Healthcare innovation with the goal of improving care for all
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Saul Marquez:
Welcome back to the podcast. Today I have the privilege of hosting Dr. Jean Wright. She’s the V.P., Chief Innovation Officer at Atrium Health. Jean is responsible for leading the advancement of innovation initiatives throughout Atrium Health in Charlotte North Carolina as Chief Innovation Officer. Her focus is on working with teams to raise the bar for patient care and population health through human-centered design, business development and novel medical technologies. Dr. Wright practice as a pediatric anesthesiologist and intensivist. She held positions as physician executive at Emory Chair of Pediatrics for Mercer and Executive Director for Memorial Health’s Children’s and Women’s Hospital in Savannah and was a Chief Medical Officer for Carolinas Health System North East. She is a health services researcher, has served on Federal Advisory Committees and given testimony in the US House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. She’s an outstanding guest and I’m super excited to dive into some of her thoughts on the health business that we’re all in. So Jean, it’s a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
Jean Wright:
Well thanks so much for inviting me. I’m excited to participate in this conversation. What’s happening in health care.
Saul Marquez:
There certainly is. So Jean, anything that you want to share with the listeners about you that maybe I didn’t cover in your intro?
Jean Wright:
Well let’s see. I think you’ve described the fact that I have a clinical background and a business background and often kid that when I went to business school I realized, oh there’s a whole class you can take on innovation, there’s a whole class you could take on analytics. Realized and that was in the mid 90s when I took them there were really formative to my looking at health care both as a physician leader, a hospital leader, and now as an innovator. So I feel like I’ve had the good fortune of seeing healthcare from several different sides.
Saul Marquez:
That’s really neat. Yeah. And you’re definitely forward thinking Jean in making that decision so early on. Today is that it’s cool you know to be the in roles like that. But you saw it early on before it became the style or really kind of the necessity. So as we dive in here I’d love to hear more about what got you interested to get into health care to begin with.
Jean Wright:
Well I always wanted to be a doctor,literally from sixth grade on. Which was pretty interesting because I come from a blue collar immigrant family. And no one had been to college much less med school but just aspired to be in health care. And frankly, 56 years later, I still have that same passion. I love health care. I’m fascinated by it. You know I watch anything on the Discovery Channel even that related to what I’m working on at that time. I think the intersection of humans, our health and now technology and analytics and augmented reality is just I wish I believe in reincarnation because I’d want to do it all over again.
Saul Marquez:
Wow that’s amazing. So what is it that got you so interested in it?
Jean Wright:
In health care in general?
Saul Marquez:
Yeah like I mean it’s from six to even after after death in real life you yeah like why why are you so interested in it?
Jean Wright:
I think it’s that common connection point of probably said way too many times high touch in high tech. It’s a place where you can bring your interest in science and see it interact with the human condition. I frankly like going back and forth between those two extremes. Case in point that just came out of a meeting where we talked about social determinants of health and what we can do on a community level later this afternoon and I’ll go into a discussion that’s very technical has to do with how we look at analytics and how we can predict disease cautious or disease pathways for patients. And that ability to cross back and forth and at the center of all of it is the patient I think of that email even though I don’t practice anymore, I got an email this morning from a grandmother who was raising her grandchild and she’s desperate because she can’t get into the health care system the way that she needs to. She’s passionately advocating for her granddaughter. And you know I used to say when I was in that business of children’s hospitals that we didn’t treat children but we actually treated with somebody’s child you know it was an end of one. It was a unit case and that’s how people relate to the system although as we’ll probably get into the discussion further on the systems that very well designed for that mass customization it’s not very well designed for us understanding what impacts the majority people and then how do we find to you as a person. So that intersection to me just is drawing and compelling.
Saul Marquez:
Now that’s fascinating. Tt’s definitely an interesting intersection for sure. High touch, high tech. So today what would you say is a hot topic that needs to be on every medical leaders agenda and how are you and your organization approaching it?
