How Accountability and Public Access to Information Improves Outcomes with Leah Binder, President & CEO of The Leapfrog Group

Hey Outcomes Rocket friends, thanks for tuning in to the podcast once again. As a leader in health care, you have big ideas great products, a story to tell, and are looking for ways to improve your reach and scale your business. However there’s one tiny problem. Health care is tough to navigate and the typical sales cycle is low. That’s why you should consider starting your own podcast as part of your sales and marketing strategy. At the Outcomes Rocket, I’ve been able to reach thousands of people every single month that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to reach if I had not started my podcast. Having this organic reach enables me to get the feedback necessary to create a podcast that delivers value that you are looking for. And the same thing goes if you start a podcast for what you could learn from your customers. The best thing about podcasting in healthcare is that we are currently at the ground level, meaning that the number of people in healthcare listening to podcasts is small but growing rapidly. I put together a free checklist for you to check out the steps on what it takes to create your own podcast. You could find that at outcomesrocket.health/podcast. Check it out today and find a new way to leverage the sales, marketing and outcomes of your business. That’s outcomesrocket.health/podcast.

: Welcome back once again to the outcomes rocket podcast where we chat with today’s most successful and inspiring health leaders. Today I have the outstanding Leah Binder. She’s the President and CEO of The Leapfrog Group representing employers and other purchasers of health care calling for improved safety and quality in hospitals. She’s a regular contributor to Forbes.com the Huffington Post and The Wall Street Journal Expert Forum. She was named on Beckers list of the 50 Most Powerful People on Healthcare in 2014 and consistently cited by modern healthcare among the 100 most influential people and the top 25 women in healthcare. Under her leadership The Leapfrog Group launch from Leapfrog hospital safety grade which many of you may already be familiar with but if not we’ll be going into that within this podcast and in a science letter grades assessing the safety and general hospitals across the country. This is a very important platform with which many of us can keep track of how hospitals are doing and if they’re the ones we want to go to. She’s also fostered groundbreaking innovations in the annual Leapfrog Hospital survey including partnerships to eliminate early elective deliveries, central line associated bloodstream infections and safe use of health technology. So it’s a pleasure that I invite you Leah to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.

: Thanks so much for having me. This is great.

: Absolutely. Now that I leave anything out in that intro that you want to highlight to the listeners?

: I think you captured pretty much more than you should of.

: Oh boy. Well hopefully. I thought it was on point. And anything that maybe you would like to see less of maybe.

: It was a very nice introduction. Thank you.

: Thank you, thank you. I appreciate that. Well it’s a pleasure to have you here on the podcast, Leah, you’re definitely doing some wonderful work in our space and our shared space of health care. Why did you decide to get into the medical sector to begin with?

: Well I think really it started when I was fairly young when my father died of a heart attack and spent some some time in the hospital before he died. So about six weeks so I got a firsthand look at the pretty young age. I mean I was just 20.

: Hard stuff.

: Really got real exposure to what the healthcare system is like. And actually in a positive way even back in the 80’s healthcare and hospitals were very adept at handling cardiac issues and cardiac trauma that actually is a great strength. And my father got excellent care although I’m sure there were problems I probably didn’t understand that at the time I was overwhelmed as anyone would be. But that was my first exposure and recognition of just how important healthcare really is. I think a lot of people who are that age in their 20’s, 30’s kind of think we’re immortal at that age and everything. You don’t have to worry about healthcare right now but you know what the ambulance could be shown up at your door any minute and taken away one of your loved ones and suddenly healthcare becomes urgent to you. So for me it was a recognition that even I was never interested in being a clinician and still I’m not. Thank God there are so many other really smart people who are interested in being clinicians but I’m not. But even though I wasn’t going to work in the health care system that way I recognized it’s extraordinarily important to me and I really wanted to help make it better.

