Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to PG Pulse Press, Ganey's podcast on all things healthcare, tech, and human experience. In this podcast, we'll be joined by some of the best and brightest minds in the industry to discuss challenges, share insights, and innovate the future of healthcare. Thanks for tuning in. We hope you enjoy the conversation.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: I'm Chrissy Daniels, press Ganey's chief experience officer, and we're on the floor here at HX 24.
Joining me today are two lifelong leaders in pediatrics. They're also friends, colleagues, and both self declared optimists. Kurt Newman and Madeline Vell Curt, this year's HX 24 Lifetime achievement award winner and recently retired president and chief executive officer from Children's National Hospital after a 40 year career as a leader in pediatric health.
[00:01:00] Speaker C: Well, thank you, Chrissy. It's just a thrill to be here at HX 24, and what a just honor and so much fun to be with my good friend here, Madeline Bell. We've known each other before. We were CEO's, and then it's just crazy and amazing that we are both being honored, but doing that together, it means a lot to me.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Absolutely. Madeline is the recipient of the HX 24 CEO of the year award and president and CEO of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where you started your career as a pediatric nurse 40 years ago. Thanks for coming, Madeline.
[00:01:43] Speaker D: So happy to be here. There's so much energy here today. It gives me a lot of hope and optimism for all of us that are leading healthcare systems that we can get together and talk about some good things in the future that we have planned.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: Just in the conversation in our sessions this last couple of days, over and over again, our exemplar leaders have been recognized, and recognized in themselves, their tendency to be optimistic. If I were just to ask you an off the cuff question around how you cultivated your optimism as leaders, what advice would you have for all of us who are thinking about a very challenging time in healthcare and how we let optimism really define our leadership?
[00:02:35] Speaker D: I mean, I would say I've had the privilege of working with children my entire career, and children have their lives in front of them and are naturally optimistic. In fact, I think we get trained to be pessimistic over our lives. So I think that optimism of working with children is contagious. You know, after they have surgery, they want to get up right away, whereas adults have to be coaxed. You know, just every part of who they are is really energizing and optimistic. So I think it's just been contagious.
[00:03:07] Speaker B: Oh, I love that. Kurt any clues for us if we're cultivating our optimism?
[00:03:12] Speaker C: Well, I think, you know, Madeleine's right. There's a.
The opportunity to work with children and families and see the fun and the excitement there. And then you couple that with all of the great science, technology that's coming around, the possibilities that are out there in terms of curing diseases that couldn't have been cured before or making things better for children, for families. That is what gives, I think, both of us, this awareness that things don't have to stay the same and that they're moving in a positive direction and being part of organizations and working with people that. That have that same kind of attitude, boy, it's just, you know, it's hard not to be up.
[00:04:01] Speaker B: A cornerstone of both of your leadership has been really keeping that human experience alive and thriving in your organizations, really keeping it at the forefront to make it better for patients and families and thinking about what we could do.
Tell us about some things you've done in your leadership to advance the human experience in your organization.
[00:04:29] Speaker D: Well, I think it's really critical as a leader to always remember how the experience of your patients and families and your staff by going on the front lines. Kurt and I both grew up on the front lines. And it's easy, as the CEO, to get very far away from that and to sit in a corner office and have people come to you. It's much harder to take time out of your schedule, but so critically important, so you don't forget that empathy that drew you to the career originally and how important that is to have empathy for your patients and families and for your staff as a leader.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: Oh, I love that, Kurt.
[00:05:07] Speaker C: You know, Madeline's so right. And another aspect of that for me personally was having been a patient myself. So you kind of channel the experiences. Maybe you had as yourself or your family members, what that was like. As well as being on the front lines, what was it like to be in the middle of the night, in the emergency apartment, or on a weekend?
And the connection and being out there, as Madeline describes, is so fundamental to not only inspiring your teams, but also learning and getting the real feedback and not where it's been homogenized and processed and it's coming to you in a memo or something, but it's like, real. Like Doctor Newman, why can't we get XYz? Or why are we limited here? And a lot of times you have no idea. And then you start digging into it, and, boy, you can make some really big improvements in a hurry and get the credibility of having listened and making change.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: I love that. You know, I'm a fascinated student of human centered design, and I think that's something both of you did, either intuitively or through discipline.
But this idea that it's not the patient or the team, it's not the family or the team, it's the family and the team. At its core, human centered design is, what does the patient want or the family?
What do they really want? The second question is, like, where does the data tell us to focus when we're looking for those big problems? But the third piece is, what can the team actually do?
