Warner Thomas

Warner Thomas is the president and CEO of Sutter Health. Headquartered in Northern California, Sutter Health is the 11th largest not-for-profit healthcare system in the nation, providing integrated, comprehensive, high-quality care throughout California.

How do you define the culture at Sutter, and why is it so important in driving your mission?

It starts with our mission, which is caring for our patients first and our people always. How we exist every day to make a difference for our patients, work hard to provide great service to them, to make sure we have the best quality, and to make sure we're working hard on access to be able to get patients in for the care they need.

This idea of our culture is around our values of teamwork, compassion and excellence, and how we wake up every day focused on taking care of our patients and taking care of each other. When we do this well, we change our communities. We have a huge impact on patients and their family members. It doesn't come easy.

We spend a lot of time around communication, around alignment of our goals and objectives around how we bring team mentors together to learn, share best practices.

It's what you do each and every day. It's about behaviors every day, every week, every month. That's what drives and makes a culture.

Could you share some details on the size and reach of Sutter, but also the importance of it?

We take care of about 3.6 million people every year. Our primary service area covers nearly 13 million people. We take care of about one in every hundred people in America, and we're the 11th largest not-for-profit health system in America. So, we have a huge responsibility to care for those around us, and a huge responsibility to help lead the change that's happening in health care.

We're committed to being a leader in policy, both at a state and a federal level, as well as a leader in technology and where we see AI and other technologies going.

What would you say are the most challenging aspects of leading such a large integrated health system?

The challenging part of any CEO's job is how you position your organization for success. How do you keep your leaders and your organizations aligned? How do you drive the culture and keep a great culture in the organization? Think about the strategic aspects and how you differentiate what you do each and every day in your organization. And then how do you continue to make sure that you align the organization driving in the right direction, that everybody is working as a team. That can be challenging in a large organization.

We spend a lot of time around teamwork, a lot of time around alignment and around spreading our culture across the organization.

What are some of the actual mechanisms that you use to maintain and foster that culture?

It's an evolution. One, we look for people that have optimism, who want to make a difference and that believe in the purpose of changing and saving lives and our mission here at Sutter Health. But beyond that, we try to have a culture of transparency around communication, around how we help each other. That goes to the teamwork component around understanding that everything we do, we can do better.

We also have sessions multiple times per year for employees called Power of One Employee Experience Events, where we bring in literally thousands of employees to talk about our culture, the strategy of the organization, and the direction we're going. They're fun, they're exciting, but they're informative. Everybody knows the goals and what we expect from each other. It creates alignment within the organization.

To me, that is foundational to the type of culture you have in an organization and the type of culture we have here at Sutter Health.

What innovative solutions is Sutter Health pursuing to address barriers like clinician shortages and workforce development?

Access is a big challenge nationally for health care. Number one, we've hired over 2,000 physicians over the past two years to bring more physicians and clinicians here to Northern and Central California.

The second thing is we have made some very significant capital investments, specifically in the outpatient and ambulatory area. We want to have facilities closer to people, so they don't have to travel as far.

We've worked hard to make the experience better, especially the digital experience, for both our patients and our teams. Almost two-thirds of our patients are digitally engaged with us, which empowers them to interact and transact with us in ways they prefer. Over the past couple years, we've grown our online appointments by almost 80 percent. In 2025, we probably will exceed more than 5 million online appointments. That's up over 2 million over the past couple of years.

And we're seeing great results with efforts to streamline work and alleviate administrative burdens. For example, ambient AI is improving clinician well-being and helping them be more present with patients during their appointments, so they can focus more closely on their care.

Nurse advice lines help triage and get people to the right places. We help patients navigate the health care system, which frankly can be complicated. It's a whole process as we think about how we serve our patients in a better fashion.

Could you share a recent success story that illustrates the impact of Sutter Health's approach on patient care or community health?

Just this week a patient showed up in one of our ERs in the Silicon Valley area who needed a certain high-level procedure and who was transferred to our San Francisco facility. Sutter CPMC has world-renowned, highest-capability specialists in advanced cardiac procedures who got that procedure done immediately and saved that person's life with hours to spare.

The facility I'm in right now is one of the larger transplant centers in California. We have patients getting lifesaving treatment. These are the types of things that literally happen every day across Sutter Health.

How are you advancing the integration of physical and digital systems to create a seamless experience for patients?

Organizations in health care delivery that are going to be successful in the future have large outpatient-oriented ambulatory facilities, physical facilities that are distributed, regional in nature, but they integrate that with a digital platform.

