In a wide-ranging interview on the Becker’s Healthcare podcast, Upstate University Hospital CEO Robert Corona, DO, MBA, discussed the increasing demand for Upstate’s services in the community, quality improvements and the ongoing challenges that all hospitals face with recruiting key health care professionals.

Becker’s Healthcare Podcast is devoted to “the people who power U.S. healthcare” with daily interviews in industry news, analysis and thought leadership from healthcare decision-makers.

Corona said the increasing demand for Upstate’s services has been fueled in part by an aging community and some smaller hospitals declining to treat more acute diseases. With the anticipated addition of Micron, and the expected population boom with it, Upstate needs to increase its community locations and capacity to serve the community, Corona noted.

“The demand for our services continues to grow,” he said. “We can’t see all the patients that we need to see in our main facility so we are trying to figure out ways to expand access points. We anticipate that our community is going to grow, so we have to be able to provide that supply that they need.”

Upstate continues to face challenges with recruitment and retention, much like other institutions, but Corona said Upstate is making progress, reducing the number of traveling nurses and retaining physicians who have attended Upstate’s College of Medicine.  

“Everyone wants the high-margin specialists, so we are competing with other institutions for labor, and some of the specialty areas are experiencing shortages, so it is difficult to recruit,” he said. “I think our problems are much like everyone else’s problems in the country.”

Also on the podcast, Corona talked about improvements to Upstate’s care and his goals for the future.  He said last year Upstate improved its quality to earn a three-star rating from CMS and Vizient.

“I’m very proud of the quality improvement we made in the past year,” he said. “We have a great new chief quality officer and with our chief medical officer they are working very closely to improve quality scores."

His organizational goals for 2025 focus on continued quality improvement. Upstate has adopted the Lean Six Sigma program, which is a management approach that aims to improve performance by reducing waste and defects. He said all leadership and much of middle management have been trained in the program.

Corona also pointed to Upstate’s improved access to care with the opening of facilities in the community to help better serve patients in the large swath of 20 counties that it serves. For example, he pointed to the new Upstate Cancer Center in Verona that enables patients to get care closer to home.

“We’ve done the same to the west and north of Syracuse,” he said.

Corona said now that he is a few years removed from the Covid crisis, his style as a CEO has evolved.

“I do a lot more listening and have an opportunity to think strategically and focus on quality, which has been very helpful. I’m focusing on the well-being our physicians and other employees. That change has been very positive. I have a background in doing innovation in industry before I came to back to academia and I am able to focus on that a lot more. It makes the job a lot more exciting to be able to start thinking about new technologies, new processes and new ways to do things.”

The Becker’s Healthcare Podcast with Corona was posted Jan. 29 and can be heard here.

Caption: Robert Corona, DO, MBA, speaks at the opening of the Upstate Cancer Center in Verona (September 2023).