Naji: Hello leaders of the world. Welcome to spread love in organizations, a podcast for purpose driven healthcare leaders, striving to make life better around the world by leading their teams with genuine care, servant leadership and love. I’m Naji your host for this episode. And I am thrilled to be joined by an outstanding communicator, a visionary leader, a healthcare thought leader, and one of the most amazing frontline emergency physicians.
Dr. Adam Brown, Adam began as a frontline emergency physician with progressive clinical and administrative roles throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest becoming the president of the nation’s largest emergency medicine practice at envision healthcare. During the first waves of the COVID pandemic, he continued to serve as president of emergency medicine and was named chair of the COVID taskforce for all specialties at envision.
That year, the CEO also appointed him to the role as an executive sponsor of diversity equity and inclusion in 2021, he assume the role of a newly created position at envision as the chief impact officer and has continued in his role in the pandemic response at D&I.
As an emergency physician and healthcare executive, Adam has a driving passion to improve the lives of patients using all his skills and influence he’s gained as a healthcare business leader and physician. He has expanded his reach and is imparting and improving the health of millions of lives. Adam, it is such an honor to have you with me today.
Adam Brown: Hey, it’s so great to be with you today.
Naji: From frontline physician, Adam, to now chief impact officer. And I’d love afterwards to, for your vision about this title. But before that your constant thread around improving patient’s lives, I want to know what’s behind this. What’s your personal story for you to do this journey and what you are today as a leader, and who you are.
Adam Brown: Yeah, I think that’s a really great question. You know, I’ll first start with a simple answer is that, I saw that as I was working as an emergency physician in different areas around the country, that there is an opportunity to take some of the things that I was learning. Some of the best practices around clinical medicine, the operational practices around how you take care of patients in an ER, or even in the inpatient units.
How to export that to other hospitals and by extension, as you start to export education and best practices, and you really start to scale that I started recognizing the opportunity there was to impact patient’s lives. And so I think, you know, as I’m looking at where I sit right now, one of the things that gives me a lot of energy and, gives me a lot about, of joy in the work that I’m doing is knowing that many of the things that I am doing really has the potential, either directly or indirectly to impact millions of patient’s lives.
But the question about the personal story, you know, I’m from Eastern North Carolina. I grew up at the beach, going to out on the water on Saturdays with my dad and a flat bottom kind of looks like a swamp boat almost, fishing and, fairly humble beginnings. My dad and mom are both amazing people.
They grew up in Eastern North Carolina in, what we called the country, in the country part of the state. And, my dad was the son of a sharecropper. He actually didn’t have running water to he was 18 years old and my dad’s only 68. So he did not come from wealthy means by any stretch of the imagination.
My mom, my grandmother was a school teacher, English school teacher. I think that’s where a lot of my communication interests came from. My granddad still to this day at 87 years old runs a barbecue restaurant in Eastern North Carolina. And so, you know, my background was definitely not one in medicine, but where I think is very important to me and how it’s shaped and informed my decisions along the way is the importance of people and really the importance of making an impact in people’s lives, no matter what you did whether it’s making really good barbecue that people wanna wake up for on a Saturday morning to drive an hour, to get to, to see people smiles as they’re coming to get that barbecue, or to hear the stories from my grandma talking about in her very Southern drawl about kids that have come back, who are now adults to thank miss blizzard. My grandmother’s last name was blizzard, to thank her for the education that she provided. And so I think that’s some of the pieces and parts of what kind of shaped who I am today.
Naji: Well, thank you so much for sharing this part of you. And I love how you framed it, right? You had it early on and you’ve seen it how to help people, right? How to make people happy. So it will take me to this idea of chief impact officer. And I think it’s coming again from the millions of patients who are impacting and helping, but also your teams, right? You’re passionate about D&I, you’re running today one of the largest teams in the us and emergency medicine and beyond. So tell us a little bit more about why chief impact officer, what do you put behind this as a daily job?
