Naji Gehchan: Welcome to SpreadLove in Organizations, the healthcare leadership podcast where we explore leadership with purpose.
I’m Naji your host, excited to be joined today by Catharine Smith, who serves as inaugural Executive Director of the term Foundation, which carries on the bold legacy of former Genzyme, CEO, uh, Henry Term.
The foundation understands that bringing new treatments to patients is grueling work with a low probability of success, and believes we can improve these odds by positively impacting the human variables in healthcare. By supporting biotech leaders, they seek to increase the probability of creating cures and solving healthcare’s greatest challenges.
Prior to this, Catherine served as the CEO of the Clinton Health Matters Initiative at the Clinton Foundation, where she led a team focused on stigma reduction and overdose prevention related to the opioid epidemic. Before that role, Catherine was the executive director of the Harvard Center for Primary Care.
Where she led business development strategy and operations for a think tank focused on improving value-based patient-centered care. She holds an MBA from MIT and a graduate degree in social science research from the University of Chicago. Catherine, it’s really great to see you again and have you with me today.
Thanks, NJI. It’s awesome to be here. I’d love for us to hear more about your personal story, what’s, uh, behind your journey in the nonprofit world and specifically focused on healthcare.
Catharine Smith: Yeah, I’m, I’m happy to answer that. You know, I’ve had kind of an, an interesting shift in my life. So I started out, I mean, you mentioned that I have, uh, my first master’s is in social science research, and I, I really started out more in the kind of like social movement, social activism space, looking at the intersection of social movements in the international political economy.
But I moved back to the United States, finished my master’s in the early two thousands, and. I started really thinking about what the biggest challenges that I saw socially in the United States and where I wanted to get involved and where I really wanted to start my career. And if I, if I go backwards a little bit.
You know, I grew up in Missouri with a single mom without health insurance, and so really grow. Growing up I thought healthcare is just one of these things that wealthy people access. It’s not something for everybody. And then when I moved back to Chicago, and again, I’m, I’m sort of in that mindset of like human rights and social activism.
I started meeting a group of people in Chicago who are really sort of. At, at the time, pioneering this idea of healthcare as a human right. It’s been around for a really long time, but this was a new idea for me, and I was, I was blown away by it. I think now I’m, I’m kind of like, oh, that’s really silly.
How did I not know that? But coming from the sort of more blue collar background that I had, I never really thought about healthcare as this thing that, that anyone could access, that really anyone should access. And so started my career in healthcare, in health research and really started on this journey of how do you actually achieve health here as a human, right?
There’s so many cool entities working across the globe thinking about, you know, sustainable development goals and how do we get to universal health coverage? But at the time I didn’t know any of that, and so really was looking at these different bright spot models over the last 10 or 15 years of how do you achieve this goal of universal health coverage of healthcare as a human right.
While also supporting the workforce that delivers that healthcare while also making sure that it’s really patient-centered and, um, approaches different people in different ways that there’s a health equity focus. And so I started out really more in the delivery space, working primarily with physicians.
In the hospital medicine space, the primary care space, um, the community medicine space, looking at those bright spot models. And then a couple of years ago, um, got a call from a brand new foundation called the Tamir Foundation, which was really working more in the biotech space. And I thought, wow, if, if we’re really thinking about.
Bright spot models for achieving universal health coverage. What better way than looking at these cutting edge science and technological breakthroughs to really be a lever for change to make the world healthier? I mean, this is really the biotech social contract. This is what biotech is trying to do.
But for me, again, coming from this. System space. I was like, wow, how cool could this be? Right? So really shifted two or three years ago into this mindset of how do we use breakthroughs in science and breakthroughs in technology to breakthrough some of the complexity in the global and US healthcare system to make healthcare better for everybody.
Naji Gehchan: Thank you so much for, for sharing part of your story, uh, and also how you’re thinking throughout, uh, the, the past years. Uh, so as you said, you moved from being in the care place delivery. To now biotech, uh, and also you did some vertical specific and some, uh, crisis or diseases. So I’m interested along the way you’ve really do always supporting and solving complex problems with this idea of bringing healthcare as a human right.
