NEJM Catalyst Leadership Podcast: Recent Episodes
NEJM Group
One-on-one interviews with leaders in health care, providing perspectives on what’s working in the industry, what’s not, and why. Find more about us at https://catalyst.nejm.org.
How can policy makers and health care leaders ensure affordable, equitable access to GLP-1 medications while managing their substantial budget impact on the health system?
How can the partnership and collaboration of multiple health care organizations attack the challenges of rural health care?
This discussion highlights the importance of recognizing that everyone can engage in leading within their roles, while also addressing the crucial skills of followership and the need for clarity in leadership roles to foster effective teamwork and improve patient outcomes.
How hospitals are facilitating knowledge sharing and accelerating the implementation of value-based health care with the Value Catalyst Community.
What are the key health care policy challenges and opportunities on the horizon for 2025, and how might recent election outcomes shape these discussions?
Family caregivers of acutely ill patients are critical members of the care team. How can health care professionals better support these care partners?
How can employers provide health insurance coverage that’s both high quality and affordable?
A health care CEO’s most important responsibility is to maintain the sacredness of the patient-clinician relationship and ensure that interaction is as valuable for both the physician and the patient as possible.
What competencies are needed in the boardroom to advance the mission of creating healthier communities? How do health care system governance boards make these changes?
A checklist of leadership skills for building trust through transparency, actions, and consistency that apply to health care mergers as well as day-to-day health care leadership.
Innovative examples of overcoming challenges in rural health care access caused by distance, weather, clinician shortages, and other reasons, by connecting with patients virtually and locally.
Value-based care frees up health care organizations to go upstream and invest in the health and well-being of their community members.
In strategic partnerships with others focused on improving costs and efficiencies, a health system needs to continue to be the right side of the brain, looking for the opportunities, not doing the routine tasks.
We need to redesign the care delivery model in a way that allows physicians to be the good doctors they are while still providing patients with full access to care.
Sustainable, forward-looking health care systems need to provide community-based care while managing risk-based economic models and populations.
The bar is not set for high-performing health care systems. It’s moving, with many opportunities to improve beyond inconsistent greatness. Transformation involves changes in mindsets, culture, and processes, along with a particular approach to care delivery.
With core outcome measures set for ICHOM, the next step is maintaining focus on implementation.
A six-component model for including gig workers as valued members of the health care team.
How Kaiser Permanente became the first carbon-neutral health system and the eighth-largest user of solar energy in the United States.
The external and internal factors necessary for population health management in the transformation to value-based care.
With health care in crisis, switching to value-based care is a necessary disruption that organizations and nations must take.
The purpose of health care systems is not just to cure illness. To make a dent, they must be part of their communities, addressing inequities in care.
When it comes to PROMs, there’s a difference between measuring something important to patients’ treatments versus important to their lives.
Health cannot be achieved unless health care also addresses mental health and social care.
Health care does not begin when someone walks in the door of their doctor’s office, but when they search online for videos and articles and then act on that information — whether good or bad.
From generators to digital medicine, Ochsner has bolstered its processes to be ready for the worst.
A directional approach from The Joint Commission on three key areas of health care quality improvement.
How creating a short TV show with health care leadership captured the attention of staff at Vanderbilt far more than written communication.
The Chief Medical Officer for DaVita Kidney Care discusses how the organization is addressing health inequities in the kidney disease population.
The CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts describes his work in making population-based contracts a norm in the state and what still needs to be done to improve health care affordability and access.
The Chief Equity Officer for Vanderbilt Medical Center discusses the development of their Racial Equity Plan.
Intellectual disabilities affect 1–3% of the U.S. population. The Executive Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer for Prisma Health discusses how health care redesign should factor in this population to reduce the health disparities they face.
How Priority Health focuses on social determinants of health to meet its members’ unique needs.
The CEO for Texas Health Resources says that “learning has to be done quickly” and describes what his organization has done to meet the needs of their patients and staff.
Hurdles faced by a Chinese American breaking into the C-suite sphere of U.S. health care leadership dominated by white men, the adapting of different cultural values, and advice for younger generations aspiring to the C-suite.
The former CEO of Memorial Hermann Health System, who began his career in nursing, traces the history of the nursing shortage back to the 1970s and offers a selection of solutions for its current iteration, focusing on short-, medium-, and long-term tactics.
If we don’t have equity, we don’t have quality, says the CMO of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services....
Physicians are responsible for making patients feel safe and secure, whether that’s in-person or via a screen.
“It never entered my mind that my gender would be a limiting factor for me,” says the President and CEO of Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center.
“I don’t think we can ever look at health care delivery, quality and safety, transformation and work, without having equity at the forefront of everything that we do,” says Eric Wei, MD, MBA, Senior Vice President and Chief Quality Officer for NYC Health + Hospitals.
How the Alternative Quality Contract strives to promote a system that produces health outcomes, not just health care.
The CMO of Montefiore Medical Center explores what they got right during the height of the pandemic — including playing music — and how to apply those learnings in the future.