Jean Wright:
Well I’d say top of mind for us is disruptive innovation. And I think if we’d had this conversation a few years ago we would have all fumbled around our definition. We would have confused it with the bright shiny object or the new technology the head of our factor. Now we’re really understanding that disruption is not technology per se, it’s a new business model. So whether that’s moving from volume to value or whether it’s somebody coming with a new value proposition and bundling it in a different way, our systems are not very nimble at either recognizing those new business models or probably even more importantly making a pivot and the change to that. So let me build upon that and I think an example that we have really kept a keen eye on is the whole field of primary care as a part of the last 25 or maybe the 50 years, primary care has looked pretty much the same. Go to the doctor’s office. Dr. Marcus Welby sees you they write something in a chart. Oh we advanced it. Now they put it on a computer. But pretty much the interaction, the payment system through insurance or your employer has pretty much stayed the same. And now we have a whole new line of primary care opportunities or threats depending on how you see your market around new forms or alternate models of care. Many of them are subscription based, some are direct to consumer models, some are most reduced down to the level of a chatbot.Those new ways of accessing not only patients but payers is about to disrupt the typical relationship of health plan, patient and the health system. And so when when we’ve been turning our eyes around looking at what are the things most likely to disrupt our industry once you look past the government and its impact on movement to value based care which has been great there is still a very slow development we see like in our own market there’s probably 40 disruptors in this space of alternate models of preventive care that we know that are out there, that are growing. Most of them in fact almost all of them are backed by venture capital funding and they have a different business model and they have a different metric of success. And for physicians who are frustrated right now they’re likely to jump ship and go to those kind of models for patients who can’t get access into the system. They’re likely to jump ship and then for a whole generation frankly that’s very comfortable doing everything on a mobile device. Whether it’s a phone or iPad or an old fashioned telephone, they’re likely to jump ship. So we’re keeping a keen eye and frankly trying to disrupt ourselves in that space as well because it’s a question of be disrupted or disrupt yourself and for big healthy, successful systems disrupting yourself at the peak of your performance is really, really hard.
Saul Marquez:
For sure. Yeah and it’s sort of the the whole example of like a Kodak. Right. I mean you’re at the peak of your performance you’ve got a solid business, you’re adding value. And then digital comes through and just sort of changes things. And so what do you do?
Jean Wright:
You know right. And it’s you know just as you’re alluding to we have become believers and subscribers in Clay Christiansen’s theories of disruption and frankly it has really helped us separate the wheat from the chaff. And we can see the phrase he often uses when is something good enough. You know I’m a mom I’m a busy working executive and so when my teenage mom calls me a Friday afternoon and she’s all the way across town which on Friday afternoons and our drive she says I have a sore throat tomorrow I want to compete in gymnastics competition for a cheerleading competition. I’m thinking what’s good enough? And frankly what’s good enough for her in that situation. I’m thinking. All I really need a throat swab the throat virtual visit will get me that so I’ll send her to an on demand clinic, a proprietary on demand clinic and I give her some coaching of what to say and then I get on the phone with that person 25 miles away. That’s good enough. If you could ask me five or ten years ago what I ever said my child to somebody other than a board certified pediatrician probably attached to a major children’s hospital. There’s no way I would have thought about it. Then today we look not only at CBS and Walgreens and Wal-Mart and other groups even things like Wal-Mart are talking about behavioral health services that we would have thought were just too hard to bring into a mass customization model. And yet they’re venturing into that. So just as you made reference to Kodak underappreciated that people wanted something that was just good enough or there were several other players at the time but that’s always the story they tell. Just like blockbusters and estimated Netflix and the stories go over and over and over. So I think in healthcare many of us have kind of chafed and said those stories may work for retail industries or maybe cars or maybe cameras but they don’t work for health care and we’re learning they work for health care. Nobody knows if it’s good enough or getting to non consumers. For example when Wal-Mart starts offering behavioral health we’ve picked up non consumers not the users people were frankly disenfranchised or couldn’t get into the system because it either wasn’t cheap enough or they couldn’t get access to it.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah that’s such a fascinating insight there, Jean, and I love the context that you that you sort of made you know between Kodak’s and the blockbusters which is another great example. And now this belief that is a myth that these trends and the way of disruption can’t affect health care work. Well it definitely can. Especially today where we’re seeing an evolution and in payer models you know and employers taking different stances in the way that they are interacting with payers and the health system so it’s definitely an evolving time. Definitely give you and your team a lot of kudos for for having this forward thinking perspective it’s gonna it’s gonna make a big difference for you guys.
