Powered by Women 2024: Tina Freese Decker, President and CEO, Corewell Health, Grand Rapids

It’s clear in Tina Freese Decker’s mind that her rise to become one of the most important guardians of health care in Michigan was fueled by the fact that her grandmother, Suzy Denny, gave up being a chain smoker cold turkey.

Being able to abstain from a pack of cigarettes she left on a table to stare at her every day was an act of courage — and a demonstration that Decker herself could do hard things.

“(My grandmother) was my best friend growing up; I would talk with her every day,” recalls Decker, president and CEO of Corewell Health, the Michigan medical giant that resulted when Spectrum Health in Grand Rapids and Beaumont Health in Southfield merged in 2022.

“She had smoked since she was 11 or 12, but when the doctor told her she needed to stop, she did it for the rest of her life — and I had six more years with my best friend.”

Decker, of course, has been dealing with her share of challenges as she continues to mesh the integration of two of the state’s largest and most crucial medical institutions, each with their own distinct brands, geographic domains, specialty concentrations, and cultures of care and work. She also led the expansion of Priority Health, a Spectrum-owned health-payment plan, into southeast Michigan.

Corewell has scored some early wins under Decker, including realizing cost savings of some $200 million a year largely from an enterprise-wide standardization of the merged system’s supply chain, revenue cycle, and marketing.

Decker says Corewell has “saved more than 3,000 lives” in its first two years by improving “system elements, better detection rates for sepsis, leadership clarity, aligning our care-pathway practices,” and more.

Decker also has led Corewell out of a painful initial period in which state lockdowns by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, along with stifling COVID-19 protocols in 2020 and 2021, continued to fray the expectations of patients, and impacted the medical field’s culture, camaraderie, and staff work schedules.

“Ultimately, in health care, it’s helping people live their best lives possible,” Decker says. “Every conversation is about how to help the patient and health-plan member get the best outcome possible. We may approach these things in different ways, and that’s what we worked through with the merger.

“Apart from that, this is why we’re in health care. We have faith and a purpose that is so foundational to us, and we build from that. Everything goes back to our mission and vision, and how we serve the people at the center of it.”

The native Iowan says she always had a passion for health care, adding a graduate degree in health finance and industrial engineering at the University of Iowa to her undergrad degree in finance from Iowa State University. She joined Spectrum, in Grand Rapids, as an administrative fellow in 2002, and by the next year she was director of planning and strategic development.

“I wanted to be in health care, and I wanted to impact a broad population — which is why I chose the administrative track, to figure out how you make an impact,” she says. “I was also curious to learn more about the human factors. I did a double master’s (because) there aren’t too many industrial engineers in health care, and now we use them more and more for process improvement, in safety, and to lower costs.”

Decker’s background and rise through Spectrum — up through strategy and operations positions — made her a solid choice to helm the merged Corewell, smooth out the many bumps from the transaction, and pull the new entity into a modern era of health care that’s dominated by financial concerns as well as medical and technological issues.

Decker notes that this summer, Corewell is going live with “one of the last major elements of the integration: electronic medical records.”

Culture also is at the forefront of Decker’s responsibilities in completing the integration of Beaumont and Spectrum. “The big emphasis of our team is that they need to be aligned with our values, to be able to move forward in an environment where we care about our team members, physicians, patients, and health-plan members, and are accountable to our organization, to people who are part of the team, and to our communities. We come together as one team to achieve our mission and vision, aligned around our purpose.”

Leading Corewell’s 65,000 people and dozens of institutions in that common direction, she says, requires a focus on “advancing and shaping our culture,” for one thing; “investing in and developing people and leaders”; and “being real and authentic. This is (an area that’s) often overlooked. It’s important to show vulnerability, and not always think you’re the smartest person in the room.

“It’s OK if you don’t have all the answers,” she continues. “Take progress over perfection. People are fearful of the first step when they don’t know every step of the way, but hopefully you only make small mistakes. You learn and get back up.”

She also credits “mentoring throughout my career, and my family — my husband, kids, and parents. They’ve been great and wonderful, and I’ve always had their support.”

The post Powered by Women 2024: Tina Freese Decker, President and CEO, Corewell Health, Grand Rapids appeared first on DBusiness Magazine .