Health System CEOs Detail Investments Covering Behavioral, Rural Care Gaps
At Becker's CEO + CFO Roundtable, UCLA Health president Johnese Spisso said the system's new 139-bed mental health campus, a $650 million project opening in January, will lose about $50 million a year but is needed given severe psychiatric bed shortages and daily ED boarding in Los Angeles County. Johns Hopkins Hospital president Redonda Miller described a housing wraparound program built with an 1115 Medicaid waiver that cut ED visits for high utilizers by 30% before the state took it over, plus a violence interruption program and school-based health centers. UNC Health CEO Cristy Page described deploying physicians across all 100 North Carolina counties and restructuring rural obstetric care to cut a county's maternity drive time from 90 to under 45 minutes without closing the unit.