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Exciting Updates on NorthStar's Vision & Strategy

What We've Accomplished. What We're Facing. Where We're Going.

Dear NorthStar Teammates, 

 

We recently held our annual Clinical Leadership Conference (CLC), where nearly 300 clinical and corporate leaders from across the organization came together for a weekend of learning, development, and collaboration. I came away energized by our talented team of anesthesiologist and CRNA leaders and their commitment to partnering with our clinical teams, corporate teams, and our hospital partners to make 2023 a banner year.


At CLC, I had the pleasure of sharing a NorthStar State of the Union address and want to take this opportunity to share highlights with each of you so that we can all be aligned with our organization-wide vision and strategy for 2023.

 

To start, let's look back at 2022.

What We’ve Accomplished

Before moving on, I want to call out the tremendous growth we’ve experienced across 2022 and say welcome to the teams from our new NorthStar sites!

What We Heard From You and How We're Responding

In addition to the highlights listed above, we also saw a record-breaking participation rate for our annual engagement survey conducted in August of 2022. Thank you to the many of you who shared your candid and thoughtful feedback.

 

We heard you clearly, and have already made a number of investments across our three focus areas in response to your feedback:

 

1.) To better communicate with employees, including NorthStar's vision and strategy, we’re:

  • Hosting regular Town Halls for clinicians to hear directly from our executive leadership
  • Making investments to determine the most effective ways to communicate with our clinical teams
  • Continuing to invest in regular leadership forums to ensure local leaders have the tools they need to share messages with local teams
  • Giving everyone at NorthStar the opportunity to share input into a project to revitalize our Careers website to improve clinical recruitment (survey launching soon!)


2.) To provide more robust career development opportunities, we’re:

  • Reviewing our CME/CE policies to remove unnecessary barriers for reimbursement
  • Increasing free CME/CE offerings through the Office of Clinical Quality (OCQ)
  • Creating career pathways through the OCQ QA/QI Committee and Anesthesia Value Institute
  • Bringing transparency and intentionality to finding NorthStar clinicians interested in taking on leadership roles
  • Investing in a best-in-class clinical leadership and frontline clinician recruiting engine to better alleviate staffing pressures


3.) Finally, to ensure we are following through on your feedback, we’re:

  • Creating more opportunities for local leaders to take action on facility- and team-specific feedback, including:
  • Sharing results for all teams with 5+ responses with local leaders
  • Training leaders on creating a targeted engagement action plan for their site
  • Encouraging leaders to share site-specific results at team meetings and other forums
  • Creating action plans for large systems or facilities whose results require additional support


And this is just the beginning. As we continue to invest in these focus areas, we have also identified operating priorities for 2023.

What We're Facing

There is no doubt that this continues to be a challenging time in anesthesia. Teams across not only NorthStar’s footprint but industry-wide continue to endure chronic staffing shortages, increased labor costs, and variable OR volumes. Additionally, despite our continued advancements in clinical quality and patient safety, our capacity to successfully negotiate with third-party payors has been severely restricted through the passage and implementation of the No Surprises Billing Act. This creates a difficult scenario where we have limited options and must negotiate increased stipends from our hospital and ASC partners, who are also managing through a challenging time and seeing negative operating margins for the first time in many years.

 

Despite all this, I am proud to say that NorthStar remains strong, due in large part to our resilience in anticipating change, our principled growth across 2022, and our collective effort in delivering high-quality, patient-centered care. Furthermore, we were able to secure over $28M from our partners that went directly towards compensation increases at many of our facilities and dialed in on our own operating efficiency to reduce overhead costs by $8.5M.

 

We are also uniquely positioned in the industry to withstand these headwinds, given our commitment to the delivery of excellent patient care and our long-term focus on partnership with our clients. One of our strengths continues to be our care team approach enabled by the highly skilled clinicians we attract and retain.


The lifetime value NorthStar delivers to its clinicians and the patients they care for is not just for the next several years, but the long term. 

Where We're Going

I want to take a moment to share NorthStar's Three Operating Priorities for 2023. Each of these priorities aligns with our evergreen core results of being a destination employer, demonstrating Value+, and running efficient sites, all while keeping an eye on areas that contribute to overall financial stability.

I look forward to sharing more about each of these priorities in the coming weeks and months as we continue seeing results from action plans that are already being put into place.

 

I am proud of our accomplishments as an organization and, most importantly, the excellent care we’ve provided for our over 1M patients, last year alone. I am confident that we will continue to strengthen our community, meet and exceed the goals laid out before us, and deliver the excellent patient care NorthStar clinicians are known for.

 

Sincerely,

Adam Spiegel, CEO