Care Delivey_ Liz Popwell: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Manav Sevak:
Welcome to the Memora Health Care Delivery podcast. Through conversations with industry leaders and innovators, we uncover ways to simplify how patients and care teams navigate complex care delivery.
Matt Troup:
Hi, everyone. This is Matt from Memora Health, one of the medical directors and co-hosts of the Care Delivery podcast. I’m excited today to be joined by Liz Popwell. Liz, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast. Would you take a moment to introduce yourself?
Liz Popwell:
Thanks, Matt, I appreciate it. This is Liz Popwell, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at Stony Brook Medicine, and I’m excited to connect with you and have a great discussion today.
Matt Troup:
Awesome. One of the things, and when we were chatting earlier, that really resonates to me is your passion for, really, transformation of healthcare. But where did this start, what led to this inspiration, and is it around a specific story or just your just passion for patients and the care that they receive?
Liz Popwell:
That’s a great question, Matt. I’ve always been the type of leader in my career that likes to try new things. I always, go out and do different things, and transformation obviously is something, … management is something that has always been an interest to me in healthcare because it gives us an opportunity as leaders and as providers, even as faculty with our health science programs too, in schools, to really think about what does the future hold. How can we dream big about that? How can we think differently about that? And then how can we really create a vision that we all buy into and really then move toward that vision in a very specific, organized fashion? So I have always loved to get teams together around big topics that are complex and complicated and allow them to really work through a process that includes data, knowledge, research, etc., and really think through what could come from that. And I think there really is a lot of power in teams, and so that’s what really excites me, if you will, about transformation and those kinds of topics.
Matt Troup:
Yeah, Liz, I completely agree. I would love to know, as we’re thinking about transformation, a lot of that anchors on knowing that there are inconsistencies or problems with current state. What would you say are the biggest challenges you’re seeing right now that lead you to think that, yes, there’s more we can do, there’s a transformation that can happen?
Liz Popwell:
One of the biggest things that I think about is the workforce issues that we have. Coming out of the pandemic and coming into whatever this new era looks like, it’s clear that it’s different. We’ve been changed forever in healthcare, we’ve been changed forever in education, in academic medicine, and even in research. And I think, when we think about what we learned from that, we’ve learned that resiliency is important and that people can really rally together and do things differently, but they only have so much ability to do that before they really hit that burnout factor. And you’ve seen the articles and the information out there, burnout is a real thing, and healthcare is losing a lot of very knowledgeable and qualified people to non-healthcare entities and or to retirement because they just couldn’t sustain that effort long, long term. And so we also know statistically that the number of enrollments, the number of younger generations going into healthcare and into these healthcare-related fields is a much smaller number. And so we already have issues with primary care access nationally, we already have big issues with behavioral healthcare access nationally. And so I like to think about, how can we create care models? How can we create models of the future? How can we use technology differently? How can we really streamline and make our processes better for the people that we work with, so that they can really do what they’re good at, which is serving the communities and the patients?
Matt Troup:
Yes, completely agree. You mentioned about COVID and how that’s really changed the landscape for a lot of healthcare. I was a frontline provider during COVID, and you’re still trying to provide the best care possible to patients, but you realize after a while that the healthcare workforce is starting to have increasing stress and burnout rates, and so you really need to start thinking about this as both patient satisfaction and care team satisfaction. How has that changed? And you mentioned about, yeah, focusing on the provider aspect of that experience. What changes are you starting to see in how we address burnout and address provider satisfaction?
Liz Popwell:
I think a lot of organizations are really thinking about health and wellness in new and different ways, and health and wellness can be addressed in a variety of ways. Flexible work schedules, it can be, we have, through some of our health and wellness programs we provide Tai Chi online for anybody who wants it. We call it the Brook, which is a key area in one of our buildings at the University Hospital, one of the flagship hospital, where we have all kinds of activities, and it could be anywhere from just having a place to go that’s quiet, to just be in the moment and focus on your meditation, we have different activities that we do in those programs, and some people don’t want that. Some people, we’ve got virtual moments where we take at a certain time of day, individuals can log on and have just stress relieving moment where we’re just focusing in on our breathing and our health and those types of things, all the way to programs where you can go out and walk with a doctor or walk with an individual and learn more about a topic, but also get out and get active. So there’s lots of different things that we do, lots of different things other organizations do, but the one thing I’m most excited about is we’re really looking at the concept of healthy aging and how can we help our workforce, as well as our communities, think differently about healthy aging. And our particular health science schools, we’ve got five life science schools, as I was telling you before, are really working on an interdisciplinary collaboration to think about research, and they’ve gotten some initial research seed funding from our president’s innovation account, if you will, and they’re really starting to think about how to stand up a center for research around aging and what does that look like moving forward. So really excited about some of the research that we’ll be doing, really excited about some of preventative medicine programs we have. Dr. Jabour, who is one of our preventative medicine physicians, was just quoted in Time magazine, for example, talking about health and wellness. And I’m very fortunate to work with a lot of really innovative and really smart people who are really trying to pave the way for not just caring for you when you’re sick and at your most vulnerable moment, but also taking care of the entire person across the spectrum and meeting patients where they are and what they need.
