As president and chief executive officer of Children’s Hospital and Health System Inc. for the past decade, Peggy Troy has overseen the organization’s growth as it has added locations and clinics, ventured into foster care and adoption services, and launched its own health insurance organization. At a recent Independent Business Association of Wisconsin meeting, Troy discussed the history of the organization, future plans at the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center campus and how the health system is tackling its big vision of ensuring Wisconsin has the healthiest children in the nation.
“When people have insurance, they will seek out care more readily and not wait until their condition is catastrophic. They will get their well-baby visits; they will get their immunizations and pre-natal care.”
“You, as business owners, know that the (health care) costs are back-breaking to your businesses. I think you have to hold us all accountable in health care to ensure we are really efficient and effective, to make sure the value is there. We have to be very mindful of ‘we can do things in a more efficient way.’”
“What we now know is that only 10 percent of your health is affected by health care delivery itself. Twenty percent is the world around us. Thirty percent is your genetics, what you were born with. And 40 percent of your health outcome is predicted by the choices that you make; what you eat for food; where you live. So we need to take into consideration all these things.”
“Our motto at Children’s is that we want to be early adopters (of digital innovations). We don’t have the money to be on the front end of innovation, but we can be early adopters and embrace it once we know that adoption curve is going to happen.”
“We’re careful; we try not to launch off into things we know we can’t do well. That is the hardest part of my job, deciding what not to do, because you want to do everything for kids.”
