Strengthening the Skills of Nurses and Nurse Leader with Kathy Driscoll, Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer of Humana: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
Strengthening the Skills of Nurses and Nurse Leader with Kathy Driscoll, Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer of Humana: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Rebecca Love:
Hi everyone, and welcome to Outcomes Rocket Nursing where we bring you some of the most innovative nursing leaders from across the United States and the world who are doing things differently to change the future of nursing and health care. Today it is my honor to bring Kathy Driscoll, the Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer of Humana to Outcomes Rocket Nursing. In her role as Chief Nursing Officer, Kathy oversees Humana’s strategy of improving the experience of Humana’s community of nearly 10000 nurses, care managers, and social workers, and promoting a culture that engages values and inspires clinical professionals while impacting health outcomes. Focus areas include clinical quality and innovation, clinician growth and development, and commissioning engagement and recognition. She also leads initiatives to support the health and well-being of Humana’s clinical communities, leveraging partnerships across the Humana enterprise, as well as external partnerships such as the ANA Healthy Nurse, Healthy Nation initiative, The IHI Joy in Work collaborative. Kathy collaborates with other senior leaders of the Humana Home Solutions Strategy to best support members’ health by advancing capabilities in-home and growing the offerings by the company. Prior, Kathy served in various senior leadership roles at the company, including as Vice President and Chief of Operations at Humana Home, where she led clinical operations including care management services for Humana members, as well as private pay clients home care operations, including licensed and certified home health agencies and other in-home health care services. She was a founding member at the Humana at Home Innovation Team, which developed a consumer-centered health experience initiative focused on envisioning the future of health care delivery services, products and other opportunities in the home. Prior to Humana, Kathy was the Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Senior Bridge, a national care management and home care company acquired by Humana in 2012. She has more than 30 years of experience in nursing, with concentrations in geriatrics, home care, managed care, and care management. Kathy, it is such an honor to have you there on Outcomes Rocket Nursing.
Kathy Driscoll:
Thanks, Rebecca. It’s an honor to be here. Always enjoy my time with you.
Rebecca Love:
Well, Kathy, you have one of these resumes in nursing that I think is a nurse makes me stand up and realize the breadth and the opportunity that nursing affords one in health care. And I think this audience who’s going to hear from you, all of these nurses, what inspires your work and what inspired you to even go into nursing when you did?
Kathy Driscoll:
Well, first of all, I grew up with nurses in my life, and like many nurses, I was inspired by my family members. Some of my favorite aunts were nurses. I watched them. They had the best stories. I thought they were the most important people in the world and they were in so many ways. They made this really great impact on people’s lives, and I was really drawn to the profession, you know, by being inspired by them. And then once I became a nurse, I really loved that there were so many different practice areas during different parts of our lives, different circumstances. You really have this opportunity to impact in so many ways. I worked for a long time in home health, love the relationships, loved being in people’s homes, and really seeing their context. I’ve been in the hospital, I’ve been in managed care, I’ve been in leadership roles. It really they all are so exciting, and at the crux of it, it’s our nursing skill set that that makes us, you know, set up for success there. And then I think you can’t forget the people that I work with in every setting. That’s what continues to inspire me. The people that we care for, their stories, you know, their struggles, their triumphs, that inspires me. And ultimately with nursing, it’s the difference we can make. That’s what inspires me, and I think that’s our common purpose.
Rebecca Love:
I think we talk a lot about nursing to that point, the purpose that we bring into our profession and we are very much a purpose-driven profession that is almost you feel more than you necessarily strategize. It’s this feeling you get and your inspiration. Many of the nurses we all talk to that point have had those family members around them, and their stories inspired us to sit there and say we can make a difference. And so you are in one of the largest payer networks in the country. And the question that I have is how is your system adding value to the health care system? And I think there is a lot of question around what is those relationships and how does Humana and you see the value that you are adding to the overall system and improving what we do today in health care?
