The Exec: Doylestown Health's New CMO says 'You Need to Lean on Other People to Help'

Sean Reinhardt says being successful in his new role includes admitting he does not have all the answers.

Humility is an essential quality for CMOs, the new CMO of Doylestown Health says.

Sean Reinhardt, MD, began his tenure on June 3 at the Doylestown, Penn.-based health system, which features Doylestown Hospital, a 247-bed community teaching hospital with more than 435 physicians in over 50 specialties. He has held several leadership positions at the hospital, including lead physician for the cardiology group, director of the medicine department, and president of the medical staff.

"You need to realize that you do not have all the answers, but there are people around you who probably do have the answers if you bring them in the loop," he says. "You need to lean on other people to help. You need to approach challenges humbly, and say, 'How can I make this better, and who can help me find the solution?'"

There are other qualities that can help a CMO succeed, Reinhardt says.

"It also helps to have a history with the organization, which helps you support the culture," he says. "You obviously must have people skills—you are not going to do well as a CMO if you can't work well with others. You must have good organizational skills because there is a lot thrown at you."

Sean Reinhardt, MD, is CMO of Doylestown Health. Photo courtesy of Doylestown Health.

At this early stage in holding the CMO role, Reinhardt says he has two primary priorities.

First, he wants to promote care quality at Doylestown Health.

"Quality is the center of everything we do," he says. "Nothing happens without good patient care."

"Our medical staff is robust and focuses on the quality of the doctors," he says. "We take very seriously any deviation from quality care, and deviations are investigated in a formal process and dealt with in a timely manner."

Reinhardt says quality is included in patient care metrics.

"Quality is reviewed regularly when we follow various metrics of performance, including door-to-balloon time for the cath lab and door-to-needle time for stroke," he says. "Everyone needs to be invested in improving quality."

Second, Reinhardt is playing a role in merger talks with Penn Medicine.

"Successfully completing that merger is a top clinical priority," he says. "If the merger goes through, success would be defined by maintaining our unique culture while garnering Penn Medicine's strengths and scale."

Reinhardt has clinical experience as a cardiologist, which he says helped prepare him to serve in the CMO role.

"As a specialty, cardiology has many different facets," he says. "There is noninvasive cardiology, which shares a lot of characteristics with primary care. There is interventional cardiology, which is much more procedural-based and involves interactions with surgeons, so I have a surgical background. Cardiology is a great place to develop experience and master the medical issues that come before a CMO."

Promoting patient safety

Reinhardt says he has three priorities when it comes to patient safety.

"My primary approaches to promoting patient safety are to make it the center of our culture, to make sure everyone knows it is essential to our culture, and to make it easy for people to report patient safety issues," he says. "We also need to address patient safety issues and to constantly re-evaluate how we are doing on patient safety. So, it is a continuous process, where you foster a culture of patient safety."

Like other hospitals, Doylestown Hospital has several metrics to evaluate performance on patient safety, such as hospital-acquired conditions, Reinhardt says. Patient safety is addressed at the highest levels of the organization, including a monthly Patient Safety Committee meeting.

Reinhardt says the health system makes an effort to avoid being punitive so that staff will feel more comfortable reporting patient safety issues.

"Everyone understands patient safety reporting is conducted so patients can receive better care," he says. "We all make mistakes. We all have bad days. Everyone knows that the patient safety reporting system is designed to have a teaching moment, where we can all learn."

Leading a medical staff

Reinhardt says his leadership style is focused on working together.

"Being collaborative is the only way to work with a medical staff," he says. "All physicians are very accomplished, and they are not going to be convinced by just saying, 'I told you so.' You must establish a collaborative environment, where physicians feel like solutions are developed with them at the table."

To do this, he says, a CMO must also be an effective intermediary.

"As the CMO, I am here to act as an interface between the administration and the clinical staff," he says. "When someone brings me a problem or challenge, my first reaction is how can I help them fix the issue, whether it is an administrator with a question about the medical staff or vice versa. I am the link between the two sides. I need to be able to speak both languages, so there is communication between the administration and the medical staff."