Adam Brown: Well, this actually goes back to during the pandemic and at the beginning of the pandemic. So in 2020, I was named president of emergency medicine for envision how healthcare and, just to give folks a little bit of idea of what and who envision is we’re a large medical group, one of the leading medical groups in the country, and we have clinicians over 25,000 of them taking care of patients in 45 states across the country. And actually now, even across the world, as we have medical type mission trips that we’re going actually going to Dominican Republic on Saturday. But we are an organization with very different types of skills, whether it’s emergency medicine, pediatrics, neonatology, anesthesia surgery, OBGYN. Those are just a few of the areas where our clinicians work. And so at the beginning of the pandemic, I was president of emergency medicine, but I could see what was I thought was about to happen, that we were going to be heading into a pandemic. And so there was a lot of concern that I had about that. It would not take long for that virus to come onto our shores as well, and was probably already here. And so at that point in time, our CEO, asked me, you know, I’m an emergency physician, emergency physicians deal with that type of training crisis training, even pandemic training. I had done some work of course in the us when we were worried about Ebola coming around.
So I had an idea about what we would need from a personal protective equipment, how we would need to have, you know, information control, crisis control, et cetera. So he asked me to start working on the pandemic response. And I think what was a really big challenge at the time was I was not just now helping the response of emergency medicine, I was having to think through how do we take care of our clinicians in the hospitalist inpatient unit? How do we take care of our clinicians in the anesthesia, in the operating room suite? How do we get them to the protective equipment that they need, but also how do we get them the educational information that they’ll need to take care of patients? So folks, remember back to March and April of 2020, all that we knew was that, there was a virus that was coming. It could be respiratory, it could be droplet. It could be, we were wiping down our Amazon packages. We were doing all these things to protect ourselves. So there’s a lot of unknowns that now we know today. And so a part of my job was to identify best ways to take care of patients, best ways to protect our clinicians best ways to distribute information and really to become the trusted voice. So that’s a long answer to get to how we got to the chief impact officer.
We recognized by the end of the year, there were so many societal changes, social changes, changes that needed to happen within patients and even within our own clinicians that keeping me siloed in a single service line, like emergency medicine did make a lot of sense. And so I wanted to lean into, the reason why I went and got my MBA. The reason why I went to get become a doctor is I wanna impact a lot alive. So it was a title that I said “Hey, what are your thoughts about this?” to our CEO, here’s the reason in the rationale. We already had decided what work I would be doing, and it seemed to make a lot of sense. And so that was the reason why we got to chief impact officer.
Naji: When you’re talking obviously you went back to the pandemic, you led the team in one of the most challenging times, right? And cross-functional teams caring for patients, but also as you mentioned, right? Caring for the healthcare providers, you guys were on the frontline, risking your lives to save others lives. So there’s a couple of things I would love to hear your thoughts about. The first one you said you wanted to become the trusted voice and I think in those moment of tensions, being also an emergency physician, as you know, like being able to be the trusted voice for the people to trust you right? To risk their lives and do practically what you’re asking is something big, right? So we’d love to hear your thoughts about the learning around this. And then I will go to the other part, which is more the silos also that you talked about. But let’s start with this one first.
Adam Brown: Yeah. I will never forget a good friend told me at the beginning of the pandemic, when I told her that I would be leading the response and she was so right. She said, Adam, your most important thing you can do is be trusted. That’ll be the most important thing for you, to lead the organization, to lead the team, is trust. There’s other pieces there too. You have to be trusted. You also have to deliver, which also kind of filters into being trusted. But you need to be a trusted voice. And so everything that I did laddered back up to being that trusted voice.
So it made me critically think about what information I was trying to get out to our clinicians. What would need, what was the research there? What were the proof points for that information getting out? Being honest with them about good news and bad news and becoming that person at the organization that when people said, Adam is speaking about something, we can trust what he says. But we are an organization of not just clinicians, we have 35,000 employees that work for us and so we have our teammates that work for us. And so many of them are not clinicians. And so not only being that trusted voice for the clinical persons, also being that trusted voice for our clinical support teammates that are helping our clinicians with everything, from their schedules, their paperwork, their credentialing at hospitals to our business development teams and our managed care type teams. Those also too were looking to me at times for answers on how they interact, how they should interact with their family at Halloween. This was before the vaccine, you know, in 2020, what type of information was available and how to try to help them search through all the disparate information that was coming out there because I knew that just as much information that was scientific that could be trusted, was out there. There’s a lot of information that was out there was untrusted. So I felt like the big piece and I’m gonna use a marketing term, but the big piece of my personal brand was be trusted.