Kathy Driscoll:
Yeah. So, you know, it’s a different type of practice setting than maybe we thought about traditionally when I started out as a nurse, I think one of the ways that we’ve really been able to impact the system is by realizing that the health and future of our business are so interconnected with the well-being of our members, of those who work for us and with us and the communities that we serve. You know that is the health care ecosystem. And so we’ve really begun to evolve. We are a payer, but we’re evolving into really being a health care provider. And, you know, I’ll give you an example. We recently completed a transaction and acquisition of Kindred at Home, so it’s the largest home health agency, the largest home health provider in the United States. What we realized is we can’t just focus on transactional care. We as nurses see people in this whole person. We see their context and we need to think about the whole continuum of care, how all the pieces connect. So by doing things like expanding our ability to bring care to the home, by partnering with other organizations, we have a large primary care organization too. We create this continuum that we can support health not only with our traditional members, but with patients, with our employees, and we really focus on the communities that we serve and their continuum of needs. So it’s really been an evolution. It continues to be. But again, going back to that difference that we can make and the relationship and trust that we can build. I think this is a great platform.
Rebecca Love:
Know, I loved how you said that it is beyond the transaction of care. That care is nurses we know cannot just be transactional. And I think to your point, there are a lot of conversations in that space where health care is largely looked at as a transactional basis. And changing that mindset fundamentally, I think, is exactly the role that nurses who when they end up in organizations such as Humana, start to change that conversation. That dialogue and the way that we can impact and your background, I mean, is tremendous in the long-term care space. And you recognize, especially at the end of life care, as life changes and needs change. This is not just an acute transactional moment, but it is a continuum of care that we have to address. So with that new mindset that you’re sort of looking at things differently, what makes what these new changes are going to be better or different than how we have been typically delivering health care?
Kathy Driscoll:
Yeah, Rebecca, I think I would go back to that the traditional way was very transactional and it was in settings that maybe were they were built for those who were providing care, not necessarily for those who were receiving care and understanding their needs, their context, and their preferences importantly. So I think that as a health care system, we continue to evolve in that manner. I was always drawn to home health, as I said because I loved to see where people lived and what they were dealing with. To me, it was the real context and you really start thinking about what are the things that matter, where our priorities are, what do we have to start with? We talk about patient-directed care and patient-centered care. We need to know these things. We need to have those we care for be definitely be at the center and be directing their care. So I think that for us, one of the important things that we learned, we started focusing on population health and we’re a large company, so we have a lot of technology and analytics that provide information. When you combine the power of that with really getting to know individuals and individual needs. I think that’s where we really started to focus in on things like social determinants of health and the importance of them in driving the health of a community, the health of individuals. So we’ve really been very, very strongly focusing on the communities we serve and on their unique needs and thinking about how can we help to address those needs as an important driver of health.
Rebecca Love:
I didn’t want the audience to miss the power of your statement, which you said that models were often built after those who were providing the care, not those who were receiving the care. And that is such a critical and important thing to note because I think to your point that if we don’t start looking at that differently, those models are going to keep being transactional and we’re going to keep failing the patient time and time again because we’re building it from the wrong angle and to this whole thing of conversations, user experience, design. If anything, the last 40 years of the technological revolution of Ubers ad Amazon’s, what we realize is the more we can get closer to the end experience of that user and build that entire model around that it is going to do incredible things for outcomes. And you know, Kathy, I love it because you oversee one of the largest nursing forces in the country and the payer system. I think it said 10000 nurses or health care workers and case managers are working for you. So every day you guys are dealing with and touching thousands of patients’ lives across the country. Can you explain to the audience what perhaps that they need to know about nursing and driving health outcomes and why a company like Humana invests in nursing to do that because of their unique skill set? But could you sort of highlight exactly what people should know about nursing that they might not know and their roles in driving health outcomes and improving health care?
Kathy Driscoll:
Yeah, I think people think again about maybe the transactional aspects of health care, and nurses have deep clinical knowledge that’s a given. The thing that always, always inspires me about nursing is that nursing is the most trusted profession. Right? We’ve seen that 19 years in a row, and when we think about relationships and we think about trust, I think it’s the crux of understanding people, understanding their needs and preferences, and having the trust to educate, to guide, to support, to provide care. I think nursing is really that linchpin in our health care system, the public trust nurses. You know, I think that nurses are great at messaging, about collaborating, about connecting the pieces of the health care system and other people in the system. And I think that what people don’t know and we’ve talked about this before, the power of nurses as innovators has been quiet. You know, we need it to be loud. Nurses are innovators, nurses, whether they’re at the bedside or they’re in other virtual roles. Whatever their role, they’re really understanding what needs to be done. And I think nurses, you’ve always quoted some statistics about the number of workarounds that nurses do in a typical shift or a typical time period. I think nurses have always done it, but that’s innovation. They’re looking at gaps. They’re looking at things that can be done more efficiently. They’re looking at the end-user, they’re looking at the patient or the patient’s family and seeing their needs and just getting the job done. So, you know, whether it’s in the public health arena, whether it’s in a hospital system, whether it’s with certain disease states, certainly we’ve seen it through the pandemic. Nurses are really innovators and really helped to shape the quality and the efficiency of clinical practice. So again, I would just say, you know, I think nurses have to stop being quiet innovators and really be very loud about how nurses and nursing can lead in health care and health care transformation.
