By Bryan Chandler, Chief Operating Officer, Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas

Over the last two decades, Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas has experienced tremendous growth. A prime example is our emergency department, which has gone from 17,000 annual visits in 2002, to an astounding 70,000 today, marking a 311% increase.

However, growth and changes in healthcare have presented both challenges and opportunities.

Clinical staffing. Like hospitals across the country, clinical staffing costs accelerated during COVID, along with our use of contract labor. We have made significant progress to reduce contract labor, but we still face challenges recruiting a skilled clinical workforce. We’re working to reduce turnover, increase retention and identify potential employees who want to build a career at BHSET. Some of the ways we are tackling this challenge include competitive market salaries, offering innovative career development opportunities to improve clinical training, and partnering with regional universities to provide leadership and clinical programs.

Physician recruitment. It’s challenging to identify and recruit physicians in certain specialties due to increasing physician shortages. We’re addressing this in a number of ways including the development of an internal medicine and psychiatric residency program. We now have a full complement of internal medicine residents and in year two of our psychiatric residency program. Our internal medicine residents have received fellowships at premiere institutions, including Stanford Health Care and Mayo Clinic. Additionally, our focus on physician recruitment has resulted in cardiology, psychiatry, urology, cardiovascular surgery, thoracic surgery, general surgery, medical oncology, internal medicine and family medicine physicians joining Baptist Physician Network over the past 24 months.

Reimbursement. Medicare Advantage Programs and other payer practices have created significant challenges with reimbursement. We remain focused on addressing these issues through optimizing organizational efficiencies and enhanced focus on our revenue cycle. Coming out of the pandemic, we focused on cost savings initiatives on non-labor spending. In three years, we were able to trim $6 million from our supply chain and purchased services expenses.

Expansion. Our market assessment showed cancer treatment to be a significant area of need for our community. We embarked on a  $44 million new cancer center that will consolidate BHSET’s two facilities and allow us to offer advanced treatment typically found at larger metropolitan healthcare systems. The facility is expected to open in spring 2026.

Throughout this journey, CHC has been a steadfast corporate partner. Their insights on community-based hospital systems and faith-based organizations have been invaluable, aiding us in scaling up to meet the growing needs of our community.

Read the Baptist Beaumont Case Study