Which I certainly believe in. Um, what has been your biggest learning throughout this journey and those different verticals, if you want to call them that way?
Catharine Smith: Yeah, so I, I would say overarching and, and this ties into the work that we’re doing at the Premier Foundation, overarching, is the power of an individual leader or a group of leaders to affect systemic change.
And, and I, again, I think this isn’t a, a surprise when I really think about. My initial focus on social movements and how much social movements have, have impacted us sort of socially and politically, um, and economically over, over the last century. Um, but I really started thinking about this when I was working at the Society of Hospital Medicine.
Which at the time was kind of in the scale up phase, but still working very closely with the founders and the idea with those founders, with the founders of Society of Hospital Medicine were, you know, there’s this tremendous shift in the way care is delivered in the hospital, and there have been so many tremendous changes in.
The hospital setting in terms of technology, care delivery, disease management. Um, and that was leading to a lot of challenges really in patient care in the hospital. And so this hospital medicine movement or the movement of, you know, physicians, nurses, and PAs working in the hospital who are really focused on that environment, um, provided an opportunity and really the founders of the hospital medicine movement took that opportunity to say, how do we actually improve the care?
For patients in the hospital and they thought about that in a lot of different ways. Um, but the thing that I think was the most interesting is how they deployed leaders. So, you know, when hospital medicine was born, sort of in the 1990s as a term. There was an acknowledgement across healthcare that we weren’t really training physicians as leaders.
And so they were one of the first organizations to say, how do we train our hospitalists not just to provide care, it’s really important, but to lead the care delivery. So they trained hospitalists as managers, as CEOs. They trained hospitalists as quality improvement experts. Um, they developed sort of a hub and spoke model for quality improvement where they trained mentors and leaders across the globe to then train other hos.
Hospitalists, I’m sorry, across the United States to then train other hospitals. Hospitalists across the United States to disseminate innovation through those hospitals. And I was like, wow, this is really, you know, there’s all kinds of things in the clinical care delivery and the education and the CME and the advocacy and what’s happening in dc that’s critical.
But what really fascinated me was how hospitalists as a movement honed in on the need to train leaders. And so that’s really followed through. And how I thought about primary care and how the Clinton Foundation was thinking about really shifting the narrative in the substance use crisis. And it is at the core of what we’re trying to do at the term year foundation with biotech leaders.
Naji Gehchan: So that’s a great segue for you to tell us a little bit more about the term foundation and the philosophy. You, uh, you.
Catharine Smith: Yeah. So, you know, for, for people listening who knew Henry Tamir? I did not meet Henry, but I feel like I know Henry through the people that worked with him, um, at Bio, at the Fed, at Genzyme in his life, um, in starting many, many, uh, companies.
You know, Henry, there were a lot of things that defined Henry, but I think the founders of the Tamir Foundation were really honed in on a couple of things. One, that he was a patient centered. Leader, his why was around patient impact. So it’s no surprise that he was really focused in the rare disease space.
And the other piece was he was a mentor. So there’s lots and lots of really cool stories about how Henry would take calls and really transformed, transformed careers, transformed ecosystems, companies, uh, therapeutic areas because he was mentoring leaders. And so that was the spark of the TRA foundation.
And so for me coming into it, I was the, um, brought in as the inaugural executive director and the first full-time employee to work with the founders, people who knew Henry Henry’s wife and several people who had worked with Henry or Henry had mentored. And so I’m coming in and I’m thinking. Okay. We have this really complex health healthcare system globally, especially in the United States.
If you really look at our high level metrics, we are not killing it in healthcare. Our life expectancy has been going down since pre COVID. We spend a ton of money, so I’m always thinking, what are these levers for change to make care better and more sustainable? Right? Because what we have now is, is care that’s really great in certain areas, but not great across the board.