I think in healthcare, we fail when we only look at, like, two of the three. And in the history of healthcare, we've done that a lot. But this idea that you're looking at a yes and yes patients and families and what caregivers want, and when we put that together, it's just magical.
As we think about today's pediatric environment, it's always been challenging. I don't know that there's ever been a time when we would have said it's easy, but right now it continues to be challenging. There are new challenges. What are some of the unique challenges you're seeing when we look at the experience of your workforce and your patients?
What do you see today that is our particular challenges in delivering pediatric specialty medicine?
[00:07:51] Speaker D: I just think the experience of children and the parents is so different than even ten years ago. And at the core of it is just how technology fits in social media, how people interact with each other through texting versus talking. And the workforce that we have grow up as digital natives. So our patients are digital native, maybe unlike an adult hospital, and often their parents, and certainly our workforce. And so understanding that they may want to relate to you and each other differently than what maybe we grew up, how we related is important. And so I think at the core of that is listening and understanding and not trying to impose my own beliefs or my own experiences on them, which is so easy to do. And it's fine to go into a back room and say, I wish they would do this, I wish they would do that. But keep it to yourself and just be open to understand. You know, the world has changed and you have to change with it.
[00:08:55] Speaker B: That's such a fascinating perspective. You really are on the forefront of caring for digital natives, all of us. I don't know that everyone's been thinking about what's going on, going to need to change, when people's preferred communication is where they're most comfortable, maybe not a face to face or a hand to hand or an eye to eye that we have to be flexible. And imagine what if that's so interesting, what do you see as different?
[00:09:27] Speaker C: Kurt well, certainly that dimension is, you know, just really off the charts in terms of complexity and trying to manage teams and people. The other thing that Madeline and I see is just all of the social issues that the children and families are facing. It just feels more and more complex because our hospitals take care of everybody no matter what. And when you look at the issues around education, mental health, hunger, many days it feels like we're sliding backwards. And so we're trying to not just heal the disease at the moment, but we've got a lot of work to do to try and help that family be intact. And there's just great initiatives in housing and partnering with schools and finding other ways to really build the resilience of these families because it's not going to be enough just to solve maybe the issue that it looked like they came in with. But as you dig into that, you realize, boy, there's so many threads here. And I think our hospitals have taken a lead to trying to educate the country about health policies that aren't working or how these kids are falling through the cracks because, you know, sadly, frequently children are not, you know, their needs aren't honored as much by our government or our society or whatever. So we've also taken that on as a role as advocates beyond just our community, but nationwide. And Madeline's been just a terrific leader in that. And it's just been, we, it's not easy, but we've made change, we have made impact.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: You know, that leads us right into this idea. With great challenge and great teams, we often see some breakthrough innovations. Would love to have each of you talk about some innovations that your teams are making in these challenging times that you're really proud of.
So, thoughts?
[00:11:49] Speaker D: Well, I'll just relate a conversation I just had with my leadership team on AI. And I think people are so fearful of AI. They worry about the risks associated with it. They worry about people losing jobs. But as we really dig into it, that has a lot of optimism for those of us in healthcare because it can get rid of the non value added time that we spend as staff and patients and families spend. And so as you look at use cases in healthcare, and we've got a number of them, everything from interacting with families and predicting what they're going to say so that you can be ready for the answer to much more complicated diagnostics.
I think those things are going to make the experience so much better for both the staff and the patients. So I'm pretty optimistic about AI. You just have to stay informed.
[00:12:45] Speaker B: I love that. I think we're naturally risk adverse because we put safety and the human experience first in healthcare, and that's what makes us great clinicians.
I love that. We're actually somewhat skeptical, but as you putting it out, I don't think there's going to be any shortage for caring, patient and family centered caregivers across every job to continue to deliver care and health care.
What are some things you're excited about, Kurt?
[00:13:20] Speaker C: Well, it's humbling to be here with Madeline and talk about science and research because of just the great breakthroughs and cures that the children's Hospital of Philadelphia and their researchers are coming up with.
And we're seeing that, too.
The ability to take these technologies and now being able to translate them directly into curing serious diseases that have never had cures before. And it's just, you see these things every week there's something new, and you can just see how that's going to be the wave of the future in many ways. So, for our hospital, we had so many ideas coming forward, and it's not enough just to have an idea and then do the research and prove the concept, but now commercializing that and getting it into the market. So we had strategized and came up with an idea to have a whole campus devoted to pediatric innovation and working with companies and working with other, with medical schools, I decreed something focused just on children, because most of this kind of thing goes toward adult medicine, and that's just, you know, the nature. But I think both of us have taken the lead in showing the way that if you tackle these diseases and issues in children, and some of them are adult diseases, but if you get them and intervene early, the benefits for the long term are just so much more. And that's the one thing that I wish I could stay with, because I just see how that is just so transformational and revolutionary. And so kids with sickle cell or with these severe genetic diseases are not going to have to live the lives that they've had to lead up to now.
