Inspira Health’s new chief strategy officer believes health systems can no longer separate long-term planning from day-to-day operations.
For April Venable, who recently stepped into the position after nearly two decades with the southern New Jersey-based health system, strategy work now revolves around helping the organization grow sustainably, while keeping the focus on community needs and care delivery transformation.
“I think it’s really about bridging the gap between what’s happening day to day in clinical operations and then what will sustain us from a business perspective in the long term,” she told HealthLeaders.
Venable’s expanded role comes as more health systems elevate strategy leadership to rethink and refine approaches for mitigating continued pressure on margins, labor costs, payer negotiations, and consumer expectations.
Yet, the function of a chief strategy officer is more than just executive-level planning. It also requires a close connection to frontline operations, Veneable highlighted.
“Strategy is not sitting and thinking all day and reading about the industry,” she said. “There’s a lot of being ingrained and involved in what’s happening, so all those dots can be connected.”
The Partnership Path
Partnerships remain one of Inspira’s biggest strategic priorities, according to Venable, particularly as health systems try to find the right balance between expanding services and preserving financial flexibility.
“When we look to grow, one of the first things we do is say, ‘is another provider already doing a great job serving our community and should we explore a partnership?’” she said. “We don’t pretend to know the answer to every problem.”
Inspira currently operates partnerships across neurosciences, cardiac care, outpatient imaging, home care, hospice, and autism services. The organization is also continuing to build out its ambulatory surgery center footprint as more procedures shift into lower-cost settings outside the hospital.
Pictured: April Venable, senior vice president and chief strategy officer, Inspira Health.
Venable said Inspira evaluates several factors when deciding whether to build services internally, acquire capabilities, or partner with outside organizations, including speed to market, available capital, and clinical expertise.
“Our favorite option is the partnership option,” she said. “You’re just leveraging complementary strengths from that both parties bring to the table, which is going to ultimately serve your communities more effectively and result in the stronger financial performance, which we all need in today’s environment.”
Putting the Value in Value-Based Care
Another major focus for Venable will be value-based care, an area she previously led within Inspira for roughly a decade.
“If you approach value-based care in my eyes as a growth engine, not just a risk mitigation tool, you can open up new revenue streams,” she said.
Venable pointed to remote monitoring programs, community health integration services, home-based care, and digital health as areas where providers can create new care models while improving patient engagement and managing total cost of care.
Inspira’s Living Independently for Elders (LIFE) program, part of the federally recognized Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE), has become an internal testing ground for new approaches under a fully capitated structure.
Venable is also thinking about value-based care’s impact on care coordination and when to intervene, or step back, from a patient’s care journey, especially as more advanced arrangements create clearer incentives for collaboration across providers.
In some cases, she shared, those models allow for more intentional coordination between clinicians, including provider-to-provider consultation to determine when a patient can continue being managed in one setting versus when it may be time to transition care elsewhere.
“Doing that level of coordination when you have the right value-based arrangement and the right financial rewards is really impactful,” Venable said.
She added that systems which operate on both sides of the equation, as providers and health plans, often have the most flexibility to innovate under those arrangements.
“It’s really just about aligning the incentives,” Venable said. “And when you have the incentives aligned, there are some really creative things outside of our typical wheelhouse that you can put into place.”
That flexibility is increasingly important as community-level needs vary significantly across Inspira’s southern New Jersey markets, where socioeconomic conditions and access challenges vary widely.
Inspira relies heavily on its community health needs assessments when determining how to match care delivery to population needs, Venable noted. That translates to leaning on embedded community health workers to connect people to resources they may have trouble accessing, as well as expanding programs to address transportation barriers and food insecurity.
Venable said: “We really are just trying to listen to the voices and tailor our strategies accordingly.”