But not only be trusted, but choose wisely on activities that I get involved in, because anything that could potentially corrupt that trust had a far greater concern of then me not being able to carry certain messages about how to protect yourself, how to protect your family, how to take care of patients in a certain way.
Naji: So any key learning you had, because obviously we all faced and you faced it at a totally different level. And everyone listening today knows potentially all those questions we all asked ourselves, right? But you guys being on the front line, it’s multiplied by hundreds of times. Any key learning as a leader, trying to be trusted? So I love the idea of choosing the activities being involved, making sure that you’re bringing the data that can be trusted and being the voice of this data. But many time, you gave the example of Halloween, for example, before the vaccines, many time we do not have answers as leaders. That’s right. How did you handle this, right? And brought back this voice to keep the trust but also many time people will look up other leaders and well, tell me what I need to do, right? So how did you coach our people towards those moments of uncertainties? Because we face them also in the business word in a daily life, to a minor extent.
Adam Brown: Well, I think a part about being trustworthy is also being honest about what you know, and what you don’t know. And so I think when you can say things sometimes with caveats, but sometimes you say things like, for example, let’s take Halloween. Based upon the best information that we have available, the way that you can protect your family the most is by X, Y, Z, A, B and C.
That’s based upon what we know now. And we’re early in this pandemic. But as we move forward, we’ll learn more. And as there, as that adjusts, I’m gonna give you that information to the best of my knowledge. So that was one of the ways that I think I built trust, by being honest with people about what we did and didn’t know.
But I think the other piece here and you had asked specifically about learnings is the power and importance of communication effectively. I’ve heard people say things like communicate, communicate often, overcommunicate, when you think you haven’t communicated enough, do it again. And I agree, but I disagree.
I agree that’s the right thing to do if you’re communicating effectively. And so this goes to the second piece that I learned. When you’re a healthcare company, every person that you are working with, whether they are an anesthesiologist, whether they are an anesthesia business leader, whether they are a scheduler or someone working in security at one of your operations offices, they all come with very different levels of understanding of healthcare.
They have different levels of understanding about their life experiences. Meaning some have been always in healthcare. Some have not. And so you really have to think through when you’re communicating the different segments of your audience. And so the questions I would ask, Naji, oftentimes were, who is this message going to? Is this going to my ER docs? Is this going to my nurse practitioners and PAs that are in the emergency department? Is this going to my clinical support non-clinician teammates? Because the message needed to adjust and change and so even though the old maximum of communicate over communicate and continue to communicate is true, but bad communication is sometimes worse than not communicating at all.
And so really, really thinking granularly about what are the experiences of the audience that you’re trying to communicate to? What is the level of understanding? What type of biases may they have? What type of information may they might be receiving at home or online or on television? And so crafting a message in such a way that can get to your ultimate goal, i.e protect people, give people the right information, stay the trusted voice, that sort of thing. It was an important, important piece to how we communicated and continue to communicate through this pandemic.
Naji: Yeah, so really adopting it, listening, knowing who they are. And I think it goes back to your very first words that you said, your passion for people. Like you can only do this if you’re literally, and genuinely want to understand what they’re going through and try to help them and be empathetic with them. So a lot of credits for you to be able to run those things with your teams.
Adam Brown: I think, let me explain it this way. When I talk to my mom and dad and they have had questions throughout the pandemic, of course, you know, and they have seen me at times as their son, they continue to see me as their son, despite being a healthcare executive and a doctor, sometimes they forget that but then they see me at times as the doctor and the trusted boy with them as well. And the way that I explain, a new story that may have come out, or the way that I explain the guidelines for say vaccines for them, or the way that I’ve talked to them about incoming potential risks, is very different than of course the way that I would talk to you or I would talk to someone who is a, a healthcare provider. And that seems really simple, but a lot of times, and I’ve seen the traps of this, whether it’s within the hospital or when clinicians are talking to patients, is that many times we start to get overly reductive in the way that we try to communicate. We either drop our communication down to a sixth or an eighth grade level because that’s what generally, newspapers are written on or we try to do things like make things overly simplistic without really understanding the driver of the anxiety of why someone may be asking a question that they’re asking. And so that stakeholder engagement that back and forth in the piece of the communication is so critical in crafting your message during a crisis, so that you can get that other individual to not only hear you, but also understand, absorb and take that information in.
