Dr. Brent Asplin calls the emergency room a “room with a view”—a view that he’s working hard to improve.
“You know how things are supposed to work, but you learn how they really work when you’re taking care of patients at 2 a.m. in the ER,” he says. “We see how the system works incredibly well and how it fails miserably—sometimes with the same patient! And you think: ‘There’s got to be a better way of doing this.’”
As head of emergency medicine at Regions Hospital and HealthPartners Medical Group in St. Paul, Asplin, 38, oversees a staff of 300-plus employees and has a leading role in the multiyear renovation and expansion of the Emergency Center at Regions, which he believes will serve as a model for ERs across the country. In January 2004, he was one of 24 experts nationwide selected by the Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C., to examine emergency care in the U.S. and make recommendations for its future.
“Brent is very focused and ambitious about where we need to get to,” says Brock Nelson, president and CEO of Regions Hospital. “That’s probably one of his greatest strengths: He’s unequivocating about the improvements we need to make.” Nelson also highlights Asplin’s integrity, humility, and friendliness. “His small-town attributes make him approachable and respected by his colleagues, employees, and patients,” Nelson says.
Asplin grew up in Slayton, where his dad was a large-animal veterinarian and his mom was a dietitian. He majored in trumpet performance at Luther College in Iowa. “I was good enough to find out relatively quickly that I really wasn’t good enough!” he says with a laugh. “What got me attracted to medicine was volunteering for our local ambulance service.”
He earned his MD at Mayo Medical School, did his residency in emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, then attended the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars program at the University of Michigan to study health-services research—a “turning point” in his career.
At Regions, where he’s been since 2000, Asplin combines big-picture policy work with day-to-day administrative and hands-on ER duties. That makes him an ideal mediator between hospital administrators and medical staff. “I try to highlight to senior leaders what the problems feel like for front-line staff,” he says. “If there’s a gap, I try to make it visible so we can close it.”
Asplin says he loves emergency medicine: “It’s one place in the health-care system where you can just do the right thing for the patient, no matter what. You can treat everybody the same, whether they live under a bridge or in a mansion. We legally mandate emergency care to be available to everyone, no matter who they are or what their ability to pay.” Trouble is, he adds, “we haven’t mandated how to pay for that care.”
In the ER, Asplin says, “We see how the system basically says no to people until they are sick enough to need a hospital bed, and then we pull out all the stops and deliver high-tech care for their stroke. But up until that point, we’ve told them, ‘Sorry, we can’t figure out how to get you some blood-pressure medication.’”
Asplin spent his first three years at Regions studying access to and financing of health care. For the past three, he’s focused on operations and how to make hospitals work better. Now, he’d like to bring the two together.
“We can’t afford to make the policy changes we need to make if we aren’t re-engineering the way hospitals work at the same time,” he says. “I get most energized by bringing people together around how we can change this system. We’re not powerless—we have an opportunity to do things differently. That’s the kind of stuff that I think is exciting.”