[00:15:28] Speaker B: We talk about this optimistic future and the innovation that we can, if we are willing to learn with and from pediatric specialty medicine that all of healthcare can benefit from. I think there are many spaces where pediatrics is leading the way, whether it's safety, whether it's engaging workforce with passion and purpose, but clearly the work that both of your organizations have done to truly not just engage with patients and families, but partner with patients and families as full partners in care. What advice do you have for healthcare around what? Frankly, I still sometimes see where there's almost a reluctance or a fear to partner with patients and families as opposed to just leaning in and truly embracing it. What advice do you have for the rest of us around challenging our own thinking?
[00:16:29] Speaker D: I mean, sometimes people are afraid to hear what they have to say. Families and staff, because you don't want to hear the bad news. But the bad news is what makes you even better. And so I'd say that it would be at every level, whether you're designing a new building, whether you're designing a new system, whether you're asking the parents to participate in daily rounds with the clinical team, whether you're asking them to be present during a resuscitation. At every level, you should partner and listen to families. It makes the experience much richer for everyone engaged.
But it's easy to get together as a staff and to project what you think they need. That's the easy road. It's harder to take the time to really set up systems to listen and understand.
[00:17:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
Although I will say that the fear of what you're going to hear, I feel over and over again is sort of, we overestimate that fear. And once we just jump the gauntlet and lean in, it truly is collaborative. You have some advice for us about overcoming our fears and embracing our patients and families, Kurt?
[00:17:47] Speaker C: Well, I think both of us have a doctor, nurse.
You know, being in the hospital, we learned how to listen, and we knew how complex the environments were. And, you know, families were hearing one thing and from one person and another thing from another person, and they were confused. And as I grew up in the leadership roles, that was one of the things that I focused on was you did learn so much from the families, and you needed to listen and press. Ganey helped me with that. When I became a CEO, I remember Pat Ryan had just become CEO, and there was a hospital he was talking about at our place, an adult hospital that went fully transparent with their physician rating scores. And I looked around and I said, why can't we do that? And, boy, that, you know, I got, you know, what afterwards from our doctors. But I said, well, you know, I bet you're going to find out that it's actually a lot better than you think. And that turned out to be true. I mean, we went ahead. I wasn't going to let them not go forward. And actually, now they embrace it and they see if they got a little ding on something and they'll, you know, they'll take action on it. And it's so true. Bringing the families into councils and part of the discussions within the hospital where we're making strategies about how we're going to deal with something has been also really empowering and uplifting, because not only do you get good ideas, but that translates out into the community. And they say, oh, boy, that's a place where they're really. And that wasn't always the case. You know, we frequently remember back in the day where there was almost a sense of tension between the family, community and the hospital or whatever. I don't feel that anymore. And, you know, I think it's healthy.
[00:19:59] Speaker B: Well, I think we're trusted when we're trusting. We want patients and families to trust us. And sometimes we have to lead with being trustworthy. You pay me the highest compliment, Kurt, because that adult hospital who leaned in to listening, that was my work. And I could only do that because I had read 5000 patient comments every week. And I know that our patients are in partnership with us. They know that we're in it together.
At press Ganey, we, through the leadership of Deirdre Mylod, our senior vice president for research and analytics, have been studying the concept of hope.
Because hope is that intangible thing. It's hard to describe, but you know when you feel it and you get goosebumps. Deirdre, so brilliant, has identified that hope is created when patients and caregivers have the will to work on something that's really important to the patient. Not just our clinical goals, but their lifetime goals, that we use our skill and acumen to help them have a better outcome than they would have had otherwise. But most importantly, that we're looking at the path together. We're breaking down these complicated problems into the steps we can take each way along our journey. I think both of your organizations really are shrines of hope, not only for your communities, but for the world.
People who will never have been your patients feel better because both of you have led the organizations you've had. I think hope is what we should be shooting for in healthcare, and we have a lot to learn from both of you. Thank you so much for being with us.
[00:22:00] Speaker D: Thank you. Thank you very much.
[00:22:01] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:22:02] Speaker A: That's a wrap. Thank you for joining us today and special thanks to our guests for sharing their time and insights. Stay tuned for our next episode, which will be released soon. In the meantime, visit our website where you'll find more information on the human experience and a lot more.