That’s a really important thing. And I hope if we talk a little bit more about it, because I think it’s an important piece for us as healthcare executives or business executives, period.
Naji: Yeah, I totally agree. And how many times, like we come with the same message, as you said, we’ve heard it many times over communicate and it’s missing this tailoring piece to who you’re communicating and how you’re communicating, what you’re communicating.
I do wanna go into COVID questions. I can, I have bunch of questions. I love to ask you about it, but I don’t wanna get there. We’re talking about, you know, leadership and what we can learn from you as you have done and still doing this. Anything you would have done differently, during those times or earlier, if you would have known and not related to the virus more from a leadership standpoint.
Adam Brown: Yeah. I think there’s probably two things that I would’ve done, you know, as much as I felt that it was important for people to trust me, I needed to learn to trust others as well. And I think what I mean by that is, is that when you are crisis or even when you’re not in crisis, when you are dealing with a business challenge or you’re dealing with a challenge with engagement with employees or choose the problem you’re trying to solve, really quickly assessing the skillset of those around you, but also identifying those other persons that you can trust and start to anchor over to them because you can’t do it all. And I think that is, has been a bit of a, something that I realized really early on, is that engagement back and forth with, again, your stakeholders, your employees within your organization, your direct reports, your colleagues, those that you report to identifying who you can trust. And I don’t mean trust, like there’s someone that’s not a good person. I’m talking about someone who’s skilled, who knows their information, who can get what you need to get done, done so that you can depend on them.
And I think early on, I was trying to do everything. And I remember my husband saying to me, at one point, he said, Adam, this was probably in April of 2020. And this was around COVID, but I can apply it to other things too. He’s like, Adam you’re not gonna be able to get everything done and sleep and have a life. He’s like, you’re gonna have to identify other people that are going to be able to help you accomplish the goals that you need to accomplish and so I quickly had to figure out a rubric and my mind of how do I learn about, identify the skillset of another individual and then, trust them.
Naji: That’s definitely replicable and a great, great point and joining. What’s next, do you think in the healthcare leadership, you know, the pandemic is still ongoing, we are all hearing about, you know, the mental health issues, unfortunately, within our healthcare teams, but also across the globe and in the us. Any thought from your side on the next challenges as we continue on having, well, luckily with vaccines, less of, you know, the kind of the catastrophic situation we were with so many patients suffering and dying unfortunately, but it’s continuing right and isolation, people having more and more suffering from mental health and we seeing it in healthcare also being impacted way more, I would say, from outside healthcare, because of all the challenges you’re facing, obviously. Any thoughts about this and how as leaders we can help out.
Adam Brown: Yeah, I actually think there’s a couple things that kind of converge into this. I’ll say it’s not post pandemic because, you know, we just recently had a hundred thousand people die within a relatively short period of time, just here in the United States.
And the virus is continuing to spread, pretty significantly in Eastern Europe and in Europe right now. And that said, I think the first big issue that’s going to be facing healthcare and clinician wellbeing and clinical wellness and burnout are an issue and I’ll talk about that in a second, but I think there’s something higher level that we are going to be dealing with and that is misinformation and disinformation within healthcare because it transcends the pandemic. It has, we’ve seen now with this pandemic, this has been an opportunity for us and although a negative one, that for people that have anchored to misinformation or disinformation about the vaccine, the last hundred thousand people to have died from this virus, a large majority of them were unvaccinated, which means could have prevented their death.
So think about that for a minute. Think about how individuals chose to listen to something other than the prevailing science, trusted voices. Those voices to them became distrustful and they made decisions that affected their lives and that’s just the people who died. There’s people that have had other type of long COVID symptoms or will continue to have sadly some long COVID symptoms, at least to what we’re seeing.
So here’s my point to this COVID is an example of a broader problem that we have around misinformation. And why is that a big problem? Well, if there’s so much distrust where people are not believing physician or people are not believing organizations that are trying to protect the public, then what are they not going to believe when there’s new cancer treatments, when there’s new other emerging pathogens, when there’s other diseases that we want to treat?
What happens when patients are coming to a hospital and their loved ones in the ICU for a different type of infection and the family members are coming with an inherent distrust of the clinicians because of information that they have seen that has been mis or disinformation. I see that as one of the biggest emerging and continual problems that we have.