: That’s awesome yeah. No doubt it’s a space where when we get struck with an illness or somebody that we love gets struck with an illness it’s hard to think and to sift through what the options are. You’ve been in this space for a while. You’ve made your contributions. What would you consider is a hot topic that needs to be on healthcare leaders agenda today and how are you guys addressing that?

: Well I think one of the hottest topics is value and people are throwing that word around. Nobody really defines it very well I think except me. I define perfectly.

: Let’s hear it Leah.

: I should have that in my introduction. Definer of the word value. Well anyway we define it as the right care at the right price. So it’s a combination of care and price and I think sometimes there’s an assumption that value means price only at its cost only and it does not mean that we don’t think of that when we are trying to get a good value for a car for example. You don’t think that means I’m going to take any jalopy as long as I can get a low price. That’s not what we’re talking about we’re talking about that combination, that sweet spot between getting excellent quality and excellent price and affordable price so I think that’s that combination for value and it is a big topic right now. There’s a real shift that’s happening out of fee for service toward this concept that we should pay the healthcare system for delivering the outcomes the right outcomes at the right price. And therefore we should negotiate on the basis of those outcomes and not on the basis of each individual service that’s delivered in a fee for service setting. Now we have not gotten there. We talk a lot about it. And I would say even though we say something like 70% of all health care is now in some fashion tied to value. Sometimes that tie is tiny and really the predominant method of payment right now really is fee for service that’s shifting and changing and there’s a real effort to change it both at the policy level here in Washington where I work and also in the private sector purchasers that is a major movement and it’s really happening. And I think any provider who’s not intensely focused on what that’s going to mean for them is missing a major part of their business.

: The right care for the right price. And as we look to tackle that. I mean it’s tough right and we’ve we’ve had guests on the podcast from the employer perspective. We’ve had folks from Walmart and Intel that are taking this from the perspective of the employer and now they’re taking internal measures to measure quality and report to these health care providers how they’re doing. But what are the – I mean I guess that’s a fraction of the employers out there you know what can employers do to take a better leap toward this value-based care?

: That was very good that you used the word leap.

: Leapfrog.

: That’s why we’re called Leapfrog and that’s why because we the founders of leapfrog back in 2000 they didn’t want incremental change in health care. They wanted giant leaps forward in the quality and safety. So we’re called Leapfrog that’s why we’re calling for.

: And you know what. Maybe rather than assume why don’t we just level set the listeners on Leapfrog the services that you guys provide what you do and then maybe we could knock out that question.

: Sure. So we’re non-profit. We were founded in 2000 as I said by employers some very large employers who joined together and then invited others ended up being about a 175 large employers who were in the founding group. So these are companies like Boeing, Marriott, Walmart you mentioned who came together and said that they really wanted to publicly report on the quality and safety of healthcare in this country make that available to their employees so that their employees couldn’t sort of shop for the right kind of care. And they were frustrated that the kind of care they thought their employees were getting was not as it should be and that they were operating in a environment that was so opaque that their employees never knew or had no way of knowing who was the best provider of care in the market. And so I think a number of our founders such as automakers for example would say well our products are in the public domain. They’re subject to high levels of public scrutiny. There’s 10 magazines on the newsstand that compare our cars against all of our competitors on every factor of interest to consumers. Why is it that we can’t do the same thing with hospitals? Why can’t my employees look at hospitals in the same way and compare them in the public marketplace on the factors that matter to them? And that’s why they formed Leapfrog, they said well let’s bring all of our purchasing leverage together as employers and let’s ask hospitals to voluntarily give us information that we don’t have otherwise so that our employees and really the American public can start to compare among hospitals. Not only will that give them the opportunity to get the best possible care but it also will ultimately elevate quality and safety of care for everyone. We know that in a competitive marketplace can have that impact. So they started Leapfrog we started in back in 2000 asking hospitals voluntarily on behalf of these several hundred employers if they would please give us the following information on their safety and their quality. And that 200 did in the beginning today. It’s almost 2,000. And that is…

: Nice.