We have health equity issues. We have cost issues, right? So what if we looked at biotech as this like really key lever to provide better therapeutics, better diagnostics, better patient journey, makes it life easier for physicians and nurses and PAs and care delivery teams. And what if we thought about leadership like Henry, right?
What if we thought about, you know. Our responsibility to solve big problems, leveraging our passion for patient care to move the needle forward. And so with the foundation, we, we said, what if we start with founders with early stage CEOs? Because we know that, um, early stage companies have tremend. Power.
It kind of feels like they don’t, right? Because there’s a lot of them and it’s really hard to get the company off the ground to get the science off the ground. But there’s a lot of power in entrepreneurship. There’s a lot of power in founding a company. Um, and there’s certainly a lot of potential for impact.
So what we’ve done is really think about this kind of, um. Social movement of biotech leaders. We really started with first time CEOs of people who want to change healthcare, wanna change society primarily through impacting patients. So we’ve recruited a group of healthcare leaders, of biotech leaders who are laser focused on patient impact, and then we provide them really lifetime support.
Sports by talking to them, by looking at what best practices are in leadership development, how do we take those people from wherever they are to where they want to go, which is patient impact? ’cause we all have the same why through providing them mentoring and professional development, training and coaching.
Um, and so we’re about, as a, as an organization with staff, we’re about four years old. So that’s been our kind of four year journey, like focusing on that why around Henry and patient impact and then around building this. Movement, social movement of patient-centered biotech leaders.
Naji Gehchan: And I’m excited. Uh, we can share.
I think today we will be bringing amazing biotech founders and, uh, some, some of their stories, uh, through Spread lab io and the partnership we will be building, uh, with, uh, with you, Katherine, and the foundation. Um, I, I know one of the key aspects that you work on, and you said it several times. Uh, leadership, uh, and how it’s defined as I was going through, uh, what what you do and what the foundation has been really, uh, doing strongly with a big belief is what you call human variable.
Um, so can you help us understand how you think about it and how have you been supporting those early phase biotech leaders through their journeys?
Catharine Smith: Yeah, happy to do that. So, you know, as our founders, the initial concept that our founders and our founding board had, I’ve heard this from Belinda Tamir and from John Meno, who’s the founding CEO of Alnylam, um, Alan Waltz, who’s another one of our co-founders.
I hear from them and, and I love this spark for the foundation, this idea that. You know, when we think about starting a biotech and we think about the biotech ecosystem, there’s really tremendous science. There’s tremendous breakthroughs in science. There’s a lot of capital around, even though sometimes it feels like there’s a not, um, the part, all of that needs to be moved forward.
And it’s complex. But the part that it has the most opportunity are the people, right? It’s the people involved in all of those processes, and there’s never enough. Leadership support for those individuals. So we know that, especially ’cause we’re working with early stage first time CEOs, everything is new for us, right?
Um, and for the community that we serve. And we also know that it’s a really lonely journey, right? So when I think about the. This resources we provide, I’ll, I’ll start with network. Um, which sounds like, I think when people think about network, they think about what’s the largest number of people that I can have in my network so that I can look at my LinkedIn or I can pick up the phone.
But when we think about network, we think about the deliberate, deliberate curation of a table of people. Could be a large table of people. That you call when you’re having your worst day that you call when your pitch deck needs to be refined, when you are having some sort of challenge in the lab or challenge in the clinic, right?
So multi-layered people with values that match with yours, because that’s really important. And for us, our value is really around patient-centeredness, um, and leveraging this. Science and the business as tools to support patients, right? So we look for those that values aligned network and really curating that group of people who can help a biotech leader or A CEO get to the next step, get to what they’re identifying as success.
So we do network curation in a lot of different ways. Um, we have a group of the most amazing mentors on the planet. Um, most of whom were either former CEOs or their board members, or they have really deep expertise in biotech. We have a group of advisors who are subject matter experts in anything from, um, clinical trials to hr, to finance.
