‘Sometimes we have to be a bit opportunistic and take some chances’

You joined Ochsner as its first chief digital officer at the beginning of this year. How would you describe your experience so far leading the system’s digital health programs?

The experience has been great. I have a real passion for improving healthcare, which has been the entire arc of my career. I think Ochsner is ideally suited to evolve care models in what’s proving to be a pretty transformational time in healthcare. I was excited to join and help facilitate some of the innovation that’s already been happening here for years.

This was a shift for you, right? You’re a clinician but had been at Wolters Kluwer previously.

Yes, I practiced medicine for about four years. And then I decided to make a leap and join a startup in 1996 called UpToDate (a clinical decisionsupport platform). I never expected that my career would go in the direction it did when I went to medical school. But sometimes we have to be a bit opportunistic and take some chances. I’ve been fortunate that many of those chances have worked out.

What has been your experience as a woman in the C-suite? And what advice do you have for others working their way toward similar positions?

I’ve had some female mentors, which I think is very important. Some of them were willing to take a chance on me and served as great role models.

Early in my career, one of the most challenging elements was building a career as a woman having children. I had my first daughter when I was a medical resident. I was very fortunate that my husband was willing and able to take a year out of his training to stay home with her so I could finish my training. Of course, I felt guilty about leaving her and going back to work. But that was just the first of many years of guilt that that comes with being a working mother.

As far as getting to the C-suite, I’m convinced that opportunity came primarily because when we sold the business, we had a female CEO who was willing to take a chance on me. We’d talk to several other potential acquirers, all either male-dominated private equity companies or other strategic businesses with male CEOs. And all of them were going to bring in an outside male CEO to run our business. The only exception was our eventual acquirer. To this day I’m grateful that their CEO took a chance on me and asked me to run our business because my career really took off from there.

How would you describe the transition from being the top leader to being part

of the C-suite as a chief digital officer?

It’s different, for sure. But I think it took a really special circumstance, which is the leadership team at Ochsner. The CEO at Ochsner, Warner Thomas, is fantastic, very supportive, very much a type of leader who says, “Here’s your job, go do it. Keep me informed. Let’s stay aligned, but go do your job.” Which is the real key to being an effective leader. So that’s made it much easier.

Ochsner has a really supportive executive team overall and it’s really a business that’s been very hungry to hear new ideas and to execute on those ideas. So I probably couldn’t have landed in a better situation.

Can you share a little bit about the digital health strategy at Ochsner and what are you doing that’s different from other providers?

Ochsner was really ahead of its time in developing tools to remotely monitor patients with chronic diseases so that they stay more connected to the health system and achieve better outcomes. And that’s what got my attention. They started a group called Innovation Ochsner in 2015, before most health systems were thinking about these things, with the goal of trying to use digital tools to evolve care models and improve the quality of care and the patient experience. We’ve employed these tools with patients in all different demographics. We’ve been able to improve on the management of diseases like diabetes and hypertension, even in patients who could never achieve control prior to beginning those programs.

And we continue to innovate. We have a program called Connected MOM that uses digital tools to help better manage pregnancy from home. We’ve incorporated advanced artificial intelligence and predictive modeling to identify patients who are likely to deteriorate in the hospital so we can intervene early.

A common theme is trying to disrupt ourselves a bit in these care models because we know disruption is coming and it’s my belief and others’ that health systems should be the disruptors, versus having others tell us how medicine should be practiced.

There are so many disruptors and new companies coming into this field trying to tackle the problems in healthcare. How much of this is Ochsner doing in-house versus working with some of those startups?

It’s really a combination. We’ve certainly started with the mentality that we can build a lot of these tools ourselves. And, frankly, we have very capable teams, so it’s true. I think what we’re beginning to realize is yes, we can build all of these things ourselves, but there might be faster paths to market. And we might be able to do things sooner if we have more partnerships. We’re beginning to look at those.

And you have admirable connections with your patients, especially through innovations that you mentioned, and the O Bar. How has that helped Ochsner’s digital health work?

Well, it’s all about the patients. Patients are in the center of everything that we do. The O Bar is a place where patients who are involved in our digital programs can go and have support for their devices: figuring out how to use them, figuring out how to connect them to their phones, how to make sure everything’s working properly.

I think that reflects how we’ve thought about health equity as well, because we’re very cognizant that not everyone has access to all the digital tools that are available. And even when they have access, not everyone knows how to use them. We’ve done some work trying to understand, as an example, barriers to digital equity in older patients. And we’re beginning to address those and I think it’s very much part of our mission to make sure all patients have access to what they need, so we can take the best care of them. It really comes from the top of the organization and our strategy to always put patients in

n the center.

“It’s my belief and others’ that health systems should be the disruptors, versus having others tell us how medicine should be practiced.”