: About 2/3 of the hospital beds represented in our survey which is quite a lot. And we asked some very sophisticated questions now about quality and safety. Still information you can get nowhere else. So example being c-section rate if you want to standardize c-section rate by hospital across the country. So you can compare your hospital how they look compared to others in the country or in your state. You get that from Leapfrog and nowhere else. I wish it were available somewhere else but it is not. So we just collected by asking and now we have you know thousands of employers involved. So we have a little bit of persuasive ability and that’s what we able to do. That’s Leapfrog and then we also do some ratings as you mentioned we rate hospitals on their quality and their safety but particularly we give letter grades A, B, C, D or F to hospitals on their safety. Something that’s very important for people to look at before they go hospital because it’s the third leading cause of death is errors and accidents in hospitals so you’re wise to go and check that out before you walk in the door of a hospital. And employers pay for this in addition to worrying about this. They pay for it. And it is very expensive. So we really need to be holding hospitals accountable for much higher levels of safety.

: Outstanding. What a great level set there. The on again folks talking to Leah Binder President and CEO of Leapfrog Group. So working through this, Leah, can you give us an example of how your organization has created results by doing and thinking differentlyO obviously you’re thinking differently you’re doing differently. But tell us about some of the outcomes that you’ve been able to produce for either employers or consumers.

: Well we’ve actually had quite a number of successes that have been very exciting. One is I mentioned c-sections just now employers pay for half the births in this country and childbirth is the number one reason for hospitalization. There are far more childbirths in hospitals than anything else that happens in hospitals. It’s the number one thing by far. And so our c-section is the number one procedure in hospitals. So for obvious reasons given that purchasers have such an involvement in paying for maternity care they’re very interested in it. And at the same time our federal government which tends to look at almost everything they look at is for Medicare populations. They tend to not look at it because they’re not interested in maternity care so much for Medicare population for obvious reasons. Anyway, so we are really becoming increasingly the locus of important information on maternity care. We started reporting on something called early elective deliveries. These are deliveries that are scheduled prior to mother nature schedule. So but not too far prior to mother nature’s schedule so pregnancies typically last about 40 weeks. These deliveries are scheduled between 38 and 39 weeks so just the very tail end of the pregnancy. The idea is to schedule and prior to mother nature so that it can actually happen at a time that is let’s say convenient or just for whatever reason meets the schedule of them either the mother or the obstetrician or the midwife. The problem with doing this is that all of the evidence suggests that it is not safe that actually this is not good for the newborn that these newborns often end up in the the NICU. And there’s even some evidence that it causes long term developmental delays in the newborn. It also tends to result in a higher level of intervention in the childbirth experience which is riskier for the mother. So on many levels these should not be scheduled without a medical reason and sometimes there’s a medical reason. But in a lot of these cases there isn’t. And the association that represents Obstetricians and Gynecologists called ACOG has recommended for over 30 years, over 30 years that obstetricians not schedule these deliveries this way. Nonetheless they’ve been they’ve been going on. So finally we had a good measure we could start to ask hospitals “do you do this?” and it’s a complicated way of asking but we ask it and we started doing that in 2010. In 2010 about 17 percent of deliveries were done this way. They were early elective and that is a pretty high percentage that was on average but we saw just incredible variation even in the same community we’d see anywhere from 40% in one hospital to 2% another. So just an incredible variation. That was back in 2010. So fast forward today and over the last eight years we have seen a remarkable decrease in these deliveries because…

: Really?

: Having publicly reported them made all the difference. It really galvanized a lot of change. So even though ACOG and also like March of Dimes has been trying to prevent these. Despite that they haven’t gotten any traction until we were able to say, “well wait a minute this hospital has a rate of 30%. Why?” And once you start naming the hospitals and showing the difference you really had an impact. So we saw just a remarkable effort that came from hospitals, providers and leaders to really address this. And we take credit for galvanizing that through transparency. And so today the rate is on average 2.8%.