Jean Wright:
I hope so. We really take it as an element of stewardship or responsibility of stewardship. We often use the phrase that we’re a watchman on the wall. People will kill us and say your work is not on a strategic plan and we push back and say it’s because we’re looking three to five years out we are looking at genomics before the possibility of bringing genomics into primary care was likely. I just returned from HIMMS and was in an all day session. Where we’re now really at that cusp of genomics impacting day to day health care decisions. It’s not quite there and as you know I’m from the south so I have some Southern phrases one of which is we’re fixin to so we’re fixin to be able to operate Genomics at the point of care but you know case in point our own employees are a local color our teammates were all offered the opportunity to buy a relatively inexpensive gene study said and we have 30000 people who have access to that may never show up in their primary care, their O.B., their pediatrician’s office saying “doctor, nurse practitioner, case manager what do I do with this? What does it mean that I have Alpha 1? What does it mean that I carry the gene for hemochromatosis. Or maybe even more concerning. I have the gene for Alzheimer’s so Epo Epsilon 4 double eliya. What does that mean and what does it mean if you’re 10 years old and they found that out? So that world is just exploding. And I would say many of our systems yet whether it’s in the office or in the hospital system are not yet prepared to respond to the public’s need and desire for that information. I was sitting with a group of providers this week and we were saying you know you don’t always have to understand something to sit there’s a lot about smartphone and I don’t understand. But I sure know how to how to use it when someone’s tested like myself and I found out too from a coach you know much that there’s a certain medication that if they gave it to me I was left my mucosa. I don’t really have to understand whether it’s CY P219 or whatever the number might be. Just put it in my chart. I quickly went to put it my chart. We didn’t have any basis in the chart for genomic information so I should just put it under allergies. Just make it so violently strong that nobody will give me that medication. So the future is quickly impinging on the present and we are all scrambling to adapt to it.
Saul Marquez:
Such a fascinating space of genomics and and I love your point here. You don’t have to understand it to use it. You could realize the benefit get the outcome you’re looking for. I think that’s such a great piece of advice.
Jean Wright:
It means we won’t need more genetic counselors surely we will or some way of getting you know again mass information out to the people on an individualized basis. But for many things especially the pharma code genomics space is just you can’t take Plavix you can’t take coumadin you can’t take this SSRI you shouldn’t take that other behavioral meds that would go a long way. You know that when people are receiving care from behavioral health issues most people spend at least $400 out of pocket before their psychiatrist or their family physician or internist whoever’s doing the prescribing get them to the right med or the right level of med or the right combination and they spend about 100 dollars out of pocket and had some testing system beforehand. Now wouldn’t it be fascinating to see if they could get to that right combo sooner.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah. Absolutely. You got to find ways to get better..
Jean Wright:
I’m beginning to preach now I realize that I probably had to back that off a little.
Saul Marquez:
But you know Jean..
Jean Wright:
Sorry I still have the sixth graders enthusiasm.
Saul Marquez:
You certainly do Gene. That’s something that we can all learn from you about. So give us give us an example of how you and your team have great results by doing things differently?
