Introducing GBMC's new Chief of Staff: Robin Motter-Mast, DO

As a leader in primary care at GBMC, within GBMC Health Partners and Population Health for Greater Baltimore Health Alliance, I have worked cross-functionally to drive innovation at our organization. I am excited to take what I have learned into this new role as Chief of Staff for GBMC HealthCare.

For a committee of my peers to respect and value my work enough to consider me for this role was rewarding to say the least. At GBMC, we have strong physician leadership that helps to drive where we're going. That is a really important component a lot of other organizations don’t have. I'm looking forward to getting to know more of the medical staff and being able to continue to drive innovation across the healthcare system, not just in primary care, but in all specialties.

Care redesign is important to GBMC and that's how we're going to continue to grow and meet the needs of our community. We need to be listening to all physicians as to what care redesign means to them and where they see areas of improvement needed. For self-employed physicians, this kind of change can cause uncertainty about how they do their work and if these changes will impact them financially. Listening and figuring out how we can make those opportunities for care redesign available and meaningful for all will be one priority for me.

In addition, leadership development for physicians is a challenge I believe I can build on during my time in this role. It's a question of, how do we give physicians resources to help them know what leadership looks like and develop those tools with really clear-cut pathways? Physicians come into this profession with strong medical knowledge, but not necessarily leadership skills. If we really want to have a physician-led organization, we need to have strong physician leadership in place that's capable of helping us continue to grow, innovate, develop and have one of the best community hospitals in the region.

Taking over during a pandemic might be daunting to some, but I find it exciting. Communication is key and ever-changing. The job of the Chief of Staff to make sure you communicate well so people understand what's going on and you are a resource for them. It gives me something to do from the get-go. This period in history is also proving to be unprecedented in the amount of stress and deleterious effects on providers' psyches. We need to implement a strategy to safeguard the health and well-being of our clinician workforce.

At the end of the day, we just want to have the best medical staff. We want to have a strong, high-quality community hospital where the community feels comfortable going, and that means we have high-quality hospital staff. My job is engaging the physicians to figure out what that looks like, hearing from the consumer and allowing the physicians to hear what the consumers are saying to help us to create the best system.

I am excited to dig my heels in and work with my fellow physicians to make that happen.