: Nice.

: Basically the problem is gone. That is an example. There are literally hundreds of thousands of babies who did not end up in the NICU as a result of this effort. And this was a purchaser driven effort. And it’s all about transparency. So that’s really what Leapfrog’s about.

: What a great great story there and that’s for sure. I mean gone from 70% to just under 3 percent is no small undertaking in this system. It’s hard to get things done.

: Right. Exactly.

: Yeah they have that type of impact is huge so big congratulations to you Leah and your team for being able to drive this.

: Oh well thank you but again all we did was publicly report what we do everyday and what was the real work was from the providers, the hospitals, the organizations but that public reporting was not easy. And that’s the piece – and we didn’t do it just because sitting in Washington. You know I’m so good at getting data out there. It’s because purchaser’s go door to door to these hospitals and they say we really want you to report to Leapfrog. And that’s not an easy thing to do.

: So big kudos goes to the employers to then.

: Yes.

: They were going after this.

: Employer leadership saying we want this data, we deserve this data, it’s important to us and that’s made all the difference. So every employer listening to this right now, take a look at what you’re doing to get Leapfrog out there because without Leapfrog, employers do not have their own conduit for data that’s important to them. You might have some CMS data which isn’t as good for you. It might be good for Medicare but you if you want your own data, Leapfrog’s here that’s where you’re going to get it and that’s where you’re going to be able to drive change.

: Friends, listen to that hit rewind because there are some huge value added in this discussion in particular just understanding the difference between CMS catering more toward Medicare versus other larger group that you’re currently covering if you’re an employer. So big big value there given to us by Leah. So what would you say, Leah, what’s the criteria like how do you go about choosing what you’re going to go after?

: Our number one criteria. Well we have two no. 1 criteria if were allowed and that is that it has to be relevant and important to purchasers and consumers.

: Got it.

: Because if purchasers actually don’t think it’s relevant to them if it’s not relevant to their employees. And so it has to be relevant to both and that it matters to us. And that sounds like a simple thing but it’s not a simple thing. Be amazed at how much data is collected and publicly reported. That is not relevant to them at all. It’s sometimes it’s relevant to providers. We have a lot of things that are collected out there that are what we call process measures things like when certain things take place in the delivery setting that lead potentially to good outcomes, but we don’t know that for certain all the time. But if a medication is administered at the right time etc. while we do look at some of those process measures to make sure the delivery setting is functioning in a safe way, that is more important to providers themselves who want to make sure that they are consistently doing what they should be doing. But we’re looking for whether they’re getting the right outcomes so we are mostly focused on or to the extent we can be, we’re focused on outcomes.

: Yes.

: What’s the rate of c-section not just”are you doing everything you can to prevent c-sections.” So we look at outcomes, we also are like structural measures not as much as outcomes but structural measures like do they have in place the kinds of management structures they should have in place to prevent errors in accidents and bad things? So we look for example do they have the right technology in place to manage medication orders? You’d be amazed at how easy it is to make a major medication error in a hospital. In fact, they make a lot of them it’s about 1 a day per inpatient so it’s a big deal, some of those can be minor errors but some of them can be major even sometimes fatal and it’s so easy. So we want to know all the steps that the hospital is taking and whether those steps actually work. We test our technology. So it’s a very really important test and that’s something that’s very important to purchasers from day one. They said, “we just want a medication errors or a big problem, it makes sense to us that those should be managed through I.T. systems, are they using them, are they using them effectively or not? So that’s something we look at. So we’re really looking at issues that again we can’t get anywhere else, important to purchasers, important to consumers and that make a difference.

: Outstanding. Wow. That’s really great, very clear and concise outline there for criteria. So what would you say, I feel like a lot of times Leah, we learn more from setbacks than successes. Would you say that there is a particular setback that you guys had in the last 10 to 18 years that you’ve been around that you learn a lot from?

