Chief Executive interviewed Louis A. Shapiro, president and CEO at HSS, who discussed his philosophy of continual improvement and business strategies to making HSS more accessible.

Shapiro explained the importance of the foundation strategy at HSS to create a culture, and having employees engaged in what the organization is seeking to achieve as being synonymous. Shapiro said, “I have had experiences in organizations that had a good culture and for a variety of reasons, lost it. And I’ve been in organizations that the only thing it had were its people and they knew how to invest in them. So, experiencing those two ends of the spectrum, I made a decision in my own mind that I had a singular responsibility for this organization as CEO and was going to make this an important platform. I believe that culture is a strategy that if deployed correctly, it allows organizations to achieve a level of results that are otherwise unattainable.”

Shapiro discussed the items that are most important to him, which include continued improvements despite what has been accomplished, and how to make HSS accessible to the world. “Better, better, better. It’s not bigger, it’s better,” said Shapiro. “We’re sitting here, the largest musculoskeletal institute in the world, we have figured out how to be the leader, not only the largest, but also the leader. And then we have all this knowledge about how to take care of one of the biggest health issues out there. If you go to a large employer, musculoskeletal is probably their first or second largest spend. It’s probably the fastest growing spend in their healthcare portfolio. And among others disease categories, there’s probably more variability and opportunities for improvement.” Additionally, Shapiro spoke about the HSS collaboration with close to 30 large employers in New York with national or international presence, to ensure their workforce has access to HSS services in an efficient manner.

Shapiro concluded, “If we could wave a magic wand and replicate this across the country, we would save the country. It would save billions of dollars. I don’t work in government. I don’t work in Washington. It’s not my job, but my job is to take HSS and don’t mess it up, make it better, make it work, more accessible. By making it more accessible, we’re filling an obligation to make our contribution to fixing our portion of healthcare.”

Read the full article at ChiefExecutive.net.