On her last day of work, October 31, after an impressive 10-year stint as MHA’s President & CEO, Lynn Nicholas, FACHE, will deliver a talk to the 21st Annual Delaware Health Care Forum. Her speech – “Under the Benchmark: Hospital Perspective on Payment Reform in the Bay State” – is a variation of one that Nicholas has delivered over the years across the country to groups interested in the commonwealth’s forward-thinking reform efforts.
And on Wednesday, Steve Walsh, MHA’s new leader, assumes control of the 81-year-old association. He steps immediately into the healthcare reform thicket as the state engages in debate over a new 101-page reform bill from the State Senate. Walsh, a former state representative, was House Chairman of the Joint Committee on Health Care Financing and led the effort on a previous comprehensive reform bill – Chapter 224. More recently, Walsh has led the Massachusetts Council of Community Hospitals since 2014.
On Friday, MHA staff gathered for an in-house tribute to Nicholas where good humor – a characteristic of Nicholas’s reign at MHA – was mixed with more than a few moist eyes as employees bid her farewell.
Lynn arrived in Massachusetts in 2007 right after the state passed its historic healthcare reform law – Chapter 58. She was hired to ensure that MHA had a “seat at the table” in future and necessary healthcare debates to control costs. Serving on numerous key committees, Nicholas advocated ably for hospitals as new mechanisms were created to transition the state away from fee-for-service payments and to tested, but still evolving, global payment systems. She became an in-demand national voice for healthcare change as the innovations born in Massachusetts rippled out across the nation.
Nicholas always insisted that MHA – a well-respected organization from its inception in 1936 – not remain stuck in the past. Seeing the importance of growing physician practices to the health of hospitals, she created MHA’s Physician/Hospital Integration Collaborative. Aware that hospitals, while the key component to systems of care, were nonetheless merely a part of the greater healthcare environment, she stressed a health-centric – not hospital-centric – focus for MHA. Behavioral health, wellness, preventive care, post-acute care, home care, and more were woven into MHA’s annual goals. Finally, in 2016, Nicholas changed the name of the association to the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association.
Recalling how tobacco use affected her own family’s health, Nicholas led the effort to ban tobacco use on hospital campuses, and won state and national recognition for her efforts. She was at the helm of MHA’s Substance Use Disorder Prevention and Treatment Task Force that created protocols subsequently adopted by all hospitals to regulate how opioids are dispensed. In short she was an agent for positive change.
Nicholas had the supreme confidence to stick her neck out on unpopular issues and not relent, but she showed a level of humility too often lacking in leaders. That is, if she didn’t grasp a complex issue, she’d admit it – but then she’d out-study, out-prep, and out-practice anyone until she mastered a subject. She’d also share praise and thanks with the staffers who helped her to represent MHA and its membership on the public stage.
Lynn Nicholas was also a mentor to up-and-coming staff at MHA, but especially to young women; she promoted women in the workplace, networked with other powerful women in the state, and did not abide with any sexist BS.
The women and men of MHA, the leaders of hospitals and physician practices, the hundreds of thousands of workers in Massachusetts healthcare, and, most importantly, the patients and communities that have been served well by a Massachusetts healthcare system that has steadily improved during Lynn Nicholas’s tenure at MHA, offer her a heartfelt thank you and warm best wishes for the future with her loving husband, Nick.