So that’s the high level problem that I see that we are going to be facing with healthcare. And I think that the answers to that come back to a marketing and influence answer of identifying segments of the population, identifying what influences and drives decision making in those populations and how can we do what we need to do to address the needs of those individuals. Now diving into the healthcare sector specifically. Yeah. You were gonna ask something.
Naji: Yeah. Just before diving, because I love this point. When you’re saying we, who do you see around the table being able to get back to this trusted information because there’s many actors, right? Like I’m in the pharma industry, you’re on the front line. There’s regulators, agencies, authorities, you know, patient advocacy group. Like when you say we do see us getting together and doing this, how do you see things?
Adam Brown: Well, I think you have to take a step back and even look for, to answer that question.
You have to take a step back. What drives your decision making for anything right now? What drives informs your decision about why you make a decision for whatever product you want to buy, where you wanna go on vacation? Why you like one thing over another, or why you believe one health type food is better than another health type food?
I believe that healthcare decisions. and any decisions for that matter are really, really complex. And I think that we’ve made the, the grievous error and I learned it in medical school that you have to talk to your patients in such a way that they can understand. Well that’s right. But I think what’s wrong is that you’re not the only one talking to that patient.
It’s their person at their church. It’s their Facebook group. It’s, you know, a celebrity, someone from the green bay Packers. There’s someone that is talking to that individual in such a way that is triggering in their mind connection and influence and driving decisions. And so I think what we have done wrong in, and when I say we, I say the healthcare community in general, is we have assumed that there’s health literacy and then by contrast health illiteracy, meaning that you either know healthcare or you don’t. And I think that’s the wrong setup because every single individual believes or knows something about their healthcare. Let me, let me just tell you a personal story. So I’m from Eastern North Carolina. I started working in an ER when I was 19 years old.
I was a tech in the ER. And I remember one day sitting with the nurse in triage, that’s the area where patients come in, the intake process and a guy had a burn on his arm. I’m probably gonna slip into a Southern accident a little bit, cuz I’m being a little nostalgia. And so anyway, guy comes in with his arm, he sits and I’m like, what happened to your arm?
He’s like, well, I burned it. And I’m like, well, why is it so shiny? He goes, oh, I put Crisco and butter all over my arms. I did, I just put it all over it. And I’m like, why? You’re not trying to make biscuits. Like, why are you putting this on your arm? And his response was, well, that’s what I’ve always been told.
Now, this a guy who worked at a farm, he was not a healthcare professional, but he had knowledge of healthcare in his mind. That he was doing what was right for him for his healthcare. So I think it’s wrong to believe that people are illiterate. It’s just their understanding of healthcare and their personal healthcare is very different. Now, clearly he’s wrong and I’m encouraging anyone who’s listening to never do that because that’s not the right thing to do. But the point here is that people are not empty vessels just waiting for information to be poured. People have made up in their minds stories and, stuff from their grandma and their granddad and their aunt and their uncles of what you do.
I mean, I remember one day working on a tobacco field and yes, I did this, when I was, my dad made me do it, when I was like eight or nine years old. So that I would ever A, want the smoke or chew tobacco, or B ever that I would want to do something other than work in tobacco field. But I got stung by a bee or a wasp or something and I remember someone saying here, let me chew up some tobacco in my mouth and put it on your bite because that sucks out the sting. Now kind of look, and that was accepted and thought it would be a really great thing and a really wonderful thing to do or take like raw meat and put on your arm. I mean, these are the things that I grew up with knowing.
They’re clearly really bad things to do. They’re not good things to do to protect your skin from infection and all the other stuff. So the point here is that those individuals believe fervently, and that is the way you treat a condition. So what we have to do is we have to not make the assumption that people are just quote illiterate.
I find that offensive. We have to make the assumption that people do come with certain levels of information, albeit wrong at times, but identify how then to communicate. So to your early question about who’s the we? The we is not just doctors. We have to think, or clinicians or healthcare providers, we have to think like a marketer.
We have to think like a disinformant. We have to think about what are the drivers of influence, the complex drivers of influence for people in their decision making to get them to understand truth in medicine.