And then, um, you know, we have the peer network, right? Which we actually hear from our first time CEOs that that peer network is the most valuable. I think I mentioned being A CEO, um, is really lonely. It’s a lonely path. You’re kind of, you’re stuck between a lot of different priorities in a lot of different groups of people and they really need each other and they lean on each other.
And then in terms of more like concrete resources, we look at the, the sort of training element of our programs in two ways, if you will. One of it, one of them is leadership development skills, and those are those leadership development skills that I saw developed in hospital medicine that I just saw, uh, developed in the physician as leader courses at Harvard Medical School.
In the, in the leadership skills that we were developing with primary care leaders across the us, across the globe. Those are those leadership skills that we need to navigate change to lead teams to fundraise. And then the other side are really technical skills. And those technical skills tend to vary.
So when we recruit a cohort, we have conversations with them, we find out their needs, and we sort of make those, um, technical skills a little more bespoke depending on the year, depending on where the cohort is hanging out. We bring in cohorts between seed and series A, um, but then in the lifetime of a fellow, they could be anywhere up through B Series B-C-D-I-P-O, right?
So those needs change. We have regular conversations with people to bring in technical expertise depending on the life cycle of that company. Um, so we really try to sort of put our footprint on what we think is really important for leadership, but also let our cohorts, let the CEOs that we’re supporting or the biotech leaders that we’re supporting also define what they need so that it’s really blended of need and sort of market best practices.
Naji Gehchan: This sounds really super strong and appealing for any first time ceo, so I don’t know how you, uh, how you do this selection and who are the lucky ones who get in. Uh, but it’s, uh, it’s really an amazing, uh, program and support system as you start into biotech. And I love how you talk about biotech being a lever to change care, you know, like.
Not, not many would think about it that way, but I certainly agree with how you’re framing it. Uh, so as you’re putting all this together and you’ve been having several cohorts, uh, I think through the past four years, um, in our current world, which is. Constantly changing. Sometimes we feel to the better as the science evolves.
Sometimes with policy, we might feel it in a different way. Where, where do you see the most exciting parts and the future of biotech as you’re really at the heart of the beginning of those, uh, revolutions, you’re, you’re leading.
Catharine Smith: Yeah, I mean there are so many ways that I could answer this, so I’ll just kind of try to be as concise as possible.
I think, I think like everybody, you know, we work with a lot of, um, patient advocate advocacy groups in the rare disease disease space. So I think just watching from micro to macro advancements in the rare disease space, I mean, it’s. I am not even sure that I have words to explain the impact that that has on children and families.
So I think there’s sort of actual changes that have happened, you know, from Genzyme with Gaucher disease to what we’ve seen with cystic fibrosis, um, today, you know, but really that potential, that new gene therapies, new therapies will come to. Really, hopefully cure children with rare disease and individuals with rare disease and treat other, um, rare disease symptoms.
So I think, like I could talk a lot about how, how wonderful it is to work with the different patient advocacy groups and different startups in the rare disease space. So I think that is. Always really exciting. It’s, you know, cord Henry, it’s core to Genzyme. Um, it’s not exclusively what we do, but we certainly have a rare disease bias because of the passion that lives within that community and the passion that still extends from the Genzyme community.
You know, I think you mentioned policy and I think. One of the things that I’ve observed in the biotech space in particular, obviously there’s a ton of federal funding in the biotech space, and federal funding is like, you know, it’s, it’s subjected to the whims of what’s happening in dc, right? It’s subjected to the whims of politics across the United States.
There’s also a lot of private sector money in biotech, obviously, that gives biotech, again, the ability to be a tremendous lever for change. And we see a lot of investments happen and we know, especially with vc, um, people are looking to make money and that’s fine. That’s the game that we’re playing. And there is also an opportunity to really think about health equity.
And so one of the things that I’m really excited about is. All of the energy and passion around women’s health that I’ve seen over the past six or eight months. I know some of that came from some of the, the, um, statements and policy out of dc but honestly, there’s still a lot of excitement. You know, that you look at the biotech, sisterhood, right?