: Well in 2010 we actually had a major moment as an organization and for our board. So we were founded as I mentioned 2,000. We came out of a report that was issued by the what was called then the Institute of Medicine and that report was called To Err Is Human and it said that there was upwards of a hundred thousand people dying from preventable medical errors in hospitals. So that report got a lot of attention and Leapfrog really came out of that. So the real first and continuing focus of Leapfrog has always been errors and accidents and hospitals and trying to prevent them trying to drive a market for safer care for people so they know which hospitals are safer than others so they go to those safer ones and they encourage through competition that hospitals improve their own safety. So that’s been our focus and we started in the 2000’s collecting that data through the survey voluntarily. We asked hospitals about their safety record through our survey and we publicly reported it and then we made that information publicly available, and that’s been the model that Leapfrog has had from the beginning. So in 2010 though, there was a lot of press coming out about the first decade after the 10-year anniversary of To Err is Human. Have we made progress on medical errors was the big question that was sort of out there and the larger world particularly among health policymakers and there were about about five different studies done by a variety of different organizations on that question and every one of them concluded, “No we have not made progress.” And if anything the problem is worse than we thought because now we’re better at measuring the safety than we were 10 years ago. That is something that did improve. We got better at measuring it and as we get better measuring it we realized it’s worse much worse in fact now we think it’s at least twice as many people than that die 200,000 at least die from these preventable error. Anyway, so ten years in for Leapfrog, this was a moment for us. We said, “well okay the problem got worse, this was our main focus why we came to be. Are we wrong? Is our entire concept wrong? and we’ve been doing something completely just our whole methodology wrong everything we’re doing our whole vision mission or is just not the right direction.

: It was an existential moment.

: There really is.

: Yeah.

: And what we concluded was and we had about at that point about 700 hospitals reporting voluntarily. And what we concluded was that voluntary was the problem, that the biggest problem we had was the hospitals that didn’t report to us got a pass. So even though in most cases we reported them has declined to report. And that really wasn’t enough to embarrass them for not reporting. And it got a pass. So if a hospital in a community said I have a bad infection rate and they admitted on our survey hospital next door might also have a bad infection rate but they decided not to report and they get the pass. And everybody said figures well the other one must be fine. The one that didn’t report so it didn’t work because you can’t have competition when people can voluntarily opt out and decide not to compete. So that’s when we launched out of that the hospital safety grade which was A, B, C, D, or F that we assigned to all general hospitals regardless of whether they report to us. So it doesn’t matter if they want it or not, We don’t ask them for anything. We just use the data that we have publicly and we assign them this letter grade, and we do it very carefully. We have bunch of experts dream team of experts involved and we use a great deal of scientific research that goes behind every single measure we use every single aspect of our methodology etc. So we’re very careful about it. But we do assign it and it is not voluntary. So that has really changed. That has changed everything and we are seeing progress as a result of that.

: Wow just finding a new way to hold people accountable and because the non-participation is really kind of unfair and just to, how did you guys come up with that? I mean that’s such a unique approach to tackle this issue and obviously it’s working. What was the spark that ignited that idea?

: Well actually one of our board members David Goldhill, he talked about in L.A…

: Yeah.

: They had the hygiene department in L.A. so the public health department in L.A. had a program where they assign letter grades to restaurants on their cleanliness. So instead of just kind of reporting all the rats and the infestations and all the other stuff that they find God knows what in restaurants they gave me a grade. And they required the restaurant to post the grade the A B or C on their door. And when they started doing that, immediately, they got better immediately the restaurants got better, I mean pretty much within a year every restaurant was either an A or are pretty much out of business because…

: Wow.

: People really…

: I wanna go there.

: Got people’s attention. Right exactly.

: Yeah.

