Advocate Lutheran General's new leader wants to see more people of color at the top

When he was a junior in college, Dia Nichols heard his mom tell a story about how poorly his grandmother was treated at a South Carolina hospital emergency room for “whites only” because she was Black.

Emergency room employees refused to let the family come through the front door. They left Nichols' grandmother lying in pain on a stretcher in the hallway even though beds were available.

“She actually almost died there ... ended up having a ruptured appendix,” said Nichols, who decided then to pursue a career in the health care industry to change how people of color are treated.

Today, the 47-year-old Inverness resident is president of Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, a role he took on in September.

Nichols recently sat down with the Daily Herald to talk about his journey, challenges with the health care industry, what the pandemic has exposed about health care disparities for people of color, and the need for more diversity in health care management ranks.

Having earned a graduate degree in health administration from Indiana University, Nichols rose from the classroom to the boardroom, joining a small field of hospital executives who are people of color in Illinois and nationwide.

According to a 2019 American Hospital Association survey, only 16% of all executive-level management positions in hospitals were held by someone from an ethnic or racial minority.

Nichols spent 18 years working for HCA Healthcare, where he was one of four Black CEOs within the organization. He joined the 329-bed Amita Health Alexian Brothers Medical Center in Elk Grove Village as its new president and CEO in March 2019. Since coming to the Chicago area, Nichols said he has met only two other Black CEOs of hospitals.

“I've been in the industry since '98 ... . I've had to look far and wide to find folks that look like me,” Nichols said. “The numbers have gotten a little better across the entire industry. But people of color in leadership roles are few and far between.”

Nichols is a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives. Over the years, he has been intentional about building connections and mentoring other health care executives of color.

Advancing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives is a priority, said Nichols, who is among Advocate Aurora Health system's top minority senior executives. His goals include attracting a diverse candidate pool for key hospital leadership roles, recruiting minority physicians and fostering an inclusive environment.

Here are excerpts from Nichols' Daily Herald interview.

Q: How diverse is the staffing at your hospital?

Nichols: You find more people of color when you get into what you call the support services areas — food and nutrition services, cooks, housekeepers, environmental services — folks who are still truly on the front lines caring for COVID patients. When you branch up into more of your clinical roles — respiratory therapy, nursing — you still find people of color, but the numbers are a little more scarce. What are the nursing schools doing to attract people of color? We're at a point in time in the industry where that needs to be a major focus as well.

Q: What are your goals for increasing diversity in the ranks?

Nichols: I've got a goal of 50% of the leadership roles will be filled by people of color. It starts with how we're attracting them.

Q: What does your internal diversity, equity and inclusion scorecard tell you?

Nichols: The scorecard focuses on how many people of color do you have in leadership roles, how many do you have on your board ... but the other piece that it focuses on is when you have people of color coming into your hospital, what are their outcomes, what are their patient experiences, patient satisfaction? We've got actual scores that the hospitals are graded on and actual goals around that.

Q: Do you have enough culturally competent staff?

Nichols: That is something that most health care organizations are struggling with. Within Advocate Aurora Health, each hospital has a DE & I committee, and that's one of the initiatives ... to make sure that across the board our staff becomes culturally competent.

Q: What challenges did the COVID-19 pandemic highlight?

Nichols: Some of the disparities in health care that are out there have less to do with the genetic code but more to do with your ZIP code. One of the things that I'm proud of working with Advocate Aurora Health is ... the system recognizes that and we've established clinics in some of these communities. What (COVID) has exposed is that people of color, just because of certain lifestyles, certain co-morbidities, are more susceptible to the impact the actual disease has on the body. It's really up to us as a system to make sure that we're going out and we're addressing what those disparities are.

Q: Does that mean providing more community education around health issues disproportionately affecting certain minorities?

Nichols: Absolutely. I want to get this started here, something as simple as a cooking class demonstration (partnering with a cardiologist, dietitian or local chef to promote healthy cooking/eating habits). There's also getting out into some of the local churches and talking about educating them on ... good eating/exercise habits ... We're trying to tie that into health fairs that we have historically been doing. If we can engage the community in discussion and education and what “good” looks like, it will hopefully prevent them from coming through the door, but (assuming) they have to come through the door, you've now taken down the mystique and you've increased the trust factor.

Q: How must a community hospital evolve to meet future needs?

Nichols: One of the things that COVID has shown ... is that we can do better from a virtual (health care) standpoint. Hospitals more and more are evolving to these telehealth and virtual visits, instead of (patients) coming into the emergency department. I see the role as the community hospital moving more into population health in terms of education, making sure that some of these disease states that impact the communities are being managed and taken care of, really more so to keep these patients out of the hospital.