Biotech, CEO, sisterhood, um, a group of women CEOs across the United States, and there’s such tremendous energy for that. But if you also just look at the different, um, VCs, different labs that are really thinking about women’s health and if we really think about health equity and what’s happening in particular in the United States, but across the globe with disproportionate impact of disease on certain communities, I think you could look at a lot of different communities, but you look at women and we’re a huge percentage of population, right?
Um, and so I am really excited to see how the private sector across the board really rallies around. Unmet need in that space. I mean, there’s no better definition of unmet need, um, than looking at women’s health right now. So I’m really excited to see what happens in that space too.
Naji Gehchan: Certainly a, a lot to be done.
I’m, I’m with you. Like the excitement of the work ahead and also what started is really important and there’s still, there’s still a lot to be done, which is exciting actually, because we can, we can solve for it together. Um, I’m gonna now give you a word and I would love your first reaction to it. The first one is leadership.
Catharine Smith: Yeah, my first reaction to that is responsibility. Um, it’s one of our values at the Premier Foundation. It’s one of my personal values. I think the biggest sign of a leader, and, and I would note like leaders can be anybody, right? They can be. First year corporate interns, they can be high school students. I mean, leadership is not about title, it’s about ethos.
Right. And I think the first sign of a leader is that they take responsibility for the change that they wanna see. That could be having a less toxic team culture. It could be, you know, curing rare disease. It could be scientific breakthroughs, it could be running for office, right? And I think taking the responsibility for the change that you wanna see.
Is so critical, like we just won’t move forward as a society no matter what. Move forward is like a little subjective, but whatever move forward looks like for somebody we can’t do if we don’t take responsibility for that. Um, so that’s the first word that comes to mind.
Naji Gehchan: What about biotech?
Catharine Smith: Oh, you know, I really think I’ve, I’ve been listening to, um, Peter Ksky in particular talk about the biotech social contract.
Again, a new concept to me being relatively new to biotech and really been thinking about how he frames that. I think I mentioned sort of biotech as a lever for change. I, because I come from a more health systems approach, I really do think about this unbelievably complex ecosystem of hospitals, community-based care payers, the government, um, investors, biotech rights labs, and.
We need serious change in healthcare in this country. I think anybody who’s received any sort of healthcare, whether it’s for something relatively simple or complex, knows how terrible that process can be for a patient. Um, and think about how much better the process would be if. The diagnostics and the therapeutics were more streamlined.
If they were more accessible, if they were affordable, if they were easy to deliver, if the side effects were minimal. Think about how much biotech could play a role in the broader, broader healthcare system in solving some of the problems. Even honestly with. With clinician burnout, which is a huge issue.
The, the, the departure of clinicians from the health system is a little concerning. It’s one of my biggest concerns. Right? But what if we made the delivery of care a lot easier, a lot more streamlined? And so I just, I think I, when I think about biotech, I know people tend to think about disease and science.
I tend to think about this big ecosystem and what biotech’s role is, what the responsibility of biotech is for. Thinking about how it makes the system better. In providing better care for everybody. Um, obviously that taps into unmet need, which is a big part of the contract that biotech has with the globe, but it, it unmet need is small groups.
It’s big groups, right? It’s public health, it’s individual disease. Um, so I think it’s just really thinking about the potential for biotech to change the world through, through science.
Naji Gehchan: We talked about systems, so the word is system dynamics.
Catharine Smith: Yeah.
Naji Gehchan: Yeah.
Catharine Smith: I mean, of course I think like you, I’m thinking of one of these big Nelson repenting, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um, I think system dynamics, I think it’s an, it’s an interesting way of thinking about the world because it’s so. You know, it’s easy for us to get into this kind of, I, I’m always annoyed with how people can get very binary about all different types of things, when in reality it’s a complex system. And if instead of thinking yes or no, if we think, what if I jump in at a point in this big factory, right?