Rebecca Love:
Kathy, I love this and I mean, you’re absolutely right. On average, nurses do twenty-seven workarounds per shift at the bedside. They’re constantly innovating, but those innovations are not seen as innovations, they’re seen as short-circuiting a system and that products and processes and protocols were put into place that was supposed to drive outcomes. But those inefficiencies, I think, speak back to your entire idea that these models were developed about providing care from that perspective, not for how can we drive efficiencies both for the workforce as well as for the patients. So I love that you’re championing that nurses need to be loud and the innovations that they’re owning and no longer hiding them because we can change the future of health care if we do this. Can you talk to us a little bit, and I don’t know if you have a relevant story from your own team, about a time that you saw your nursing team provide a great solution to a really challenging problem?
Kathy Driscoll:
Oh, that was a loaded question, because I have so many stories, Rebecca. Let me talk about a couple of the things that I’ve seen with our nursing team. I’ll go back first a few years, probably about five or six years ago. At our organization, we are a national organization and very distributed where nurses work. We have people that work in person, in clinics, in-home health. We have people that work virtually. So one of the challenges was just creating this clinical community, a community of practice, and thinking about what nurses value. Because I’ll go back to, you know, to support health care, you have to also support the people who provide the care to. So we really focused on building a strong community, building ways that nurses who weren’t in the same practice setting could collaborate, could learn from each other, et cetera, so we found a way for nurses to amplify their voice, and that was the most important foundational thing. Nurses in our community lead leadership development programs. We’re very proud of the nurse rotation program that we have. Nurses said we need to learn more about the business of health care so we can be even more effective leaders, so nurses in our organization rotate through areas like our population health area, nursing clinical research, digital health and analytics. Really great. They can provide their expertise, their perspective and also learn and expand their skill set. Another thing that really was brought to light over the pandemic. We have partnerships with several educational institutions, one of them, the University of Houston. We endow the College of Nursing and four other medical colleges and some others there. Well, you know, the pandemic hit us. They were having problems with their clinical rotations, and we had worked with them to provide spots for clinical rotations previously. But we kind of just had the team say, OK, how are we going to make sure that we have nurses for the future that are exposed and are still gaining their skills there? So they really worked on virtual rotations with the thought that we’ll go back to in-person. We had a great partnership that continues. We started an intern program for some of their graduates, and I think it’s just looking at where there’s a challenge, getting a passionate group together. And if you get a group of nurses together, they always go back to our previous question are going to get the job done. And I think just testing out creative and new ways to do things thinking about we will get it done, not can we get it done.
Rebecca Love:
Nurses do get it done. And I think that’s the power of what you bring to the table that this audience, I don’t think, necessarily always hears. It’s because we’ve always sat behind the physician. It appears that we are always being told what the decision is for us. But in reality, nurses are often the ones who come up with the plans to make sure that the patients are cared for. The overwhelming of the system does not fail because they are the ones boots on the ground operating that. And this idea of your nurse rotation, I just love because we’re hearing across the systems so many health care institutions are saying, you know, our graduates are graduating, but they don’t have the skill sets that we need in them today. And I think there’s this debate out there. Kathy, where does that responsibility fall? Does it fall on nursing schools to educate them, to be ready for all of these settings? And if so, you know, do we need to change how we’re testing? Do we need to change some of those guidelines? Or is there an opportunity now for employers to really look at the nursing workforce and upskill them, such as the way that Humana is doing, which I just have to applaud you because I love to hear that Humana saw the value in investing in nurses to learn the business of health care and create this rotation because you have educated a workforce in areas of business and health care that is going to drive transformational change? But in your opinion, and I know that’s quite off-topic on those, but what do you think? Where do you think we could go with that? And where is that opportunity with regards to this kind of situation that’s facing the world of health care today?