Matt Troup:
Yeah, and this falls so much in line with what you were telling me earlier, as a lot of times it sounds like you’re thinking about what does healthcare look like 8 to 10 years out and then work backwards from there to start to sort of change management process. How does that more long-term strategy, vision work for you and your teams, and where do you see healthcare in ten years, and what are the changes you can make starting today?
Liz Popwell:
That’s a great question, Matt. You have to think long-term. Think about now, think about ChatGPT. Everybody said, oh, this AI and machine learning is coming, and then all of a sudden it’s here, and it’s real, and we’ve got companies like Cerner and Epic wanting to partner and bring that into workflows. So we’ve got, through our process, we’ve got several individuals and a team that is really thinking about technologies of the future and what does that look like long term? What are some of the emerging technologies that we want to incubate and really promote? What are some of the technologies that are here now that we can take advantage of? We’re very fortunate at Stony Brook Medicine, where through a partnership with our Renaissance School of Medicine, as well as our Biomedical Informatics School, we really have a lot of very bright individuals who are looking at AI and machine learning and looking at not just what is in the market, right, because that’s the hot topic now. What’s in the market that we can use and/or leverage for our workforce, but also what do we want to build? How do we use our scientific discovery and the research and academic components of what we do to really drive innovation moving forward? And so that team is a newer team to our organization, and we have stood up this idea of let’s think down the road, because again, we’re educating social workers, health professions, dentists, nurses, physicians, social, sciences, and all of these elements. And we have to think about three years, five years, ten years, think about a physician and how many years of school or, you’re a PA, how many years of school you went through. Care is going to look completely different when these students graduate, and we need to start thinking about what that looks like now so that we can start to think about how do we strengthen our curriculum, how do we think about interdisciplinary curriculum, how do we think about training, technology. We’ve got a simulation lab that is amazingly lifelike. When you go down there, you look at these simulation models, and you think, wow, they look like real people. And how do we use that to teach? How do we use that to also advance our scientific discovery through our research? And then how do we ultimately take our science and discoveries and translate that to the care, whether it’s at the bedside, in the home, in the physician’s office, or virtually frankly?
Matt Troup:
Yeah, I really agree with that vision, and I know at my time at Memora, now that it’s coming from the healthcare system, I think a lot about how new technology, just like what we’re trying to drive, takes adoption to be successful, and when we think about transformation of care, and you’re plotting your strategic course over the next 8 to 10 years, what have you found or what’s your vision for how to really get providers and care teams to buy into to that strategy and adopt, whether it’s new technology or new workflow practices? Because a lot of clinicians, it takes a lot of time and reinforcement, and I feel, it feels like sometimes it’s a hard shift to make.
Liz Popwell:
I agree with you. I think change, management, and culture are so very important, whether it’s strategic changes, whether it’s operational changes, I think you have to really have an inclusive process. And I’m the kind of person who really believes that if you have a good, strong, inclusive process, it doesn’t mean everybody’s going to always agree, but if you can build a consensus and build a vision that everyone buys into, I think that’s the first step. Because if you don’t have that vision and that idea of where you’re going as an organization and what you’re trying to achieve, then it becomes really hard for, whether it’s a staff position, whether it’s an administrative position, whether it’s faculty, whether it’s physicians, it’s really hard for them to understand how their role fits into that vision. So you have to have a strong vision. You have to articulate that vision in a way that resonates so that they understand how their day-to-day work is important to moving that vision forward. And then, you have to have healthy conflict and healthy change management and really have people feel heard, be heard, and at the end of the day, make the decision that’s right for the community, the patients, and the mission you’re trying to serve. So I think it starts with transparency and open communication, and I think a lot of times organizations struggle with that, and that’s one of the things that we’re working very hard at, is how to become more nimble as well as how to make sure that we’re communicating, steering information, being more transparent, and helping to have those feedback loops that are that will make us successful.
Matt Troup:
Yeah, that transparency is so key. I love that you call that out. It really does make a difference to understand why processes are changing, why we’re bringing, why health system might bring on new technology and being transparent, and the why there for care teams or other administrators who are, who have a stake, is really to getting adoption, so it’s such a great call out. And you mentioned too about as you’re bringing on new providers or new care team members who are coming up out of the schools and the programs that you have at Stony Brook, making sure that they are also engaged in that process. And so you’re bringing along this new generation as well, at the same time, as you’re building this care transformation strategy. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Liz Popwell:
Absolutely. I think now that we have had the ability to come back to some new normal state, whatever term you want to put to that, we’ve had the ability to really start to get people together, even from a social perspective, get back together from that perspective and connecting with our community physicians, connecting with our faculty, connecting with our staff, those human connections are really important. People lost a lot of that during the pandemic and are really hungry to reinvigorate those relationships and reinvigorate those moments in time where they can connect and collaborate, and so I think that’s really important, is to foster that and to really promote that. I’ll tell you that in our organization, we have had a lot of retreats in a lot of different ways, whether it’s a service line retreat, we just recently had one for our children’s pediatric hospital and service line. We’ve done retreats with senior leaders, with our department chairs, with our operational leaders, and again, getting them in a room so that they can understand the vision of where we’re headed and they can put their fingerprints on where we’re going and give their input and give their feedback. And I’ve found that to be a profound opportunity because, I think the plan that we have and where we’re headed is even stronger because we have all of those really smart individuals adding new ideas. The hardest part in strategy, as you well know, is prioritizing, right? We’ve got a lot of, we’ve got plenty of great ideas and a finite amount of resources and trying. Prioritization of what will differentiate organizations in the future, prioritization, and sequencing is always something organizations struggle with, and so that’s part of the process that we have gone through as well, and leadership has been very willing and open and really taking charge and taking that seriously and really moving that needle, getting ready to move that needle forward as we roll out our strategic plan next month.