And Nelson rep Pennings dynamics look like a big factory. What if I jump in at a point in the factory and try to make this piece better, it’s gonna have disproportionate impact. We don’t know what that’s gonna look like. What if I find a group of people that think like me and we jump in at different places in the factory and try to make the whole factory better, right?
These are the opportunities that we have, um, when we think more systems wide and, and take responsibility for the change that we wanna make.
Naji Gehchan: Totally. The last one is spread love in organizations.
Catharine Smith: Yeah. Okay. So what really, what really interested me about you and about this podcast is, you know, um, aside from thinking about the, the healthcare system as a whole, you know, uh.
I’ve been working for a long time, right. I’ve been working for a long time and I, I, I think my first job when was when I was 11, um, off the books and have been doing a lot of off the books and on the books, working basically since I was a teenager and I’ve worked in some amazing places. Um, you know, I’ve worked in some amazing places and I’ve worked in some toxic places, and at the end of the day, um, most of us spend a lot of times, a lot of time within the, within the containment of our organization, of our employer, um, of our school, right.
And. There are so many really cool ways to run those organizations, to run those institutions, companies, and schools. And I think really your framing around spreading love, letting that be a point of orientation is so cool. I mean, I think that’s super core. It’s core to like management philosophy. It’s core to, you know, setting organizational vision.
I think I mentioned before just about biotech. We don’t do anything without the people. And I think a lot of organizations, they do kind of lose sight of the people, right? For a whole, for a lot of reasons, some of which are really good reasons. But the people, and making sure that the people have that, um, meaningful connection and are oriented around love is, and kindness is really critical.
Um, there’s no way we can get through the hard stuff if we don’t do that. So I love that you have this podcast and that you’re talking with people who have that same point of orientation.
Naji Gehchan: Thank you so much for your words. And, uh, yeah, it’s a, it’s a journey as you said, and certainly we deeply believe in it as you are also doing with, uh, with the leaders and founders you have, uh, in the foundation.
Uh, any final word of wisdom, uh, Katherine for leaders in healthcare?
Catharine Smith: I think, you know, two things that I’ve been thinking about a lot, and this is, this is a little bit for my friends, more in the care delivery space right now because that work is so, so hard. Um, and that’s just like, keep going and figure out.
What your point of light and point of why is, um, because we need you and that’s the people in the care delivery space specifically. We need you and ask for partnership. I think within the biotech space, I have some conversations with some people in the space that are, um. You know, crossing over between care delivery and biotech.
I think there’s a lot of opportunities to sort of refresh some of the challenges that are happening in the care delivery space through those partnerships. But, um, you know, and I think for everyone it’s think of, think of big problems that you wanna solve and let that be your point of inspiration. It drains us all.
It drains me too. Um, but it’s really exciting to think about some of these big challenges in healthcare, whether they’re due to the policy that we’re seeing now, or whether it’s just the natural eeb ebb and flow and complexity of human health. Um, but to find those big problems that you want to get involved in and, and find your humans who will solve them with you.
Naji Gehchan: I love that, and it’s certainly exciting. Uh, thank you so much, Catherine. We can, uh, talk for hours, uh, and I’m really, uh, grateful for your time today, all the impactful work you’re doing in the healthcare and, and in the biotech, uh, field. I look forward to meeting actually several of, uh, the founders you have and fellows you have at the, the foundation soon on future episodes.
Uh, so thanks again. It, it was a great pleasure to have you with me today.
Catharine Smith: Thank you so much. Thank you for you and thank you for the work that you’re doing as well.
Naji Gehchan: Thanks for listening to the show. For more episodes, make sure to subscribe to spread love io.com or whatever you listen to your podcasts.
Let’s inspire, change together and make a positive impact in healthcare one story at a time.
Naji Gehchan: Thanks for listening to the show! For more episodes, make sure to subscribe to Spreadloveio.com or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Let’s inspire change together and make a positive impact in healthcare, one story at a time.
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