Kathy Driscoll:
Yeah, it’s a great question, Rebecca. You know, I think that like many other things, the answer is in more collaboration, I don’t think it’s incumbent upon any one part of our system to solve the whole puzzle. I think that when you think about educational institutions partnering with places that nurses could work and contribute afterward and understanding whether it’s a hospital system or a managed care organization, home health, whatever it is, what are the skills that we’re looking for? And I think part of it is giving people a realistic look into what practice environments look like. So, you know, I think that there’s definitely room for maybe some tweaking in the educational process there, but I think there’s even more room for partnership and collaboration really much earlier on, not just when people are graduating or the six months before when you start interviewing with different areas. So whether it’s through internships, preceptor shifts, rotations, just exposure to lots of practice areas, right? When I was a nurse, I don’t know that anybody didn’t think, but you are going to go work two years med surge in a hospital and you know, and you start on the night shift. And then you’re going to go down. I think now just defining different pathways, finding what’s a great fit for people, and realizing that it’s a journey, you don’t have to do the same thing forever. What really do you have a passion for? And I think that takes a lot of exploration. So I think we all have a part in it, and I think it’s a tremendous opportunity because really our future depends on these nurses that are thinking about becoming nurses are in school to become a nurse and are continuing to learn. And I guess I would just end with, you know, as nurses, we can never stop learning. And I think Florence Nightingale really emphasized that from the beginning. And to be a nurse is to be a continual learner, and I think we all need to commit to that and the organizations that we work for and with have to commit to supporting that.
Rebecca Love:
I love that the organizations that we work with are absolutely the right way to look at partnerships and collaborations and that it is not on any one institution that that is going to take us all in health care to really invest in this workforce so that we have a future as a profession. And so, Kathy, we are facing dark times in nursing. I mean, you can’t open a newspaper or turn on the news. It seems this time without hearing something devastating about nursing in the front lines. And I think that people that are listening today assume that life, where we are, is fortuitous in many situations. And I think that what I was hoping to ask is if you could share with us one of those setbacks in life that you experienced, that you took away a learning and you moved on from that perhaps can help support those nurses today if they’re listening, how they too can keep going. That, you know, setbacks in life sometimes teach us something so incredibly valuable, that those insurmountable odds sometimes are part of the ways that we grow, and I was hoping you might be able to share some of your own setbacks that could help guide some of these nurses who are listening today to believe they too can make it through.
Kathy Driscoll:
Yeah, it is a time that I just want to acknowledge there are so many challenges that we as a society are faced with, and I think nurses just have the additional burden of how much they care of being those people who are at the front line, wherever the front line may be and those people who really are making a difference there. You know, there have been so many setbacks and I think resiliency is something to learn along the way. I think that’s a skill that is super important, and I am concerned about our nurses today and in the future and their well-being and their mental health and ability to be resilient. So I think we need to make sure that we’re concentrating on that. We had a presentation a few months ago and the speaker said self-care is not selfish care, and I loved that. So I think that’s important. So I’ll just talk about the biggest setback was about 18 months ago. We had a global pandemic that just seemingly came out of nowhere, although of course, it didn’t. And you know, for myself and my position and my team, our plans for the year changed in about twenty-four hours when our entire staff over fifty-three thousand people had to go and work at home. Now some did before, some didn’t. But I am proud as an organization, we focused as many did on what was right for the safety of those who worked there. But you know, all of the plans, my budget, the rotation program, we had to rethink what was the priority of the moment. And so it’s a setback. But it doesn’t mean that things can’t happen. It doesn’t mean that you can’t think about different ways to make investments, etc. So, you know, I think the resiliency of nurses was, OK. You know, we’re facing this big issue right now, and I’m so proud of the nurses on my team in our organization. They shifted roles, and I know this is true of so many organizations. Where you worked traditionally, you may be working in a different way. You may have a different connection via we all became familiar with Zoom, etc. We use technology in different ways. We worked in different ways and we really started to meet the needs of our members and patients in different ways, so we had a lot of nurses that became care managers and really we were able to use, we were able to shift and use our analytics to kind of try and identify those people who we felt were at greatest risk. But we learned lessons along the way, you know, in the first few weeks and months there. What we thought were going to be the biggest issues that people had weren’t necessarily. Two of the biggest issues that we found were I need food and I’m depressed and lonely. I’m isolated. So, you know, again finding new resources and ways to adapt what we do, the order we do it, the priorities were really important. You know, a few months in, some of the priorities came to be, I don’t feel safe. I was isolated. I need to get out. I need to have my primary care, you know, I need to see my primary care provider, but I’m afraid, how do I get there? Transportation we have, if you ever see green masks around Humana, recognize that people even have problems getting that so kind of shipped them out had them made for everybody. So, you know, the setback is the year and a half did not go as we had planned, but I think we learned really valuable lessons. We learned about resiliency, we learned about agility and it can we really learned about innovation and being scrappy, about how we worked, and really understanding who we’re caring for it and their priorities at the moment. So I can say later in the year, we found ways to do things like our rotation program again and some of our other types of things. But you know, time doesn’t always move in the way that we have planned. And while it’s important to have a plan, I think we need to make sure that we’re agile and we can respond to what we need to do and the priorities of the moment.