So I had a big impact and even saw impact on emergency visits for food poisoning and stuff. And it really had an impact. And New York City has done it as well successfully so we thought well let’s do that for hospitals. We’ll just assign them a letter grade. Now we can’t require them to post it on their door but we can at least give them letter grade. We can get some publicity for it. And so that’s what we’ve done, we updated every six months so we get a lot of publicity every six months when we update the letter grades nationally and regionally. There’s usually a lot of attention. I think it’s had an impact for a lot of boards of hospitals which is an area that I think is important. For example we have lots of stories of board members who come into their board meeting and say, “you know for two years you’ve been reporting to us on all the progress you’re making with falls or infections or all these problems and all those great work that you’ve done and improvements, but we got a D. Why are we getting a D?” And so when board members ask those kinds of questions. The board mates has a real impact on the entire hospital, the leadership involvement just changes overnight on safety so we’ve seen impact like that, the letter grade just has a real sense stickiness get traction and people listen to it and people pay attention which is important and I will add one thing I think others you know yeah it’s not like this is the most genius idea in the universe at A,B,C,D or F, I mean people you know you’ve heard about grades obviously. What’s different though is that Leapfrog because we’re independent because we were not in the healthcare providers side at all. We’re very careful about in fact a real wall between us and the those we rate, because of that separation the independents were actually willing to give some bad grades.

: Yeah.

: And I think for many organizations that’s a line they couldn’t cross. But we can and that really even though we don’t give a lot of terrible grades we don’t get, it’s really not something we relish we don’t enjoy giving really bad grades but we give them a lot to make it clear that they’re willing to tell the truth and he is candid as possible and we’re willing to celebrate hospitals when they do well because we certainly give a lot of A’s as well.

: What a great message there Leah and that inspiration from one of your board members to use this system that worked in the food industry, I had our guest recently Lucianne over from the Netherlands tell us, “you know what once a year, twice a year if you can attend them a meeting that’s completely unrelated to what you do.” He’s like go to a plumbers meeting or go to an arts and crafts meeting because you will find something that will get you out of your box.

: Yup. So true

: And I thought that was such a great recommendation especially with your solution here.

: It’s so true. I think that’s one of the techniques we use actually…

: Really?

: As kind of a discipline in our planning and strategy is, what do other industries do? And sometimes you can really get some insights because healthcare traditionally we think of ourselves as completely different…

: Yeah.

: Completely outside it we’re just so unique. But actually there’s a lot of lessons to be learned from how other industries pursue odd issues.

: Wow. And this is a great example of that just the pivot that you guys made as an organization and the results that followed. So tell us about an exciting project or focus that you guys are working on there.

: Well we’re really excited right now because we’re working on a ratings for ambulatory surgical surgery centers and outpatient surgery so we’re right now Leapfrog rates inpatient hospital care including some surgical procedures we look at the volume of particular surgical procedures but we’re going to add to our survey and we’re going to look at surgeries performed in the outpatient basis as well. And again we’re also going to look at surgeries performed at ambulatory surgical centers which will really require a new survey available to ASC’s that they can complete and publicly report their own quality and safety data. This is a big deal because about 60% of surgeries are now performed on an outpatient basis and a lot of them now are moving into these ambulatory surgical centers. And there is relatively little quality or safety reporting available to consumers or purchasers to compare among them which is deeply concerning. They tend to be lower priced, but back to my definition of value it’s price in the right care price and quality. And we don’t have the quality side of that equation too often with outpatient and ambulatory surgical centers. So hopefully we’ll be able to change that fast.

: Well you guys have definitely done great work in the acute space Leah and there’s no doubt in my mind that with the models you’ve established then the track record that you have that you’re going to be able to do that in a much shorter time frame. So very exciting.

: Thank you. Yeah we’re very excited about it and we do welcome any ideas or feedback from people as we look to this new area particularly with ASC’s and this is really a part of the health care universe that we don’t know as well. We certainly know hospitals we don’t know ASC’s as well and I think it’s growing so so quickly and evolving sometimes I think they don’t know themselves as well either. So we’re we’re starting to learn how the market works but we are always welcoming of suggestions.

