Kristin Kennedy is officially wearing two hats. As of Sept. 1, Kennedy has taken over as president and CEO of both Windsor Regional Hospital and Erie Shores HealthCare under a shared leadership model announced earlier this summer. The partnership is expected to save about $2 million annually by sharing executive leadership positions and reducing administrative duplication through vacancies, attrition and portfolio realignment, with no layoffs planned. Speaking on AM800’s Mornings with Mike and Meg, Kennedy said the decision was driven by a need to rethink how hospitals operate during difficult financial times. “The health system, we’re having some challenges with our finances and funding and challenges across Ontario, and what could we do to ensure that we were a good role model and using our taxpayer dollars in the right way. Looking outside the box and how we could find efficiencies and cost savings,” Kennedy said. She says she’ll split her time between Erie Shores HealthCare and Windsor Regional’s Ouellette and Metropolitan campuses, adding the arrangement should improve collaboration across the region’s health-care system. “I think it is a benefit to the region. We’ve worked in silos for a long time and I think that’s something that COVID and the cyber attack really helped us understand that it was better to work together for the health system and for our patients and our families and our communities,” she said. Kennedy also provided an update on the recent regional hospital IT disruption. Over the weekend, a critical technology malfunction hit Windsor Regional Hospital, Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare, Erie Shores HealthCare, Chatham-Kent Health Alliance and Bluewater Health in Sarnia. Kennedy says the outage was caused by a hardware failure, not a cyberattack. “We’re about 90 per cent up and running now. We did cautionarily tell individuals that we may have some delays over the weekend, but what a testament to TransForm, our shared service partner, as well as all of our staff and physicians across Erie St. Clair,” she said. “We really were up and running within about 48 hours, maybe 72 for some low priority applications.” TransForm Shared Service Organization previously said the systems performed as designed by immediately detecting the issue and notifying TransForm. -With files from CTV Windsor’s Chris Campbell