Rebecca Love:
Resiliency and agility, I think, are those skill sets that, to your point, are so fundamental in those moments when setbacks hit you, because life doesn’t always go as planned and when you are resilient and you’re agile and innovative, the truth is you can take those moments and learn from them and do things better. And what you just said is your priorities and your teams came to recognize new needs that have now innovated into new processes and protocols and focus areas that, if COVID had not highlighted, would those innovations have happened? And I love that, and I love that you recognize that an institution of fifty-three thousand people there, even at that scale, in that size, you were able to do that. And I think that is a lesson that we need to hold on to, that at any point in time, no matter how big your system is, you can change it in a day and we were forced to do that, right? And I think that are some of those lessons of COVID that we need to hold on to as we go forward and so that we can’t keep sticking our heads in the sand and say, Oh, we just can’t do it, it’s too big, it’s too overwhelming. The reality is, is that if we all learned anything in the last year is that we could do it. So I love that. And so, Kathy, as we’re sort of circling down here, tell me, what are you most excited about for the future of health care?
Kathy Driscoll:
Yeah, I think you hit it on the head, Rebecca when you said there are things that we learned. Out of the negative things that we learned in the past year and a half, there are so many positive things, and I think that one of them is really people started to recognize nurses and what nurses bring to the table and how important nurses are to the health of our nation. So I think there’s so much opportunity and momentum. I love, you know how you said, Oh no, it would take years and years, but we by force had to do some things in a matter of days. So I think the opportunity is continuing that momentum and really ensuring that we hear the nurses’ voice, that we really give platforms to hear the voice of nurses. So I think we have to in some ways seize the moment. I think there’s an opportunity there, but as we have this very complex health care system and I think there’s greater recognition for the need for health care transformation. I think that there’s this great opportunity for nurses to really step up as they always have stepped up, but to be heard, to ensure somebody else said, you know, don’t necessarily wait for a seat at the table, pull up a chair. And I think we have to help to support nurses pulling up a chair so that their voice is heard at the table. I always like to say if more leaders were nurses, the world would be a better place, and I really believe that so I’m excited that nurses want to lead, want to influence, and I think the opportunity is for us to make sure that the health care system embraces that respects it, and that we hear that nursing voice and we follow the lead to transform health care.
Rebecca Love:
If more nurses were leaders, the world would be a better place. I love that. And to everyone who is listening.
Kathy Driscoll:
More leaders who are nurses, if more leaders were nurses.
Rebecca Love:
More leaders, better leaders. Yeah, you’re right. Absolutely. Oh my gosh. If more leaders were nurses, the world would be a better place and everybody that’s listening today. I think what Kathy just said is to help nurses get a seat at the table. If you are driving a health care business if you are in the space where there is an opening and you’re thinking, how do I want to transform my community or the health system or the program or the community systems around me, invite a nurse to that seat because they are going to change it? And if Kathy’s experience has not been the ideal experience to show that when you bring a nurse into these roles, your systems grow in ways that improve outcomes that potentially change the entire nature of your business. And Kathy, I think you’ve been that example at Humana. So tell me and tell the audience, where can they find you? If people wanted to find you today, reach out to you, ask you to speak partner. How can they find you today? What’s the best place to locate you?
Kathy Driscoll:
You can find me on LinkedIn, or you can reach out to me directly right at Humana. I’m katedriscoll1@humana.com.
Rebecca Love:
Kathy, it’s been such a pleasure to have you on Outcomes Rocket Nursing. Thank you so much for being here. What you said, I think is going to change the way the world views nurses. So thank you for being here today.
Kathy Driscoll:
Thank you, Rebecca. It’s a pleasure.
Rebecca Love:
To everyone who tuned into Outcomes Rocket Nursing, we so thank you for being here. In the future, tuning again to hear from other incredibly innovative and leader nurses across the world. Thanks for being here.
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