Wellstar Leverages Mayo Clinic Collaboration to Transform Service Lines

Every health system carries a list of problems everyone talks about, and no one quite knows how to solve: capacity bottlenecks that never seem to move; complex acquisitions that strain culture and workflows; behavioral health needs that outpace existing models of care. The kind of issues one leader at Wellstar calls the “big hairy problems… the ones that are just very difficult to tackle.”

Wellstar Health System in Atlanta, GA, made a deliberate choice: instead of treating those problems as background noise, they would bring them into the spotlight.

In August, 26 leaders representing thirteen clinical service lines and radiology traveled to Rochester for a two-day service line leadership retreat through the Mayo Clinic Care Network. This wasn’t a meet-and-greet or another strategy deck review—it was a reset.

“From the outset, this was really meant to be a learning opportunity for our service line dyads,” says Barry Mangel, M.D., Physician Lead, clinical service lines at Wellstar. “We wanted to come and learn different processes for tackling challenging problems within a complicated healthcare organization.”

Before they ever set foot in Rochester, each service line at Wellstar held its own mini-retreat and built a five-year strategic plan. Those plans surfaced the work that would define the next era of care: how to optimize surgery across hospitals, health parks, and ambulatory surgery centers; complex acquisitions; and creating a clinically integrated network in behavioral health.

“We realized that in order for them to be successful in getting some of those very complicated projects done, we needed to give them a framework to be able to navigate,” Dr. Mangel explains.

With the help Richard Winters, M.D., emergency physician and director of leadership development for Mayo Clinic Care Network, Wellstar designed a retreat where leaders arrived with specific, high-stakes projects. Mayo Clinic Care Network was then instrumental in building the experience around that real work.

"When we're dealing with complexity, we want to be able to look around our blind spots and gain lots of different perspectives. And so, the first thing we do is develop the shared reality,” says Dr. Winters.

Over two days, leaders stepped through the ROW Forward method together. They practiced what Dr. Winters calls getting “off of the dance floor into the balcony,” learning to see their problems from a higher vantage point, with all stakeholders in view.

Wellstar’s Thomas Draper, Vice President, Administrative Lead Clinical Service Lines and Cardiology, found the most value in learning about communication and influence tools. These insights are critical in a matrixed environment where “service lines have a lot of accountability but not necessarily oversight… all these areas where we need to influence.”

The impact is already visible back home, especially in the operating room (OR) optimization project. Wellstar had challenges with access for existing patients, new programs, and pediatric subspecialists. The goal was to get patients into the right environment. For example, they wanted to ensure that pediatric patients can have surgery in child-focused settings with specialized anesthesia rather than crowded main ORs.

“To me, the success of our meeting is really what we’re seeing now,” says Dr. Mangel. “Watching teams navigate through these difficult problems is really more than I had even hoped to get out of it.”

The experience also created powerful connections, and the work is still expanding. Dr. Winters has been invited to Wellstar’s pediatric retreat and to join executive leadership development podcasts.

For health systems staring at their own list of “big hairy problems,” Wellstar’s story offers a glimpse of what becomes possible when you step off the dance floor, climb to the balcony, and commit to building the tools your leaders need to change the future of patient care. Want to see what other leaders are doing differently? Explore more stories of impact.