How the Apollo Hospitals Group handled the intense spike of Covid-19 cases in India, and what they’ve learned from the thousands of families they’ve treated.
Missing important points of view around the C-suite table hurts the organization and the clinical outcomes they are attempting to achieve, says Ron Williams, former chairman and CEO of Aetna.
Naming the challenges and crowdsourcing the strategic plan are two ways Oregon Health & Science University is tackling the ongoing challenges from 2020....
The Chief Medical Officer and Chief Innovation Officer for Sheba Medical Center discusses how Israel was able to keep its case mortality rate low.
It’s not about blaming others, it’s about doing our part to address the inequities and unjust reality we see in health care, says the CEO of Hennepin Healthcare.
Burnout in nursing began long before the Covid-19 pandemic. What will health care leaders learn from the past months to make sure this problem doesn’t continue into the future?
UF Health Jacksonville’s CEO describes the safety-net hospital’s hurricane mindset for sustained Covid-19 pandemic response and leadership efforts such as receiving the vaccine first.
What can health systems and their public health partners execute on now to accelerate and amplify vaccination efforts?
The Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer for CVS Health remains optimistic about the United States’ Covid-19 vaccination efforts.
Especially important during a pandemic, health care’s common challenge is making sure how we deliver care and change the structures of society actually contributes to the health of the people we intend to serve.
Four strategies from Texas Health Resources’ Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer for becoming a high-value health care system.
With conflicting information across all levels, strong communication creates trust and support within a health system.
“Covid, in a children’s hospital, really is a whole different beast,” says Larry Hollier, MD, Surgeon-in-Chief at Texas Children’s Hospital.
Quality and safety is a powerful, established system that providers can leverage to advance equity in health care.
Providence’s EVP and Chief Clinical Officer discusses how her organization navigated the last several months to get back to pre-pandemic volumes.
Covid-19 has not been fee-for-service’s most shining moment. Health policy economist Michael Chernew discusses building a better payment model for the future.
The CEO of the new Cleveland Clinic London discusses how he is helping to confidently integrate care in the UK despite the challenges of a pandemic.
The President of UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals discusses the important role of an academic medical center in deciphering the constantly changing data on the pandemic, its effects on children, and how to keep them safe.
Lord Ara Darzi offers firsthand background and insights on the successful implementation of the London stroke initiative, which, through a profound restructuring of care design pathways, led to improved clinical outcomes at lower costs.
In times of crisis, you learn a lot more about an organization than you otherwise would. The Regional President of OptumCare discusses the large organization’s goal to become fully value based and how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted its care providers in terms of payment models and other aspects of health care.
Health care safety, for both patients and caregivers, is having a tremendous moment during the Covid-19 pandemic. But to establish that safety, there must first be trust.
How Intermountain Healthcare empowers employees to become problem solvers and implement, with their local teams, ideas for continuous improvement.
Twenty years of research and effort has established patient safety as a core health care responsibility, but new approaches suggest a need for expansion of ways to define the terminology, the scope of the challenge, and the implementation of models for success.
Health care organizations need to understand not just what work is needed for transitioning to value-based care, but also how to organize and resource the work.
Massachusetts’ Public Health Commissioner discusses the need to break down barriers within organizations and between public- and private-sector health organizations to achieve better care and health equity for patients and populations.
Health care leaders must recognize that change comes quickly, says the CEO of Mayo Clinic, and from places they might not expect: technology, data, and consumerism. He also stresses the need to chip away at administrative and clerical burdens so that staff can focus on the tasks they truly enjoy.
The CEO of SSM Health notes that the organization is not just in the care delivery business and discusses an approach that involves the complex integration of elements beyond hospitals and physician practices to include home care and hospice, pharmacy benefit management, a generic drug company, a health plan, a direct-to-employer care model, and an innovative wellness program.
Dartmouth-Hitchcock, a rural health system, serves patient populations over three states (and disparate payment models) but has been developing a regional model of care that strengthens local access to services for lower-acuity patients, while limiting the academic medical center to high-acuity patients.
A physician and researcher in China for the Covid-19 pandemic, Ewelina Biskup, MD, MPH, discusses that experience, and calls for a big data collection and analysis effort to address the many unanswered questions about the virus.
An orthopedic surgeon from Italy’s hard-hit Lombardy region discusses how he and his community have been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, and shares lessons learned.
An orthopedist was one of an army of medical professionals called into the quarantine zone around Wuhan, China. He describes his role in treating patients with Covid-19 for more than a month, from the peak period of 10,000 new cases a day, to March 23, 2020, with no new confirmed cases for several days, and counting.
George Diaz, MD, Medical Director for Antimicrobial Stewardship at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett in Washington state, describes the preparation, real-time decision-making, and implementation of a telehealth program to protect patients and staff alike.
How Mayo Clinic created and disseminated an enterprise-wide Covid-19 care delivery plan through existing resources and real-time updates and adaptations.
