Pride & Promise: Healthcare Leaders Share their Wins for '24 and their Hopes for '25
Dan Bjerknes, Regional President & CEO of Avera St. Luke’s, Aberdeen, South Dakota
Dan Bjerknes, Regional President & CEO of Avera St. Luke’s
In our ongoing effort to keep our metaphorical finger on the pulse of what's happening in our wide and diverse medical community, we invited regional healthcare leaders to share their insights about the year past and the year to come. Our hope is that you'll learn something new about the health systems around you, get to know some of the people at the helm, and find inspiration for your own organizations as we navigate a new year.
1) What are you proudest/most excited about what your organization has initiated or accomplished in 2024?
2024 was a fantastic year for Avera St. Luke’s Hospital because of some of the strategic decisions we made that ultimately increased access to both primary and inpatient care.
For example, our innovative, novel approaches to care delivery, including the hiring of several advanced practice professionals following the retirement of three long-term, well-loved providers and the opening of a Same Day Sick Clinic, have resulted in an increase of nearly 2,000 patients year to date in same-day settings that include our After Hours and Same Day Sick clinics.
At the same time, we were able to increase our inpatient transfers to our facility by nearly 70% from 2023 to 2024. This was the result of focusing on system throughput to ensure that our patients are able to receive quality care as close to home as possible.
In July, we were named as a 5-star facility by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for the fifth consecutive year.
2) What are you most looking forward to or hopeful about for your organization in the coming year?
In 2025 we’ll look to increase access to specialty care - again to keep health services close to home. We now have physicians in nephrology and pulmonary medicine, as well as added additional physicians in orthopedics and urology.
In the spring, we will open our newly renovated behavioral health unit, expanding from our current 10 beds to 18. The new space will also include an adolescent flex unit to care for acute needs of this young population. This will meet a long-awaited needs request by our community and the surrounding communities we serve. We continue a strategic focus on access across the continuum of care and quality.
With all of our initiatives, we’re hopeful for a growing workforce and we look forward to partnerships within our community to help with both retention of our valued employees and with recruitment of our future workforce, including skilled physicians and nurses.
We continued to be humbled by the opportunity to carry out the mission of our founding Sisters, who met the needs of the diphtheria epidemic by opening our hospital 123 years ago. Serving this ministry is truly an honor.