Jean Wright:
Ok. We call ourselves a small but mighty team. We also refer to ourselves as Sherpas that we even have a podcast called The Sherpas guide to innovation. There we are multidisciplinary so I have people with business development backgrounds biomedical engineers, people who have been in consulting, people with public health. I even hired a designer from Parsons school of design. First time we had somebody like that come into the hospital system that I caused for creation of a new job code. When our team gets asked to look at a problem let’s say one of our current problems is memory care. The number of people that have memory issues whether it’s Alzheimer’s or one of the other very not only it’s very large right now but we are on the opening scene of a tsunami. We quickly added up as we were doing some preliminary scouting work that in Charlotte is probably 35,000 people that already carry that diagnosis through their electronic medical record. They’ve already been coding that is like filling the Cleveland Indians stadium and then we turn around look at the resources that we would have to support that whole stadium. Of people realize we only have one geriatric position. It would be like going to a big sports stadium and only having one bathroom or one hotdog stand or one guy selling beer which would probably be the real crisis for the stadium. But literally you know as you can tell I use a lot of visual representations because people remember that way. Well it’s not going to be very long to Charlotte. Now only has one stadium full but we’re going to have two stadiums full. And yet our way to scale our resource in some way to address people that are in the hospital. My sister recently was in the hospital for shoulder replaced. She has Alzheimer’s. And one of us from the family stayed in the room because well meaning nurses and doctors would come in and chat. But there and she was delightful and she gets lovely answers and they have no relationship to reality. It’s just that there’s a no, she hasn’t today. Yes she can take this. No she’s allergic to penicillin. So our system has not yet caught up with how do we not just treat them and their disease but how do we treat them? How do we talk to them? How do we interact with them? You know a few years ago I think many health care systems were becoming aware of their need to be more culturally sensitive. On the same way now we need to become memory sensitive because in our hospitals not surprisingly it’s often older population and the prevalence now is just amazing. So we applied some of those tools of innovation like we went out and did ethnography at clinics and watched the interactions. I even got permission to follow my sister and video her so that I show it to my team members so they could see how confused she gets it checking. How simple signs that said look straight forward other people don’t look straight forward to her. Then we started working with stakeholders, the neurologists, the people who had really been owning this need over the last couple of decades. And it was interesting that we took them through the tools of innovation. They began to appreciate that there were some moments that mattered like the first time you give somebody the diagnosis and what they realized was we were not meeting people’s needs. We love the phrase jobs to be done when a family member say my brother in law brought my sister the first time. His job to be done was can you tell me if it’s safe for my wife to dry. I’ve noticed and changed her thinking. Is it safe for her to drop. Can I leave her at home by herself. Well we are first. There must be technology or an app or a web. When we went and asked people and watched them interface with them what we realized was they wanted a pretty simple booklet that a 20 page booklet. Not the 36 hour the first 36 hours which is a well respected book on how to handle somebody with Alzheimer’s in life to the book or caregivers but they want it like the first 20 pages were. Fast forward we created that book. We put it in a special bag that has our logo on it. People are thrilled because we’re meeting their fellow need. In that moment. So why are there some days that we may be working on predictive analytics. I think the days that we work on some of these simple human need issues as important maybe even more important because we’re touching people right at their pain point.
Saul Marquez:
I think that’s so great Jean that you guys did that and it goes back to your message at the beginning of our podcast here where you said hey you know innovation doesn’t have to be a shiny object, it’s a redoing of a business process a business model or even addressing the need such as a booklet right to help guide where there is no guidance and so huge huge success there. What would you say an example of of a setback that you guys have had that you learn a lot from that’s made you better?
Jean Wright:
Well it’s easy when people talk about innovation and say you’ve got to embrace failure. You want people that have a constitution for that because either we’re really strong and hearty people or we have a soft side psychiatric diagnosis because it is true. Almost every single day we’re hearing a thousand points you know we’re failing, we’re being shot down but I’ll just tell one.
Saul Marquez:
Okay.
Jean Wright:
have read some literature a few years ago that most patients when they’re discharged from the hospital actually don’t take in enough calories the first few days after they’re home to really start the healing process. We saw how in one particular state Medicaid provider and the Medicare providers were sending meals home with patients. We thought wow what if we did that. We discharged 10000 patients a year. What if we sent home four or five days worth of frozen meals. So by the time they got home. And then you know that the church sign up for the meal train or the neighborhood let’s take Aunt Mary some pasta got kicked in. They would have already had the right meal. So we call it food is medicine. We presented the literature in fact to our senior physician executive and he said “Oh this makes so much sense. The evidence is overwhelming. Go do this and don’t do a pilot just just do it for everybody.”.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah.
Jean Wright:
Well we held that ground. We said no the really the principles of innovation are start small iterate. So we said we’re going to start small. So we picked a hospital that had a very aged population and then we realized that we’re giving out food is that a conflict with the federal government? So then we talked to the lawyers and compliance is what if that’s a form of a new element. Then we realized we might have to have a restaurant license because we’re giving out food. So then we have to say if we had a restaurant like that we realized we had to have a place to store the foods we had to buy refrigerators and then we had to figure out when somebody was going to get discharged so we could give them a frozen meal kit to go home. Long story short it was a huge failure. And now so humorous in retrospect the people didn’t like the food. It tasted just like hospital food to them. And what they wanted was cooking again and they wanted meat. And mashed potatoes and gravy and fried chicken caught among other things in our diet is weather proof and we can’t. That one guy on our team ended up eating the majority.
