Featured FAN: Ryan Loke

Each quarter, we feature a Federal Action Network (FAN) member leading the charge on Capitol Hill to protect essential hospitals. This quarter, we spoke with Ryan Loke, chief health policy officer at Grady Health System, in Atlanta, about crisis management, workforce challenges, and mitigating health disparities in the city. 

You have a robust background working for the state of Georgia and as the deputy commissioner and chief health policy officer for the Georgia Department of Community Health. How did those roles equip you to be senior vice president and chief health policy officer at Grady? What have you learned since stepping into that role that was unexpected? 

My background with the state of Georgia, including serving as deputy commissioner and chief health policy officer at the Georgia Department of Community Health, equipped me with invaluable insight into the intricacies of Medicaid, health care policy, and stakeholder engagement. Those roles taught me how to navigate complex systems and collaborate with various entities to advance health care initiatives. I was fortunate to know the leadership team at Grady before joining the organization, which helped make a large transition much smoother than it could have otherwise been had I not had experience already with many of the leaders here. 

At Grady, I’ve had to adapt to the unique challenges of working directly with a large public health system. One unexpected lesson has been the level of agility required to respond to emergencies — whether it’s financial constraints, supply chain disruption, or nuanced policy issues — while keeping our mission front of mind. Managing such a politically charged environment also demands precision in balancing relationships across diverse groups. 

How has Grady navigated change and challenge over time, including the closure of the nearby Wellstar Atlanta Medical Center in 2022? 

What’s unique about Grady, and something we often joke about, is that we are always in a crisis. Since 2019, we have navigated a catastrophic flood that took more than 200 inpatient beds offline, the COVID-19 pandemic and running an offsite alternative care facility for the state, a city wide water disruption lasting several days, supply chain shortages for IV fluids, and the closure of a level 1 trauma center less than a mile from our campus. It’s truly a testament to the leadership team and the folks who work here each day that we were able to navigate these challenges as well as we have. Without the resiliency of the team here, just one of these crises could have broken the will of an organization — but we have a strong and resilient team, and the fact that they still show up with a smile on their face when they step into Grady is testament to that fact. 

Given ongoing national workforce challenges, how does Grady ensure it attracts and retains good talent? What are you doing at a policy level to develop and strengthen the pipeline of health care workers? What are your thoughts on the new med school opening at the University of Georgia? 

Every organization is facing similar workforce headwinds. Fortunately, at Grady we have worked to retain our top talent, not just in nursing and other clinical areas but also in critical services, such as environmental services, facilities, patient access, etc. One of the challenges we face with the resiliency of our workforce, however, is violence against health care workers. We worked closely with leaders in our state legislature to pass legislation that provides the same level of protections for health care workers when violence is committed against them in an emergency department to the rest of the hospital campus, as well. Federally, we are huge advocates of the Safety from Violence for Healthcare Employees Act and hope to see that issue addressed in Congress soon. 

Having graduated a proud dawg from the University of Georgia, it’s exciting to see your alma mater grow. Georgia ranks 40th in the nation in physicians per capita and is a net exporter of physicians after residency, so anything we can do to retain that talent in state will only help to bolster our health care workforce. 

How has Georgia’s decision not to expand Medicaid influenced Grady’s operations and community impact? 

While Georgia remains one of the last holdout states that has not expanded Medicaid, we have worked with our policymakers and regulators in Atlanta and in D.C. to craft policy solutions that provide a funding stream to cover uncompensated care costs while also advancing state objectives of improving quality of care in Medicaid. Our largest state directed payment, known as GA-AIDE, has served as a critical tool in our policy tool belt to meet the financial needs of the health system, which sees a large amount of uninsured patients, while driving measurable quality outcomes in Medicaid through targeted investments to increase access through new clinics, improve quality through new programs, and enhance data monitoring to track our progress. 

How does Grady prioritize mitigating health disparities in Atlanta, from an advocacy and policy standpoint? 

It’s at the forefront of everything that we do from an advocacy perspective. When looking at how to approach a new congress or a new legislative session, our efforts start with the patient population we are privileged to serve, first. What needs do they have that could be mitigated, improved, or addressed through policy? With that framing, we can prioritize issues in a way that leads with the patient’s needs. 

What recent developments or new facilities are you particularly excited about? We’ve watched a handful of outpatient buildings pop up to help increase access to quality care in more remote areas. 

We’ve been fortunate enough to grow our off-campus footprint significantly in the past three years with the opening of two new neighborhood health clinics in South Fulton County and three clinics planned for DeKalb County in the next two years. These clinics serve as a vital community resource to address access challenges in communities that have historically lacked access to primary care services close to home. We are also growing our emergency and — hopefully, knock on wood — our acute care footprint with a new free standing emergency department planned for Union City. Grady acquired 40 acres to build a campus in that area, starting with an emergency department, and then likely to grow into an acute-care facility with its various accoutrements within the next five to seven years.