Health News

Building a State-of-the-Art Hospital: “It’s Going to be Amazing”

Published 3 months ago3m ago • Bookmarks: 338 • Comments: 1

Phelps's new Executive Director, r. Beata Mastalerz

February 12, 2024

Before taking over earlier this year as executive director of Phelps Hospital in Sleepy Hollow, Dr. Beata Mastalerz spent her first month shadowing her predecessor, Eileen Egan, who retired, just to see what the job entailed.

Phelps, a part of the Northwell Health system, employs 1,600 of Northwell’s total workforce of 90,000, spread out over 21 hospitals in the New York Metro region. It’s not the biggest; that would go to North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset. Phelps is one of two of Northwell’s flagship in Westchester County.

Dr. Mastalerz recalls arriving in the U.S. from Poland at age 21with little English. “I was a nurse in Poland, and I started here as a nursing attendant, while baby-sitting to earn more cash,” she says. “I’ve done it all, and I fully respect everyone’s impact on the patients.” Over the four decades since, she has evolved to become an accomplished healthcare executive.

Support our Sponsors

Though her job immediately before Phelps was as executive director of Manhattan Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital, Doctor Mastalerz spent more than a decade at other Northwell hospitals, notably its Cancer Institute, based in Manhattan. A resident of Rockland County, she spent years commuting to the city, often leaving home at 5:20 a.m. and returning late in the evening, spending four hours of that time commuting. Her days at Phelps are almost as long, with meetings starting at 7:00 a.m. “Now, my commute is 25 minutes each way,:” she says. “I bless the Lord every morning and every afternoon.”

Recently, she sat down with The Hudson Independent’s Barrett Seaman to talk about her job and what’s happening at Phelps. The following are excerpts from that interview:

THI: Help us get a sense of where Phelps Hospital fits into the larger galaxy of Northwell Health, its parent.

BM: One of the fundamental learnings of the past few decades is that growth and scale are the prerequisites for continuous success and sustainability, and Phelps offers a boutique approach to that. It’s personalized care that, you know, our patients feel special, and it’s not only focused on sort of technology and offering the best techniques and expertise, which we already have, but also making it, most of all, very personable for our patients. That’s what really matters and what makes us unique.

THI: Your ultimate boss is Michael Dowling, Northwell’s CEO. How often do you interact with him, and what’s his management style?

MB: I have to say that I have never seen a boss like that. So, I’m not sure if you know, but Mr. Dowling attends almost every first-day orientation for all new employees. That’s how they meet him, and they hear his vision, and they hear his mission, and they get to ask him questions and get to know him as a human. That’s extremely unique, and it happened throughout the COVID, and it happens today. During COVID, he visited every hospital and specifically intensive care units, and you don’t see that anywhere else.

He and his senior team travel to every hospital once a year and meet with the teams.They speak about what happened last year, what is the vision for next year, for three years, for five years–where do we want to be—and then he opens up a forum for the employees to ask questions and wants to know, how can we help?

… It’s truly unique, the way he leads. It’s huge, but it’s small.

THI: What sorts of benchmarks does he set?

BM: Safety—quality and safety and always pushing the boundaries and thinking outside the box. For example, we are implementing EPIC [a cloud-based electronic medical record-keeping (EMR) system) in all of the hospitals and ambulatory areas within Northwell, starting in 2025. That’s truly innovative. It’s very hard to have 90,000 people learn one EMR. In my career, I have been in three Northwell hospitals, each of which had a different medical records system, some of which are still on paper. He’s changing all of this to one enterprise. That’s thinking outside of the box.

THI: What does that mean for the patient?

BM: If you travel from Phelps to Northern Westchester or Lenox (Hill Hospital in Manhattan) or even to North Shore, your chart follows you. Right away, your physician sees your history instead of trying to find out what medication you’re taking, your past history, surgeries, your allergies? We have all of that information readily available, which is very amazing.

THI: What do you consider your competition for patients is here in Westchester?

BM: I’m going to tell you my true approach to this. True healthcare providers are not here to compete against other hospitals or health systems. We simply compete to be the best in our field for our patients and community’s sake. We are here to provide the best innovative approach to care—state of the art technology, world-renowned expert physicians, but at the same time, patient-centered and boutique care, and this, in return, makes us the competition for others.

THI: How do people–even EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians)—find out that Phelps has all this state-of-the-art equipment, like the new CAP (Center for Advanced Procedures; see https://thehudsonindependent.com/phelps-opens-state-of-the-art-neurosurgery-center/)?

BM: What we have done since I started, our team has been traveling and teaching and educating EMS corps about the technology and treatments that we provide. We found it very troubling that the EMS corps did not know that we have this state of the art technology available, that we are a thrombectomy-capable stroke center and that we can take care of a head injury and diagnose it in the best way possible and treat it.

Just yesterday, I had a meeting with our marketing team, [asking] how can we more proactively make this wonderful news known? So, speaking to journals, speaking to any social media, of course, journals, magazines, anything, articles, highlighting the physicians’ good patient stories. I mean it’s a lot of work, but we just opened in December, so….

THI: Do you have such a thing as a five-year plan, or do you have, just informally, goals that you want to achieve over a longer period of time?

BM: Growing our surgical and neurosciences programs is very important. We have all of the ingredients. We have expert physicians. We have teams and the best technology. Now, the aim is to make that known, make it very attractive, and make it a destination center when the patients really want to come to us, right? The other opportunity is the cancer care. That starts with a very accurate diagnosis, and we already have the PET/CT suite.. We have very comprehensive cancer care, an infusion center, a medical oncology center, wonderful physicians and staff. The plan is to rebuild the cancer center, rebuild it so it’s totally inclusive of the holistic approach towards the patient and patient care.

THI: When you say “rebuild it,” do you mean literally?

BM: Yes. It’s going to be much nicer for the patients. It’s going to be much more cohesive for the patients. We are looking at making it with the holistic approach.

You know it’s creating a center that has everything that’s needed for the patient, here on site, but the other thing that we need to take into consideration that as part of Northwell, we can also provide patients with the research, with clinical trials, with the best knowledge. As Northwell, we are taking care of the biggest number of patients in New York State, of cancer patients in New York State. So, it’s very important to know that and also to utilize it to the patient’s advantage.

I have one more: a digestive health center. That’s something that’s going to happen within the next five years. Our goal is to create an all-inclusive and highly specialized center of excellence for the patients with any digestive health issues. As you know, a lot of patients have chronic disease, and it really affects their life, their productivity, and it could become very costly.

So, with this, we will create something that has all of the modalities and technology available in one center, so the patient can have everything done on the same day, and it could be readily available to the patient. It’s going to be amazing.

Read or leave a comment on this story...

Support our Sponsors