: There you have it folks. If you’re if you’re looking for ways to collaborate to this tremendous effort we’ll give you a way to reach out to Leah and her team here at the end. Leah getting close to the end of the podcast here the time flies when you’re having fun. We got a little lightning round here for putting together a medical leadership course on what it takes to be successful in the business of healthcare. The ABC’s of Leah Binder so I’ve got four questions lightning round style followed by a book that you recommend to the listeners. You ready?

: OK.

: All right. What’s the best way to improve healthcare outcomes?

: You have to care about them deeply.

: What’s the biggest mistake or pitfall to avoid?

: Not being transparent.

: How do you very relevant as an organization despite constant change?

: Eyes on the prize. What’s important to the patient in the bed is always the most important thing even when you are distracted by a zillion other things.

: What’s one area of focus that should drive everything in your organization?

: Safety. Safety is the bottom line. It’s about respecting the patient enough to think about their well-being and safety in the most mundane ways and simplest ways 24/7 and that’s the focus once you focus on that, everything else will follow.

: Safety is key. And what book would you recommend to the listeners as part of the syllabus Leah?

: I have a book that I love, Cracking Health Costs is published last year and it’s by Tom Emerick and Al Lewis. Tom Emmerick’s former Global Benefits Senior V.P. for Walmart, Al Lewis is a great innovator runs a company and he’s also an expert on care management. They have assembled a series of chapters on really innovative approaches that employers and others can take to reduce their health costs but also to do it in a way that again looks at both cost and quality at the same time and gets better outcomes for their employees. They’re also really funny and that with a book.

: That makes it a minute’s entertaining and informative. That’s really good.

: Yes exactly it is fun to read.

: That’s awesome. Listeners you could find a link to this book as well as a transcript of our discussion. The syllabus that we just built for you all add outcomesrocket.health/Leapfrog. You’ll find all of that there. Leah before we conclude I’d love if you could just share a closing thought with the listeners, and then the best place where they could get in touch with or follow you.

: My major thought is this do not become distracted by the language and the intensity of healthcare clinical practice so much that you lose sight of what’s really important about healthcare which is the values that cause us all to care about it. What’s important to the patients and families. What’s important to all of us for our own families to have a respectful and effective health care delivery system. Let’s not lose sight of that through the smoke and mirrors that sometimes happens in health policy or clinical practice let’s keep our focus on the values that drive us forward.

: What a great message Leah. Thank you for that. And what would you say the best place to contact you say somebody interested in collaborating on your ASC initiative or in general to find out more about you or how they could get involved.

: They could contact me at lbinder@leapfroggroup.org

: Outstanding. That’s the email you have it folks. And again you could find all this information and outcomesrocket.health/leapfrog. You’ll find Leah’s email as well as all of the links that we’ve discussed. Leah, it’s been a tremendous pleasure. Keep up the amazing work and we really appreciate you spending some time with us today.

: Thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

: Hey Outcomes Rocket friends, thanks for tuning in to the podcast once again. As a leader in health care, you have big ideas great products, a story to tell, and are looking for ways to improve your reach and scale your business. However there’s one tiny problem. Health care is tough to navigate and the typical sales cycle is low. That’s why you should consider starting your own podcast as part of your sales and marketing strategy. At the Outcomes Rocket, I’ve been able to reach thousands of people every single month that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to reach if I had not started my podcast. Having this organic reach enables me to get the feedback necessary to create a podcast that delivers value that you are looking for. And the same thing goes if you start a podcast for what you could learn from your customers. The best thing about podcasting in healthcare is that we are currently at the ground level, meaning that the number of people in healthcare listening to podcasts is small but growing rapidly. I put together a free checklist for you to check out the steps on what it takes to create your own podcast. You could find that at outcomesrocket.health/podcast. Check it out today and find a new way to leverage the sales, marketing and outcomes of your business. That’s outcomesrocket.health/podcast.

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