Julie Miller-Phipps says Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and Health Plan will likely stick with the familiar as it seeks to fill her role as its top executive in Orange County, where consideration of internal candidates is under way.
The search comes as the longtime leader of OC’s biggest healthcare provider is preparing to “shift into an area I’m not familiar with.”
Miller-Phipps recently spoke with the Business Journal about her new position as president of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Georgia.
She served as vice president and executive director of Kaiser’s OC operations—the top local position—for 12 years before she was named president of the Atlanta-based health plan a month ago.
Kaiser added a hospital in Irvine, built a new one to replace an aging facility in Anaheim, and increased membership in its HMO by 68% to nearly 500,000 during her tenure here.
Much of the gains came against a backdrop of healthcare reform that has led some competitors to move toward the long-standing Kaiser model in California.
Miller-Phipps noted, however, that Kaiser in Georgia delivers healthcare in a different fashion than the California plans.
“We contract with hospitals [in Georgia],” she said. “We don’t have our own.”
Miller-Phipps said she doesn’t expect Kaiser Georgia to add hospitals.
“I don’t think so … we are going to stick with contracting,” she said. “There are excellent hospital systems in Atlanta, [including] Piedmont [Healthcare] and Emory Healthcare.”
Oakland-based Kaiser Foundation has usually contracted with other providers in its non-California markets, she said.
Margie Harrier, chief operating officer for Kaiser in OC, will serve as interim chief executive, according to Miller-Phipps.
“We are doing an internal search,” she said.
Kaiser is expected to pick a permanent successor sometime next month.
Record of Growth
Miller-Phipps can point to a clear record of growth as her legacy in OC, where she led a service area with two hospitals, 23 medical offices, and about 900 doctors in the county in the Permanente Medical Group.
“When I got here, we had 290,000 members—we are now almost at 490,000,” she said. “Something’s working.”
Much of Miller-Phipps’ time was spent overseeing the emergence of Kaiser’s new OC hospitals.
Kaiser added a $400 million healthcare complex on Sand Canyon Avenue in Irvine in 2008. It included a 150-bed hospital—the first entirely new hospital built in Orange County since Irvine Regional Hospital and Medical Center (now Hoag Hospital Irvine) opened in 1990.
A $560 million complex in Anaheim that included a 262-bed hospital with 16 operating rooms opened in 2012, replacing an aging facility on Lakeview Avenue.
“They’ve done incredibly well,” Miller-Phipps said of the two facilities. “They receive accolade after accolade.”
She noted that excitement about a hospital “can wear off very quickly” if it is not doing its job in caring for and improving the health of its community.
“We are in the business of healthcare,” she said. “This is not a frivolous [industry]—lives are in our hands every day.”
Teamwork
Miller-Phipps had warm words for Kaiser’s Orange County workforce and its efforts to fulfill the vision that’s been laid out for the healthcare network.
“They were everything,” she said, mentioning that she hired much of the leadership team.
“If there is no team, you are not going to go anywhere,” Miller-Phipps also said.
She wants Kaiser to “keep the pace moving” in terms of how the provision of health services is changing in Orange County, as well as looking toward the future.
Healthcare in OC in general has taken significant steps toward Kaiser-style integration in the past year or so, as healthcare reform has had an increasing effect on the marketplace.
Irvine-based St. Joseph Hoag Health and Vivity—an alliance between Anthem Blue Cross and several local hospital operators, including Fountain Valley-based MemorialCare Health System—are recent examples of that movement.
Miller-Phipps has said the emergence of Vivity and other alliances will spur Kaiser to think “differently” when it comes to how to serve various patient groups.
“Our elderly [members] want more traditional healthcare—our Millennials want to receive their care differently,” she said. “We have to keep the pressure on. … We have 65 years of experience” with delivering vertically integrated healthcare.
