patients, consumers and us.

Take care of your team.

If you're having to come to your team at the end of the day and there's a lot of headlines.

I just saw a headline in our own state, in our backyard, 1,000 people the other day going to be downsized.

I just think that's just a wrong direction.

Atlantic Health, really proud to say during pandemic when you saw all those headlines of workforce reductions, we did not do any of those.

- None?

- None, zero.

We focus on our culture a lot here and you can get a lot more done.

So my goal is, you talked about AI.

My goal is, so let's think about this for a second, they're working at 100% capacity right now, that's causing some burnout too, right?

Can we bring technology to support our clinicians where they work at now 90% off their current capacity?

Not 100%, but produce 150%.

I think that's possible.

And when you do that, you enable a resilient workforce and you don't have to think about laying anybody off because you're getting more production out of them.

- Saad, I cannot thank you enough for joining us.

We appreciate it.

- Thank you, Steve.

Appreciate it.

I look forward to the next conversation.

Take care.

- You got it.

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by EJI, Excellence in Medicine Awards.

A New Jersey health foundation program.

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.

The Turrell Fund, a foundation serving children.

Rutgers University Newark.

The Burke Foundation Newark Board of Education.

PSEG Foundation.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

And by The Fidelco Group.

Promotional support provided by NJ.Com.

And by BestofNJ.com.

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