Saul Marquez:
That’s funny.
Jean Wright:
Hey I think you’re 17 of those real still left in the freezer. So is this what did that teaches? One, it really reassured us that start small. Start some place and really work the bugs out. We heard about one meal prep company Blue Apron or Hello fresh I forget which one but they started with a single customer and worked for six months so they could get the meals the portions, the freshness, the delivery, all the bugs worked out. Many folks want to jump to that conclusion. We have to learn we’re not really good at being in the food business. I mean we have ever eaten at a hospital you already know that.
Saul Marquez:
Right.
Jean Wright:
And this was not going to be our strong suit. So we finally chalked it up to a learning curve that will eat the rest of the meals and then went on to another project.
Saul Marquez:
My goodness. Some great great insights there and you know you guys take it and with a stride and you’ve made some some great choices based off that and in the future. Well the programs that came after that. Jean, you’re a student of innovation I mean I know you’ve spent a lot of time studying it and doing it you know some work with M.I.T. and Harvard Business School and I’m just you know studying what it is and implementing it in meaningful ways. So appreciate it sharing those those tidbits with listeners today. What would you say one of your proudest leadership moments has been to date?
Jean Wright:
Well it’s hard for me to even narrow down to one because one of the things that really personally drives me you know I mentioned this intersection of science and humanity. But the second is watching people develop and I have had such pleasure and I have such pride in watching the team that I have grow and thrive and as high was quoted in The Wall Street Journal. Another guy on our team Jay Gerhart is your classic strategic planner used to work at one of the big companies that does consulting you would have thought he would be the last person to come over into innovation. Not only has he come over. He leads our consumer strategy and he has now trained himself by going to Second City and how to do improper really learn that empower helps innovation. When I see folks thrive and I see them find you know find their zone, find their space and where they begin to build a national reputation of their own it just gives me huge pride. A few years ago we were asked to help with virtual behavioral health and this was gosh now five six years ago and our senior position executive said “We need behavioral health and we need and primary care” was as he said that I thought Oh I’ve seen models so that people would take a psychologist get them in a practice and they call it Behavioral Health Integration and those models are actually quite successful both in improving care for the patients delivering access, reducing costs, and improving chronic illness so that I know how to do that. And then he looked at me and said “You’ve got to be virtual and no new FTE”. In fact his phrase was “go virtual or go home”. And he was right because you said 10 years from now we’re going to look over our shoulders and anything that we’ve built and we’ll ask ourselves why did we not move to either virtual or digital or chat more quickly. What was our hesitancy to do that. So we started with that framework and just like the story about food is medicine we started small. We started with the tools of ethnography. We started in the multidisciplinary way. We do bring along operational owners right from the beginning. Fact that’s why we use the word Sherpa because we think Sherpa connotes someone who is wise someone who’s experienced but expedition leader is at the end of the day the person who’s both got to own it. It really gets the glory for now. So we’ll come along say look we have some tools in ethnography, we have some tools and business model innovation we can do a value prop canvas for you. But at the end of the day you’re going to have to read that. So our Head of Psychiatry our SVP over behavioral health some frontline, psychiatrist, we’re all in the room with us as we were designing this together. And when we went to roll it out we did it in one practice just one group of doctors and we even kept the psychiatrist on site that first week I don’t know what we what’s going to happen.. catch on fire somebody had a seizure or something. But we wanted to make sure just like opening a restaurant that we didn’t either miss somebody or miss something or maybe what we thought we’d designed we call our design center the treehouse just children always go up into a treehouse to imagine things. So what we had just finding the treehouse we want to make sure that it worked on the front line. I’m so glad that we tested it so well before we opened it that we took our own members the innovation group through that week and we kept pretending we were patient and we purposely would score that we were having suicidal ideation to make sure that the machinery and everything picked it up. When we went live with patients in that first week. Three people answered question number nine. I’m having thoughts about killing myself or harming myself. So we are so glad that we had built it that way. After showing that it worked in that environment and as people if they do score high they get offered an opportunity right then there to talk to a bank of licensed psychologist who helped screen them. They do kind of adjust in time counsel and figure out you need face to face counseling need to have your meds adjusted and maybe that’s why things are just right. So they work through with the patient. It helps that primary care doctors workflow because here we’ve essentially taken them out of that queue taking care of the issue and then we put them back with a primary care doc and if needed they can get on the phone and do it just in time for the psychiatrist about the meds that work has been recognized by the National Council on Community Health Community Mental Health. We won an award from Best company for design and health but most important we not have touched one hundred thousand people with this. You know this goes back to my original mantra about the intersection of science and the humanness of people. One hundred thousand people we can see that their anxiety has improved, their depression has improved. Even that very difficult question. Eighty three percent of the people who said I’m having suicidal ideation said I’ve never had another suicidal thought after you brought me into the program and got me the help that I need. And as a byproduct we also watched their hemoglobin A C drop appropriately and so we knew if we can help people’s mental health we can help their overall health. And now we have docs who are not afraid to broach anxiety and depression because they’ve got a resource and it’s a resource that just doesn’t disrupt their workload. So I guess if you talk about a project that we are most proud of and has been referred to by others on the outside it would be our work in virtual behavioral health.