Matt Troup:
Oh, that’s excellent, Liz. A little bit of a shift here, but would love to know, as you think about strategy within healthcare and healthcare being really unique to work in, do you ever try to find inspiration outside of healthcare? Do you look to other industries as you think about how we can make just the healthcare experience better?
Liz Popwell:
Always, I have always been one to look at other organizations and look at other industries. Think about banking and ATM, that’s expected. Now, online banking, right? And on the phone banking is expected. When I do, when I have my retreats, for example, I always bring examples from outside the industry, and one of the examples that, it’s funny to us here in New York, is the Domino’s story. Domino’s went through a transformation that was really a digital transformation, and they really, over a period of ten, ten plus years, moved from a pizza delivery company to a digital pizza delivery company and even saw a new commercial the other day where they talked about even more optimization that they’ve done. They’ve even delivered pizzas with drones, for example. And I use examples like that with my team because it’s really about the evolution and the process, and again, it’s like an inside joke with us because say, okay, who likes Domino’s? We’re in New York. Everybody likes New-York-style pizza. Nobody, you know, and it’s not nothing about, against Domino’s. It’s just that the style of pizza here is, the preference is different. But we have a little laugh, and then we all talk about how that company was created to, it actually, in Michigan, where you’re from, and it was made for college students and made for fast meals right before we tried fast food, all these fast food options, and they really took that to heart. They owned some of their quality, and they changed their quality, their recipes, and then they also then started doing the watch, time my pizza delivery, right, and then moved on and on and on from that digital platform and really set the stage. So I use those examples to help our organization and to help leaders see that we can learn from that. Our CIO, for example, he’s using the airline industry and the check-in, check-out process to help people understand how we need to optimize the way that we do our check-in, check-out process for our patients and for our consumers so that it’s streamlined. And it’s, we’re always looking at what lessons can we learn from these other organizations.
Matt Troup:
Yeah, and I think that’s key. I think sometimes people can view healthcare as let’s just, slow moving. It’s maybe a little bit archaic, but it takes a true vision. And I think looking out ahead and being transparent and optimistic that you can make considerable changes in healthcare just like you can in any other industry, and so I’m glad to hear that you’re trying to relate it to other ways other industries have that have moved forward. Liz, this has been such a wonderful conversation. I would love to know, as we wrap up, what excites you most about healthcare, where it is right now, and maybe where it’s going in the next 8 to 10 years?
Liz Popwell:
Yeah, great question. With regard to the future, I think that now is the time for us to be thinking differently. There are so many disruptions and disruptive players in the healthcare market that if we don’t pay attention to that and think differently and dream differently, then many organizations are going to become less relevant. And when we think about our strategy, we think about taking our healthcare system to what we call health platform. We don’t have to provide every single avenue of the care delivery model, but we have to be thinking about new and unique ways. Think about the Amazons of the world, think about the CVSs, the Walgreens. There are a lot of big players coming to really look at primary care differently, think about the Kaiser announcements lately. So there’s a lot going on in the space, and we have to pay attention to those things. We have to figure out what are most relevant to each of our organizations, to our markets, and most important, to our mission and how we will be able to provide our mission in the future. So we’re looking at all those different types of things and thinking differently, and I think there’s a world of possibilities out there. I’m very optimistic, and I know that there are lots of things that are coming in that are going to make change and make disruptive change. I see that as a positive because that allows us to possibly partner with some of those organizations or possibly think differently about our delivery models, and that makes us better for our patients. While sometimes it can be scary to some, to me, it’s exciting.
Matt Troup:
I couldn’t agree more. It is really exciting. It’s an exciting time to be in healthcare. Liz, this was a wonderful chat. Thank you so much for spending time with me. I’m excited to watch you as you chart a path forward for care delivery and continue that work towards transformation. I hope we get to chat again soon.
Liz Popwell:
Thanks, Matt. It was my pleasure.
Manav Sevak:
Thanks for listening to the Memora Health Care Delivery podcast. For more ideas on simplifying complex care for care teams and patients, visit MemoraHealth.com.
Sonix has many features that you’d love including automated subtitles, automatic transcription software, automated translation, upload many different filetypes, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.