Digital capabilities include online appointments and patient portals where you can look at notes, ask questions to your physicians or clinicians, pay your bills, look at your lab results, be connected to chronic disease management tools or on-demand virtual appointments.

Those systems have to be connected, and the organizations that do that well will be the ones that succeed long term. So that's a big focus of our strategy here at Sutter Health. We've made big investments in the outpatient ambulatory area, as well as major investments in our digital infrastructure and our digital ecosystem.

How is Sutter leveraging technology and data to improve clinical outcomes and reduce friction for patients and caregivers?

Given our proximity here in San Francisco, we're in the heart of AI development. We are a leader in ambient listening, using tools in the exam room that will allow us to assist a physician or a clinician in getting their notes pre-done by listening to the patient, listening to interactions. We have over 3,000 clinicians and physicians on that system today.

We're looking at new technologies, how we can optimize AI, how we aggregate information and how we predict what might happen with patients. But what we think about with technology is how do we move from being where patients call us to where we're reaching out to patients.

We know they need screenings or appointment follow-ups to be predictive. We use information to predict what might happen to them. And to me, that's the evolution that we're on as we think about technology in the future.

What trends do you see shaping the future of health care over the next decade?

Personalized medicine and where we go with genomics in the future is going to shape medicine and where we go with patients.

Systems that are integrated and easier to use, that can basically jump that chasm of fragmentation, are going to be ones that are successful. Other systems that are not able to do that will probably struggle over time.

We have a shortage of physicians and clinicians in this country. AI will help with that some, but we have to train the next generation of caregivers. Sutter has a very large graduate medical education program that we are expanding, and that is a key component of our strategy.

As we see more people age into Medicare and more people use Medicare Advantage plans, how we operate in more value-based or global payment systems would be critically important. We certainly are on that path here at Sutter Health, but that will become a core competency for successful systems of the future.

What are your thoughts about advancements in, not just treatment, but prevention and an overall education for the populace to need less treatment?

The health status of our population in general is challenged today. If you look at the health status 20 or 40 years ago versus today, it's changed – pretty dramatic increase in diabetes, increase in obesity, increase in challenges around mental health. We need to tackle all these chronic diseases as a health care system and work in partnership with our patients to help them move through some of these challenges.

We created a new program called Sutter Sync, which allows us to connect with our patients digitally first around hypertension. The next wave of that will be in diabetes and diabetic care. We then will move into things like mental health or lipid management. But this idea of having a digital connection with our patients that helps them manage chronic disease, helps them own their own health care and engage them in a different way is critically important.
Let me give just one example of that. A patient would come into the office and get their blood pressure taken quarterly. The physician would adjust their medicine levels and then send them home. They come back three months later and go through the same process.

The control rates on that historically are pretty low because as humans, we leave the office, we eat right for a while, or we might exercise for a while, and then we forget or don't do it.

With Sutter Sync, we send you home with a wireless blood pressure cuff that syncs to your smartphone and our system. We have health coaches, algorithms, AI and virtual health coaches who interact with you every day to encourage you to take your blood pressure not four times a year, but four times a week.

We've seen a significantly higher success rate in getting people to manage their blood pressure than in the traditional interaction. So, this idea of how we connect with people at home, help them change their lifestyle, that's really where we need to go with prevention in the future.

What personal values guide you as a leader and how do they shape your vision for Sutter Health?

When we think about personal values, I like to tie back to purpose, and to me, one of my purposes is to make a difference. That's driven by values such as teamwork, how we help each other get better, how we have values around excellence and continuing to drive ourselves. Having the courage to take on difficult issues.
At the end of the day, it is about making a difference. It is about helping others, and it is about how we continue to challenge each other, to get better, support each other, to act as a team, all in the spirit of caring for patients and caring for our communities.

Can you share a patient story or experience from early in your career that continues to motivate you today?

I was already in health care when we had a son who did not survive childbirth. It was a very difficult time personally. You realize the importance of what people in health care do, the difficult things that they go through, the difficult times that they help.

I'll never forget the physician who was there to help care for us or the nurse who was there to be part of that challenging process. They're life changing. I've been asked, "Why are you in health care?" And to me, it's a privilege and an honor to be able to work in health care. It's a huge responsibility, too.

We wake up every day thinking about how we care for others. That's a huge responsibility, but it's also a huge honor. It's not a career. It's a calling. And it's about taking care of others and to me, there could be no greater purpose or higher calling in life.

Warner Thomas is a member of the Newsweek CEO Circle, an invite-only executive community of subscribers.