In this episode of the Healthcare Plus Podcast, host Dan Collard sits down with Colleen Swick, chief nursing officer and vice president of patient care continuum at Sarah Bush Lincoln Health System in Mattoon, Illinois. Their discussion centered on what nearly two decades of sustained cultural excellence looks like and how to protect it through growth.

Sarah Bush Lincoln began its culture journey in 2007. They branded the work “Excellence as a Way of Life,” a name chosen deliberately to signal that this was not a consulting engagement with an expiration date. It stuck. Nearly 20 years later, the organization has grown from a three-county to a ten-county service area and from 1,500 to 3,600 employees, with a broad ambulatory and outpatient footprint across South Central Illinois.

But growth dilutes culture. When Sarah Bush Lincoln looked around and realized only 300 of its employees had been there for the original launch, they made a decision: bring everyone back into the room, all 3,600 of them, to reset the foundation and rewire what needed rewiring.

Listeners will learn:

· How Sarah Bush Lincoln branded its culture work to signal permanence, not a flavor-of-the-month

· Why a pre-employment commitment statement became a cornerstone of hiring and accountability

· How to recognize culture dilution and know when it’s time to refresh

· Why bringing all 3,600 employees into the same message mattered (and what that commitment signaled to the team)

· How a strong culture drove physician recruitment and service line growth in a rural market

· How outside coaching helped a high-performing organization see what its own leaders had stopped noticing

This is a conversation for any healthcare leader who wants to build something that lasts and keep it strong even as the organization around it grows and changes.

In this episode of the Healthcare Plus Podcast, host Dan Collard sits down with Don Taylor, president of Don Taylor Leadership, LLC, and adjunct professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center’s School of Public Health, to explore one of healthcare’s most underutilized assets: its nearly 700,000 advanced practice clinicians.

Taylor brings a perspective few can match. A retired U.S. Air Force colonel with more than 45 years in healthcare, he commanded the busiest trauma hospital in Iraq as the only non-physician to hold that role. There, advanced practice clinicians (APCs) were indistinguishable in many ways from the physicians working alongside them. That experience shaped a conviction he has carried ever since: The healthcare system has underestimated what nurse practitioners, physician assistants, CRNAs, and other advanced practice clinicians can lead and do.

This episode, recorded as part of the run-up to the Rewiring Healthcare: Foundation to Future conference to be held October 20-21, 2026, in Nashville, TN, frames APCs not as gap-fillers but as a largely undeveloped leadership pipeline with real potential to reshape care delivery, physician well-being, and healthcare costs.

Listeners will learn:

1. Why healthcare is at an inflection point on how it develops and deploys advanced practice clinicians
2. What vertical development means for APCs, from dedicated leadership training to creating a legitimate path into senior leadership roles
3. How horizontal development could extend APC practice into prevention, primary care, post-acute care, and end-of-life settings
4. Why the APC conversation is “physician-and,” not “physician-or,” and why that framing matters for well-being across the care team
5. How AI augmentation could support the safe expansion of APC practice, particularly in primary care and low-intensity settings
6. Why Taylor says less than 10 percent of healthcare workers using AI are formally trained on it, and what that means for health systems right now

This is a conversation for any healthcare leader thinking seriously about workforce strategy, care redesign, and what it will take to meet the access and cost challenges ahead.

In this episode of the Healthcare Plus Podcast, host Dan Collard sits down with Mike Schafer, CEO of Spooner Health in Spooner, Wisconsin, for a conversation about what sustained high performance looks like over time.

Schafer has led Spooner Health since 1990. When he partnered with the Studer Group in 2009, his organization was at the 12th percentile for employee engagement. Within two years, they had hit the 94th. For the last three years, they have held at the 99th. This is an impressive turnaround story. But it’s also a staying-the-course story, and those are rarer and harder to tell.

Schafer brought that story to the inaugural Rewiring Healthcare: Foundation to Future conference in Atlanta earlier this year, where attendees called him one of the most humble and self-aware CEOs they had ever seen on a stage. This episode gives listeners who were not in the room a chance to hear it.

Listeners will learn:

• Why Spooner Health's five-year engagement plan happened in two years, and what made the difference
• How employee-written standards of excellence became the cultural backbone of the organization and still hold today
• Why transparency with data, including the uncomfortable numbers, builds more trust than protecting people from them
• What Schafer tells every new hire at orientation and why storytelling is now central to how he does it
• How the rewiring concept gave a high-performing organization a framework for continuing to improve without starting over
• Why investing in external development matters even when an organization is already at the top of its game

This is a conversation for any healthcare leader who wants to know what it looks like to build something that lasts.