Brett McClain, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Sharp HealthCare

The Risky Health Care Business

What he does: Brett is the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for Sharp HealthCare in California. At Sharp he has direct accountability and oversight for the daily and strategic operations of Sharp's four acute care and three specialty hospitals, three medical groups, ambulatory and clinical service lines, and facilities management and development. His career spans nearly 30 years of health care management experience in a variety of operational, consulting, and executive leadership roles overseeing various hospital and medical clinic operations where he has been instrumental in leading growth strategies, large-scale capital investments, clinical integration and service area optimization, patient safety and performance improvement, and service line development.

On risk: "There's a lot of consistency with risk in health care over the years. As time has gone on the risks have changed and evolved and been added to as well. One of the lessons through COVID has certainly been the very real chance and issue and risk of multiple things happening at the same time, not just one big event. I think what's evolved around risk is the recognition that we need to have processes and people and policies and practice in place in order to deal with multiple catastrophes or multiple risks at the same time that can stress the organization in ways that probably haven't been experienced before … A flavor of some of the things we're looking at now at the top of the list is absolutely cybersecurity. It is something that continues to be critical in nature for all of us in health care and something that we cannot take our eye off any single day. The resources we've had to put into that, the people and the processes and the systems in order to assure that we are safe. We get hits every day, every single day, someone's trying to bad actor out there, trying to make something happen. Here in California we put the legislative risk pretty high up. It's not just on a state basis, but on a state basis here in California we have a very active legislature, and we put a lot of time and energy to monitor the things that they're working on. Make sure that we're taking a look at the impact so that we can communicate and educate our legislators. We spend a lot of time doing that … I've never seen something like this (workforce) in the past. The toll in terms of the physical, as well as mental toll, under all of us and folks just deciding this is not something I want to do any longer and changing the whole workforce perspective of working within health care. That is a massive risk for the entire industry. It's probably the one thing that I'm most concerned about, and most challenged by, about how do we respond to that and the moment so that we can assure that we have the workforce of the future, not just for today"

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