Spectrum Health’s CEO discusses the importance of focusing on the consumer in addressing priorities, rather than favoring by default either the payer or provider side of the business.
Intermountain Healthcare CEO Marc Harrison, MD, offers an update on Intermountain One, an initiative that encourages bottom-up ideas to improve clinical quality and patient experience. He also shares insights from his own experience as a patient.
Innovations in biomedical informatics and computational health informatics are creating opportunities to move from generic evidence-based medicine at the point of care to patient-specific medicine-based evidence. In addition, technology is opening patient engagement opportunities with smartphone apps, but there are some undesirable consequences to consider.
Mandy Cohen discusses the need for integration between public and private sector health entities in order to achieve common goals and shared financial responsibility to “buy health” for whole-person care of populations.
The CMO of HCA Healthcare on lessons for approaching long-term change on enormous scale.
The former Executive Director of the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector — a model for the Affordable Care Act and other state marketplaces — reflects on what worked, what didn’t, and what could be done differently in both Massachusetts and at the federal level.
For big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google, the health care sector looks ripe for disruption. Two executives working in different parts of the health care ecosystem discuss what this means for patients and doctors, including the positives and unintended consequences.
Physicians must hone the “four Cs” — critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity — when leveraging AI as a new partner in their care teams.
Co-founders of an integrative outpatient treatment center for mental health and addiction discuss the problematic lack of continuity of care between inpatient and outpatient and physical and mental health services.
Hearing loss isn’t a normal consequence of aging. But it is associated with a higher risk of dementia, depression, and falls. The Chief Medical Officer for AARP Services talks about combating this huge but silent epidemic that impacts all ages.
A program at Yale has students conduct open-ended interviews with patients about their lives, their hopes, their values, and what they most want their medical team to know — creating the opportunity for human connection and a better care experience.
How Oak Street Health, a full-risk, value-based primary care model and social determinants practice, embeds itself in the community to keep its elderly population, “happy, healthy, and out of the hospital.”
A public health expert discusses the scientific, technological, and financial foundations needed to modernize the social services infrastructure and address social determinants of health.
The expense of the U.S. health care system is so misaligned from what we need as a country — a healthier population. A public health expert discusses how we can move toward a model that addresses social determinants of health and promotes well-being while still growing our economy.
Becoming a high-reliability health system that is personalized, efficient, and effective means making some tough choices.
How Community Servings evolved from an HIV nutrition program to one that feeds people with any illness.
The case for fostering “personized” work relationships to create a culture of process leadership across an organization.
The idea of humble leadership is to get away from looking at what does the individual need to be a leader, and examining the many, many ways that leadership occurs as a process.
Will Amazon–Berkshire Hathaway–JP Morgan and CVS-Aetna change the health care game? To one health care employer purchaser, these announcements feel a lot like Groundhog Day.
We have to think about how much we want to spend on health according to how much it’s worth to us at the margin.
A group of care experience leaders from across the United States discuss innovative physician coaching models at their respective organizations.
How lessons from a concert pianist in timing, audience connection, and intent apply to health care leadership.
How daily huddles have played a key role in Advocate Health Care’s journey toward zero serious safety events by 2020.
Listen to the whingers — if 50 people are complaining about the same thing, something is going on that you should address.
How Christiana Care’s initiatives impact not only those they serve directly, but also the larger community.
If you start a meeting with an effective “what” or “how” question, you force people to get into the mindset of learning and testing change.
Think big, but start small: change starts with one patient, one nurse or doctor, and one shift.
Providence St. Joseph uses the “give a darn” method to deliver value — what makes a difference to patients makes it on the short list.
“What we aim to do is to create something akin to a public utility that is going to put public good first.”
Will those who recall the lost art of paper prescriptions contribute, or gracefully bow out, to technology?
David Cutler asks Patrick Conway what worked and what didn’t at CMS, advice he’d give to the Trump administration, and his predictions on Medicare and Medicaid.
Winners will be providers who translate today’s inefficiencies into tomorrow’s profits.
How the CMO of Brigham and Women’s Physicians Organization combats burnout at her institution and empowers physicians with leadership skills.
How Adrienne Boissy and Cleveland Clinic are focusing on physician communication — and getting results.
There’s a difference between leaders who are physicians, and physicians who happen to lead. So what is it, and how do we find it?
A young leader in cardiology interviews his former mentor, Christopher O’Connor, on what it means to be a good leader in medicine.
Intermountain Healthcare’s CEO says it’s about connecting with what communities believe in.
Small nuances become powerful drivers of not only how we engage our patients, but also how we engage our colleagues.
There’s a clear underrepresentation in the leadership in our medical schools and our hospitals — so what are we doing about it?
When it comes to a culture of respect, NewYork-Presbyterian is proving “if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”
Is the ratio of love to hate for electronic medical records moving in the wrong direction, and if so, what can we do?
“We use the guiding principle that the physicians’ expertise should drive our business principles, not the opposite,” says Ziad Haydar.