Saul Marquez:
Love it. What a great example and I mean numbers don’t lie and you’ve helped a lot of people and you guys are definitely making a big difference. Congratulations on that.
Jean Wright:
Thank you.
Saul Marquez:
So Jean, getting close to the end of our time together here and wish we had some more time. This has definitely been a very insightful conversation. I know the listeners are probably jotting down notes hitting rewind. Wanted hear some of the tidbits again. Unless it’s video podcasting as you could always go back and listen.
Jean Wright:
Absolutely.
Saul Marquez:
So this part of the podcast it’s a lightning round someone ask you some some questions five in total at you’ll provide just lightning round responses and then we’ll finish that with a favorite book that you recommend to the listeners. You ready?
Jean Wright:
OK.
Saul Marquez:
All right. What’s the best way to improve health care outcomes?
Jean Wright:
I think it on the frontline with the patients. I think we’ve tried too long to improve it figure it out from conference rooms from PowerPoint shadow patients get out there in the space and watch you know both the handouts that are occurring and the ones that are being dropped.
Saul Marquez:
What’s the biggest mistake or pitfall to avoid?
Jean Wright:
I think this runs parallel to question number one and that’s thinking you know the answer we waiting up in the wall of our design area. Following love with the problem not the solution. Everyday we’re being pitched by young startup companies who have the greatest gizmo widget technology you’ve got to go back to the problem and really solve for the problem just like we found out it was a booklet that people wanted. Not a technology or an app.
Saul Marquez:
Love that. What do you do to stay relevant as an organization despite constant change?
Jean Wright:
We approach life with intentionality tech. We even use that phrase intentional serendipity. We put ourselves on field trips you know we’re here in Charlotte. So we have the opportunity to go visit Lowe’s and we learn about how they’re planning for the year 2040 and how they understand that their mission is to love where you live. It’s not so you know a great set of tools. It’s love where you live. And so we can relate to that. We can go to NASCAR and see a highly regulated industry have to redesign itself every year. We can look at the banking industry. So we do field trip Fridays. We host groups from analogous organizations and sometimes we just go to things that are completely out of our wheelhouse. And invariably, you know something comes back that is so great.
Saul Marquez:
I love that. So folks something to think about when’s the last time you or your team took a field trip Friday and explored the business model of somebody else that’s doing something completely different. You’d be surprised what you could apply there. Thanks for that, Jean. How about the last one here. What’s one area of focus that drives everything in your organization?
Saul Marquez:
We often say our job is to accelerate the transformation of health care. If we can come in and help someone be close to something that’s great. If we can help them be the first. All right. Can we help them be as fast as they can in moving to that. And then are there some ways that we can help them skip some steps. So for us many times is taking people through a walk through something that they never even thought they could do. We might use a 3P or some other design tool or skill to help them see that the future is possible. We’ll often use the phrase how, well say setting reality aside how might we? And then we start talking about that future state. And sure enough people can then begin to work backwards and go you know I really think I can get it there.
Saul Marquez:
Love that. This one is what is your number one health habit?
Jean Wright:
Probably getting enough sleep. Well I didn’t know you’re going to get so personal.
Saul Marquez:
These are sort of the non-business ones. That’s big for me. And they’re fun.