Naji: What an amazing perspective Adam really, really great, great different perspective. And as you were talking, I was thinking about all those different beliefs patients can come with and me included, right? As you said. Yeah. And it’s, yeah, it’s definitely a different perspective and a challenging one, right? Like to unlearn and relearn, and make sure we trust people to be able to listen.
I would love now to give you one word and get the reaction to it. So the first word I have in mind for you is leadership.
Adam Brown: Ooh, one word I’m gonna give you a second one back, challenging, but opportunity. I see that being a leader is a challenging job. Being the leader of people is not easy and nor should it be. But I also see great opportunity in the job. And that’s been such a driver for me.
Naji: What about equity in healthcare? If you want even broader
Adam Brown: Misunderstood. I think that what people have understood as equity means access, just because you have access to something doesn’t mean you can use it. You know, I could have access to tons of cars, but if I don’t know how to drive the car, or if my legs are short and I can’t reach the pedals, or if I can’t see over the steering wheel, then the car’s kind of meaningless.
So I may have access to it. So I think people, and this is something we’re kind of grappling with a bit here is there’s an assumption that there is equitable access to vaccines, equitable access to hospitals. But there’s not, it’s not because when you look in rural, there are multiple areas in the country that are well over an hour to your closest hospital.
There are areas in the country where there’s very disparate skill sets in the type of clinicians that are in various hospitals. There are areas of the country where you have some people that have access to primary healthcare clinics and some that don’t, that only have critical access hospitals. It’s not just rural though versus urban, even within urban environments.
Like I live here in Washington, DC, there are parts of the city that have better access to care, better public transportation. So, equity and healthcare is not just simply about the ability of, of saying that there’s something close by or not close by. It’s like, can people actually truly access it? And is there equity in ensuring that all parties and all persons can get there?
The other thing with equity and healthcare is that if we are looking at the future of healthcare. we have got to start addressing the issue of equity in healthcare. And where do those issues come from? They come from social determinants of health. If we don’t address those, we aren’t accomplishing the goals of improving the population’s health across the board.
And so that means identifying ways to improve education in our communities, improve infrastructure in certain areas, clean water, getting people the access they need. There’s direct correlations, between those type of big infrastructure things, those social determinants of health, it’s in the title, it’s a determinant of health. That, we have to address those issues to truly ensure, and we have to address racism before we can start to get to equity.
Naji: Can I double click on this one, cuz it’s such an important topic and you’re obviously within your organization leading diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
What should we do? Where are you starting? So I know a lot of things we’re a little bit, I don’t wanna say way better, right? Like at least there’s light on it and we’re taking actions, right, to improve diversity.
There’s a still long way I think, into inclusion, because something is to have a diverse team, it’s a different thing to make sure that everyone is included and equity is also another step as you just shared. And I love this idea about difference between access and usage. Where are you starting and what can we, and should we do, as leaders on this topic?
Adam Brown: Well, I think you started hitting on it right there. You know, diversity is not the full answer to equality. Inclusion is not the full answer to equality. You really have to take all three of them together, right? You have to have diversity, you have to have inclusion, you have to have equity. And the three pieces of those parts have to be a part of your solution in tackling the problem.
So let’s take, for example, just a few issues with social determinants of health and healthcare. Sometimes when we say health inequity, or I said racism earlier, that can be triggering of course, to people meaning that, oh my God, I’m not a racist. There’s no way in the world that I’m a doctor. I care for everyone. And there’s an immediate defense that can kind of come up.
So what I believe you have to do is you have to recognize that let’s start talking about number one. Do we have a problem? Let’s start educating populations within our own sphere of influence about the problem. Like there should not be a reason that if you live in Dallas, Texas in one part of the city that your life expected sees 30 years different than someone in another part of the city.
So when we look at that, we have to start asking a question of then why? Now as clinicians and as healthcare professionals, many of us, and even as business professionals, we’re analytical individuals, we’re intellectual individuals. We should start asking the questions to why is that? And you keep peeling back that onion and digging to the why, why, why.
Why did this happen? Why did that happen? Why is this happening? And so for us, when we started looking at how do we start to improve? Not only diversity in our organization, I can get to that, some tactics there. How do we create a sense of belonging and inclusion, but how do we get to equity?
