This post was contributed by Danielle Cass (@daniellecass), an innovation evangelist at Kaiser Permanente, for XX in Health Week 2013, a week-long celebration of gender diversity in healthcare.
Danielle Cass with her family.
This is the story of how I hacked my life and career last year to get closer to the frontlines of health care innovation – and my family.
That experience – and talking to other women leaders in health care – made me realize that disrupting health care starts with your own life and career.
This is also the story of how you can reinvent your own path in order to fix what’s broken in health care or fix imbalance between your work and life.
My story starts at home: I grew up surrounded by health care pioneers whose work saved and improved the lives of hundreds of people. My mom is a family physician who in the 1980s opened the nation's first health center for women. My dad is a urologist who brought mobile lithotripsy to the U.S. in the 1980s. (That's a non-invasive way to smash kidney stones without surgery.) My sister is a lead Gynecologist Oncologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and UCLA focused on finding a marker for ovarian and cervical cancers so they can be detected and treated earlier.
One year ago I was Kaiser Permanente’s National Director of PR Strategic Planning and Partnerships. I was in Washington DC twice a month organizing big news events and meetings at KP's gorgeous new Center for Total Health on Capitol Hill with The White House, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Secretary Sebelius' team and the innovation team at the Center for Medicaid & Medicare Services.
I was doing really exciting stuff and raising the visibility of Kaiser Permanente's integrated care model and award-winning innovation and research -- BUT I was missing out on key moments in my family's life.
I missed my son's stand-up saxophone solo at The Berkeley Jazz School because I was in DC for an Institute for Healthcare Improvement event I organized at our Center for Total Health. I missed my daughter's school play and most of her soccer games because I was in DC.
Then I had an epiphany after attending two amazing health care innovation events in a row: The XX Retreat and the Kaiser Permanente Innovation Retreat.
At The XX Retreat, I was moved to tears by speaker Nupur Srivastava as she described her work to treat jaundice in newborns in India. She told the audience how the technology was available to mothers whose babies were dying of jaundice but how one mother said it was cheaper to have another child rather than seek treatment.
At Kaiser Permanente Innovation Retreat, I listened rapt as teams of KP doctors, nurses, IT experts and designers described their innovation projects that were being awarded for netting big impact in clinical care.
As I sat in the audience, I decided that while it was important work, for me personally at that point in my life, it didn't matter whether I landed more stories about Kaiser Permanente in the New York Times and POLITICO and generated two million impressions on Twitter.
I wanted to help clinicians improve the lives of their patients. AND I wanted to do it while working just 45 hours a week right here in the Bay Area.
That night in my hotel room I sketched out my dream job at Kaiser Permanente. I would be an Innovation Evangelist helping our care providers share and spread their innovative projects throughout the Kaiser Permanente universe of 17,000 doctors, 49,000 nurses, 175,000 employees and 9 million members.
The next morning while still at the KP Innovation Retreat, I pitched the job idea to the Vice President of Innovation & Advanced Technology, she said yes immediately, and I was hired the next month.
Ironically, I was scared to tell my parents about it. They are immigrants to this country and always pushed my three sisters and me to work hard, achieve more and climb up the ladder, rather than taking our foot off the gas pedal to explore a side path.
But to my surprise, they were thrilled for me and very proud and supportive.
In the last year on the new job, I've chaperoned my kids’ school field trips and camping trips, attended their music performances and sports games, and gone on more dates with my husband because I didn’t feel guilty about leaving the kids due to constant work travel. And my husband finally let me get a dog because I wasn’t traveling for work and could help take care of it.
Most importantly: I've already made some impact in helping clinicians spread their innovations – like a roving mobile telemedicine robot that Intensive Care Unit doctors use to beam in from home for evening rounds in the ICU. This innovation has led to fewer night emergencies and increased patient and patient family satisfaction.
And a program that makes better use of Kaiser Permanente members’ time while they wait in lines at our flu shot clinics. Roving workers go through the wait lines and use iPads to review members’ personal health prompts in their medical record to schedule overdue health tests and screenings like mammograms and other cancer tests. During the first 12-day pilot at the KP Redwood City flu clinic, more than 900 cancer screenings and health tests were scheduled while members waited in line for flu shots.
So here is my message: disrupting health care and leading others starts with YOU and your own life.
