Mahajan recently sat down with Community Impact and shared his biggest priorities for the industry. Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
What led you to Baylor Scott & White?
Baylor’s previous president and [current] CEO Joel Allison was actually on my health care advisory board [in graduate school]. Early in my career, I got a lot of exposure with Baylor, [and] I always had a great admiration for the organization. Baylor is the largest not-for-profit health system in Texas. We have Level 1 trauma centers with Baylor University Medical Center, leading specialists [and] organ transplants. To be part of this organization is a great privilege.
What are your biggest priorities for BS&W now?
If you look at our primary service area, we are in one of the fastest-growing parts of a fast-growing metropolitan [area]. The Grapevine area in northeast Tarrant County, where we serve, is one of the fastest growing over there. As our community grows, it’s paramount that we have the technology, the tools and the resources to best care for that community. Where we want to position Baylor in Grapevine is to be that tertiary level center where comprehensive care can be made here locally within the community. Our goal would be for any ailment that a person may have to receive the highest level of care here without having to migrate into Dallas.
From health care in general right now, our biggest challenge and priority for us is stabilizing our workforce with the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of our nurses either chose to leave health care or have travel assignments. While we have been blessed to have a number of travelers support us during our critical need phase, it’s become vitally important that we stabilize our workforce. [We want] full-time, Baylor employees caring for team members and our patients.
How is Baylor adapting to growth?
We have been blessed with a number of capital projects that we are underway with right now. Part of that includes increasing our capacity in our ICU. We have 20 beds right now, and we’re going to be expanding that into an additional eight beds. Women’s services is a fast-growing area of our community. We’re creating a dedicated women’s center with 20 additional rooms plus two new operating rooms for the women’s center, which will be supported with minimally invasive robotic surgery. This creates about 30 beds of additional capacity for us over here. We feel with this addition of 30 rooms, plus adding our capacity into the [operating room], we will be able to meet the growing needs of the community.
What accomplishment would you highlight since you started at BS&W?
One of the biggest accomplishments [is] we just received our third Magnet designation. [The Magnet Recognition Program] is a very prestigious nursing award that looks at comprehensive nursing care, clinical competency [and] nursing pathways to expand their clinical skill set and their career paths. Since 2012, Baylor Grapevine has been a Magnet Designated Facility. Only 8% of hospitals nationwide earned this designation once, and we’ve been fortunate to be awarded three times.
Could you describe some of the main challenges these days in health care?
Technology. To be able to support our comprehensive level care [and], our tertiary level services requires a lot of investment from our company in our hospital into those technologies. We are going to be investing in robotics, which is minimally invasive surgery, with an additional two platforms over the next few years.