We start to look at the reasons and the drivers for inequity, meaning what are the drivers for those social determinants health? So whether it’s education, whether it’s systemic racism, whether it’s, I mentioned education like childhood education, but are there even other types of education that we need to focus on? Targeted education, housing, food insecurity.
Those are some of the issues that we start looking at. And then we, once we identify those five or six domain, then we look tactically, or what are the things that we can do? As a large healthcare organization to make improvements in those areas so that we can ensure that patients are getting better healthcare, more access to healthcare, more equitable healthcare.
This is a long, long, long journey though. This is not something that will change in a day. So that’s the first thing is I think we first are diagnosing the showing that there is a problem we’re educating our teams, that there is a problem. And sometimes it’s not so much an issue as a new problem. It’s a Hey, we’re all into this together. And we need to recognize that there’s a broad, broad problem here, and we need to do something to to affect it. And then once you identify the domains and the areas that are creating the inequity, then you start to address tactically the issues that are supporting that inequity and turning those around.
So it’s a multi-year journey, multi-prong type of approach.
Naji: Yeah, totally agree. And yeah, we have to start it and it’s great that Envision has you as a leader and then impact that you can have across the country. That’s really great. My last word is spread love in organizations. Thoughts?
Adam Brown: I love it. I mean, I love spread love. I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, we talk about as, you know, you’re a physician, I’m a physician, you know, we kind of jokingly said, oh, we did this cuz we want to help people. And when I say that jokingly, I remember someone saying to me back in medical school don’t answer that way on a question when someone asks why you want to go into medicine, because everybody says that, but I think it’s true. I think the reason why I’m doing what I’m doing is because I wanna impact people’s lives positively. I wanna make sure that my nephew whose eight years old has the same and the other that six, has the same ability as the kid across the street, the African American kid, has a life expectancy. I hope the African American kid has the same life expectancy as my nephew who’s Caucasian. There’s love there, right, that I want to make sure that there’s equitable access, that there’s fulfilled life. It’s because the color of our skin or where we grew up or the political leanings that we had, or the religion that we had, all of those different things should not be the driving force behind how our lives look, how long we have lives, the quality of life that we should have in the negative, it should all be positive. And so I love this idea that you have of spreading love, beause it goes back to your impact. What impact do we have as business leaders of improving the lives of other individuals around the world.
Naji: Well, it’s really an amazing way to sum it up. And I think you bring love and we can feel the passion you have behind it. This is why you’re moving lines within your organization and across all the US with what you’re doing, Adam, this is amazing. Any final word of wisdom for healthcare leaders around the world?
Adam Brown: Yeah, I think the final thing actually goes back to the thing that I’ve learned earlier. You know, I do believe that we are are still very much in this pandemic as much as many of us don’t want to be in the middle of the pandemic. And there is going to be a piece as we are starting to hopefully see the ends of some of the hard, hard pieces of the pandemic, where there’s not a vaccine, but where there is a vaccine now.
But we are going to have to reestablish our trust as leaders. And I think that’s important not only when we start to think through the lens of how do we protect the patients that we see, but how do we protect the clinicians that are caring for those patients?
Because as I’ve talked to many of my colleagues, many of us are hurting, and many of us have seen things that we never thought we would have seen, something that we did not prepare for. People say, oh Adam, yeah, yeah, in emergency medicine, you prepared for crises. Yep. But we didn’t prepare for crises that would go on at this long with this amount of stress and strain. And so as leaders, business leaders, as healthcare leaders, a way for us to establish that trust is start to become very empathic and understand the challenges of the patient, the challenges of our clinicians, so that we can reestablish ourselves as the trusted leaders and many of many folks who are listening are the trusted leaders. But that trust can be lost. And so as we go through challenges through the end of the pandemic, hopefully coming out of it sometimes soon there will be new issues. And so I believe we still have to understand our audience and make sure that we stay that trusted voice.
Naji: Thank you so much, Adam again for your time, generosity and such an inspiring discussion. Thank you.
Adam Brown: Thanks again for having me.
Naji: Thank you all for listening to spreadlove in organization’s podcast.
Follow us on LinkedIn and connect with us on spreadloveio.com. We’re eager to hear your thoughts and feedback. Most importantly, spread love in your organizations and spread the word around you to inspire others and amplify this movement, our world so desperately needs.