On the Record with Chris Miskel, CEO of BloodCenter of Wisconsin and Versiti

Chris Miskel encountered some of his best mentors while playing basketball at Butler University. A three-year starter on the team, the CEO of BloodCenter of Wisconsin and Versiti, an affiliation between four blood centers, was named an Academic All-American in 1995.

Miskel, who joined BCW and Versiti as CEO in February, appreciated the team’s culture, which focused on humility, passion, unity, servanthood and thankfulness, principles known as “The Butler Way.”

“I’ve been fortunate to be surrounded by some great teams and people throughout my career and today is no different,” he said. “My job is really to create an environment for everybody to be successful.”

Miskel recently spoke with Wisconsin Health News about BCW and Versiti. Edited excerpts are below.

WHN: Why did you decide to join the BloodCenter of Wisconsin and Versiti?

CM: There were three things that really excited me about Versiti. One was the mission. For someone who has grown up in healthcare and worked exclusively in healthcare, the mission around saving lives is super important to me. That resonated. The second part was the leadership position that Versiti has inside medicine. So beyond what some of the other traditional blood banks have, we’ve got real differentiation and expertise on the science and medical side. I’m actually sitting out at our research institute in Wauwatosa right now. We’ve got some real great talent here, advancing the science. Then the third thing I would say is the growth potential. We’re focused on driving innovation. We’ve got some real cool things that we’ve been doing the last several things to ensure that we’re kind of pushing the boundaries to solve those complex questions.

WHN: What’s your vision? What areas would you like to expand and how do you see your organizations’ work evolving?

CM: There are three areas that are our plans at this point. I think it’s a dynamic environment, and it will continue to evolve. One, we want to continue to strengthen our core blood services business. We’re constantly looking for ways to run more efficiently. We’ve brought on additional affiliates from outside of Wisconsin that now compose Versiti. That gives us a scale and a strength that allows to operate more efficiently. We’ll continue to bring on some more hospital systems. In some cases, they’re working for a partner that can mirror their footprint because of some consolidation on the hospital side as more regional and national health systems come together. For us to continue to grow in the same way and bring on additional affiliates gives us scale. Our ability to meet their needs in that way gives them confidence that we can deliver on various blood tests and beyond. Finally, we’ll continue to look to drive innovation. One example is that we recently launched a first of its kind test in the U.S. to more actively measure von Willebrand factor activity. The hope is that, with some of the diagnostic challenges that exist with measuring and treating patients with van Willebrand, we will be able to help providers care for those patients in a better way by bringing better testing about.

WHN: Versiti has been around for a few years now. What’s been its impact on BCW?

CM: BCW has affiliated with Heartland Blood Centers, based in Aurora, Ill., Michigan Blood and then Indiana Blood Center. Really what it’s provided is a platform for us to share our resources. In a challenging environment, the blood banking industry is getting more and more complex. So having a bigger base helps give us scale that we need. We also secured contracts with several large hospital systems by sharing our blood products across states and then also providing medical and scientific expertise across the affiliates. So it’s really helped us to gain new contracts. I talked a little about efficiency earlier. One example is that we consolidated our donor testing activities. Before Versiti, we would have done donor testing in each location. Now we’ve consolidated that activity into one lab so that we can gain the efficiencies and also have consistent service and quality across affiliates. And maybe one other example is that some of the shared corporate services that you need across affiliates, as you continue to grab more scale, you can leverage some of those shared corporate services in a more consistent way. You can share best practices and essentially you can enable growth without increasing overhead significantly, which is really important in the current healthcare environment. There’s a lot more to do. We’re still a relatively young organization at Versiti. We’ve still got a number of things that we’d like to continue to do. But right now, we feel real good about the progress that we’ve made.

WHN: Your predecessor Jacquelyn Fredrick told us about two years ago that Versiti would have focus on innovating its core services as well as therapies for blood-related disease and cellular therapies. Since this affiliation has started, what has the Versiti done to achieve those goals?

CM: We think that Jackie laid a great framework for us to operate within. Really, Versiti has led the blood banking community in precision medicine. The way that we’ve done that is we applied innovative molecular and genetic testing technologies to better match donor blood for patients with unique blood needs. We’ve got the largest genotyped donor base in the U.S. What that enables us to do is find specialty blood products for unique patient needs. A lot of other blood banks can’t provide that because they don’t have the size and scale of the genotyped database that we have. There’s a lot of complexity in matching blood donors with patients these days. It’s not just kind of the A, B, positive, negative algorithm. There are lots of different types that exist. So our database allows us to very finely connect donors with patients to ensure that they get the best care possible. Beyond that, we’ve developed some novel diagnostics for blood-related disease. One example, a notable one, is that recently we introduced a hematology genetics next generation sequencing panel, which basically enables faster, higher confidence diagnostic testing at a lower cost. It’s a very unique partnership between our blood institutes and our researchers that stay in Wauwatosa and our lab, which is downtown. We’ve had a great collaboration between those two groups to bring about some of this advanced testing. Maybe the last thing I’ll is that we have and we continue to partner extensively with pharmaceutical and cell therapy companies to support their clinical trials. We’re obviously hopeful that will help them be able to approve therapeutic solutions for patient care.

WHN: What’s next for BCW and Versiti?

CM: We’ll continue to value our heritage as a community-based organization, advance our missions and serve more patients. So that’s first and foremost. We’re very thankful and humbled by the donors that give us their precious gift. We’re stewards of that gift to make sure that we help as many people as possible. We’re mission-driven, supporting local communities. Our focus will continue to be to run as efficiently as we can but also to expand across the nation. Right now, we’re in the Midwestern region from a footprint standpoint. But our services actually go across the country. We’ve got blood customers in Texas. We’ve got customers for our diagnostic lab across the U.S. out to the West Coast, out to the East Coast and down South. We want to continue to leverage the expertise that we’ve got coming out of our research institute and our diagnostic labs to continue to diversify what we do. So more blood services will continue to be important for our business. That’s over half of our revenue currently. Over time, we’ll continue to look for ways to leverage our expertise in science and medicine and diversify. As an example, we’ve got researchers here who are focused on gene therapy, who are focused on cellular therapy as well as all the researchers we have that are studying blood. The time and effort that we’re putting into discovery hopefully will down the road lead to great solutions for patients.