This approach is far more common than you realize. For validation, I asked some women health care leaders whom I admire.
“The best jobs I’ve had were the ones I thought up for myself and then ‘sold’ to other people,” said Susan Dentzer, former PBS NewsHour health correspondent and editor-in-chief of Health Affairs who is now Senior Policy Adviser to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “These were not the jobs that existed previously or got advertised. I thought up the role of on-air health correspondent at the PBS NewsHour then persuaded the Kaiser Family Foundation (and later RWJF) to provide the funding to support the unit.”
Dentzer’s current position as senior policy adviser at RWJF did not previously exist but instead spawned from conversations she had with the CEO, Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, to shape something that accommodated Dentzer’s skills and interests and the foundation's needs.
Best of all: the job gives Dentzer more flexibility to cope with the equally busy schedules of her husband and their three children, ages 13, 16 and 19.
Vocera Chief Medical Officer M. Bridget Duffy, M.D., was driven to invent new roles for herself after witnessing as an Internal Medicine doctor too many dehumanizing interactions between doctors, patients, patients’ families and technology.
“For the last 20 years of my career in medicine, I have created non-traditional roles where I was empowered to innovate and drive change around the human experience of care. It was out of pain and frustration and my desire to fix the status quo of what I saw as broken in health care,” said Duffy, who helps Vocera empower healthcare organizations through integrated, intelligent communication solutions that improve outcomes and the patient and staff experience. “The common thread between all the innovative roles and titles I’ve created is my passion to humanize the delivery of medical technology.”
So if you don’t already have your dream job, or if you are frustrated by something you see as broken in health care, or if you’ve been at the office so much that your family no longer recognizes you, here are tips on how to hack your life and career.
Bridget Duffy advises:
- Find your posse. Create a tribe. Find a community of disrupters who have challenged the status quo and will support you on your journey.
- Have courage to fix what you know to be broken even when everyone is against you and don’t be afraid to fail.
- Find the powerbase in the organization where you work, and get tucked in with them. Make sure you have people in the foxhole with you.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for the craziest new position and for the way in which you want to work. You should be able to bring your full self to work, not have to check your soul at the door, to change healthcare for the better. Lastly, while trying to heal medicine, you should not kill yourself in the process!
- Don’t stay too long in the wrong organization. Life is short. Pick an organization that is aligned with your vision and your values and where you can add value in minutes not in years.
Susan Dentzer advises:
- Establish a track record in a field or with an employer who is open to talking about what you'd like to do and how it might mesh with the needs and desires of the enterprise.
- Pick an employer large enough and innovative enough that you want to work there, then establish a track record there in some capacity.
- Even if it isn't your "dream" job; get good and get noticed having a unique skill set doing something you really love. Then just keep selling your talents to the right people to create your dream position.
- Start your own business, either as a consultant or entrepreneur. Too many women do not consider this possibility and it's a shame, because if you can build a successful business and sell it one day, it is a way to create wealth also.
- Embrace this saying: "The shoe that fits one pinches another:" Sometimes you definitely have to shop for a new pair of career shoes. And sometimes your foot is unique enough in size that you have to be your own shoe designer and cobbler -- your own Christian Louboutin or Steven Weitzman or even Aerosoles if you prefer!
My advice:
- Take advantage of resources already around you. Look for existing groups in your organization that support women advancing their careers. For example, Kaiser Permanente has two internal business resource groups focused on fostering women to lead in health care: Kaiser Permanente Women in Technology and Kaiser Permanente Women Embracing Life and Leadership.
- Find a mentor. Luckily at Kaiser Permanente we have KPMentoring.org that pairs our employees with fellow mentors and mentoring programs. But you can discover your own mentor by getting involved with groups like XX in Health (xxinhealth.org), the Lean In Foundation (leanin.org), or just reach out to a woman leader whom you admire and ask her for a quick coffee by her office or a 15-minute phone chat.
- After you’ve completed Step 1 & 2, sketch out your dream job, then brainstorm with your friends, colleagues and mentor on who to pitch and where to network to make it real.
- If you get rejected, wait a few months and try again. The health care industry is changing so fast right now that new technologies, digital health tools and care models are emerging every day. If the landscape isn’t ripe today for your dream job, it might be six months from now.