Jean Wright:
The other one is I’ve learned years ago I was looking at the literature about metabolic syndrome and all those sorts of things and I thought, wow you know I may not be able to influence a whole lot of these other things. But in terms of helping with stress.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah.
Jean Wright:
Helping with creativity because I do have to be creative at work helping with resetting my own cortisol which makes a big difference in how you metabolize different foods. Here’s one that I both would like to do. It would be good for everybody. And so I’m pretty close to an eight hour, a night sleeper at which 30 years is anesthesiologists intensive as I was probably a four hour a night sleeper. An intentional chain that has had big benefit.
Saul Marquez:
That’s huge. That is huge. Congrats on that. I definitely work hard to get seven to eight daily as well and I know the difference..
Jean Wright:
Nap.. It’s really good too.
Saul Marquez:
Oh absolutely. Absolutely.
Jean Wright:
The Chinese have something to teach us about that take a little midday nap.
Saul Marquez:
I know. I have I have a lot to learn from my wife. She’s a great napper. And what would you say your number one success habit is?
Saul Marquez:
I think my number one success habit is not being afraid to ask people for advice. I learned that early in my career there was a time where I wrote a letter to someone who was very well known both in pediatrics as an academic and as a hospital leader. And I started off with. You don’t know me but I’m trying to make decisions about my career. Can you help? From then on every time I need something, I write people. If I don’t know them or you know now that we have the advantage of LinkedIn then I’ll say, you know Joe you know Bob could you connect us so I could talk to him about predictive analytics at the bedside. We’re so afraid to ask and I don’t know which gender impacts it. I sense it’s a little bit easier for women than men. Maybe that’s too much over generalization but I think for any of us who have had some degree of success sometimes we’re afraid of being seen as a sign of weakness. And I really don’t know the social. Can you teach me or I don’t understand how this model of analytics is different than somebody else. I always feel like I end up becoming Tom Sawyer. I ask other people and they come along the fence for me but I’d say that key to success is not not being shy about asking and asking for help.
Saul Marquez:
I love that, Jean. What a great piece of advice there. What book would you recommend to the listeners?
Jean Wright:
Whoooh. I’m going to go to an old one and it’s called Leading quietly and the author is a professor at Harvard he’s probably in his 60s maybe even a little beyond that now. I think his last name is Joe Badaracco, might be mispronouncing his last name. I’m not even sure the book still in print but one of the things I like about that book is it shows you that life is not always fair, doesn’t always work out the way you want it to. There’s just some really practical leadership case studies in there that in fact recently I’m serving as an interim and one of the areas of our system and I said to the men and women that section for the next eight or twelve weeks you’re going to hit me as an interim leader. Let me share with you some of my favorite books or chapters and I pulled out Leading quietly and said here’s a book I think if you only read chapter two, read that one and you’ll get some great insight to some of the best books out there are actually some of the oldies and goldies.
Jean Wright:
I love that’s one that I’ll definitely be looking for, Jean, so thank you for that. And listeners you could find all of the awesome insights that we’ve discussed today. Just go to our website. Go to outcomesrocket.health and in the search bar type in Jean. You’ll find her information there Jean Wright. Or you could type in Atrium health either of those two key phrases will pop up the podcast, full transcript as well as show notes of today’s episode. So Jean, leave us with the closing thought and the best way that the listeners could learn more about your work.
Jean Wright:
All right. Well I would say the number one barrier to innovation is that people don’t start. That’s another one of the phrases that we have up on the wall in our innovation engine workplace. It’s start, start somewhere. Start small. Get over that barrier of inertia. And the people that are successful are the ones that you know that started some place. Yes, we’re on the web, we’re the innovation engine we have a podcast so you can use your favorite tool to download it. Sherpas guide to innovation. We’re on Twitter, we’re on Instagram. You can find us all sorts of places. So I’m @drjeanwright or you can follow us through innovation.
Saul Marquez:
Outstanding. Gene this has been awesome. I’ve enjoyed it so much and I know listeners have too so I just want to say a big thank you to you for joining us.
Jean Wright:
Well thank you so much and thank you for the work that you’re doing.
Thanks for listening to the Outcomes Rocket podcast. Be sure to visit us on the web at www.outcomesrocket.com for the show notes, resources, inspiration and so much more.
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