This is the last week of our Women in Healthcare series, which we began last month in honor of Women’s History Month. Healthcare Finance News asked some of the women leaders in the nation’s healthcare industry to talk about the role of women in healthcare.
Today, we hear from Christine Cassel, MD, a noted expert on geriatric medicine and the president and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine and the ABIM Foundation. Cassel’s accomplishments are many. Among them: She was the first woman chair of the ABIM, the first woman president of the American College of Physicians and the first woman dean of Oregon Health and Science University. She is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books and was appointed to President Barack Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
Q: What role do women have as decision-makers/leaders in today's healthcare sector?
A: Women actually have major roles in much of what’s going on in healthcare today in lots of ways. Some of it is governmental – that’s where people tend to look first. You see people like Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services. You see Marilynn Tavenner, who’s now the administrator of CMS. You see Carolyn Clancy who is the head of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. … Peggy Hamburg, who is the commissioner for FDA. So I think we’ve seen – that isn’t true just in this administration, it’s been true in past administrations as well – that women have been in leadership positions in a number of healthcare agencies at very, very senior levels. That is a place where in some ways I think the glass ceiling has not impeded capable women from having really important leadership capability and I think it’s a good place to look for leadership.
It’s also true that a number of women … just in my interaction with the world of health plans and hospitals and hospital and healthcare systems – more and more women are rising to leadership positions. A good example is Susan DeVore who is the president and CEO of the (Premier healthcare) alliance, which is the largest hospital alliance in the country. They’re doing really forward work in healthcare quality and helping to actually implement some of these transformational ideas that are coming out of the policy world. …
I think that there are many, many roles for women in this sector (healthcare) and it’s a place of great opportunity. I’ve talked to my young granddaughter who’s in high school about the opportunities in healthcare. One of the things I think appeals to me about it and I don’t want to generalize but I would imagine it appeals to other women, is that it’s a combination of science and caring. It’s a combination of evidence and rigor with compassion. There aren’t that many places in the world where you definitely both have equal priority. At the end of the day, you are doing work that is very meaningful, that is effecting human lives and you’re applying deep levels of knowledge and skill, which is part of what makes it so satisfying.
Q: What do women bring to the table to shape the future of healthcare?
A: In part, the answer to that is what I just sense, this sort of combination, but again, I have to tell you I’m reluctant to generalize about women these days because I think like men, women are a very diverse population of people. But now that 50 percent of students going into medical school are women and a huge part of the rest of the healthcare workforce at every level are women, I think it is important to recognize certain kinds of things that tend to be more common, perhaps, in women leaders. I mean leaders at every level, whether you’re talking about a clinical setting or a whole health system or a policy situation. To my mind, that’s a kind of a combination of visionary – the ability to kind of look out in the future and also to be very practical. Sometimes I think that in the world of people who are visionaries you don’t always have people who are able to be very, sort of, sensible and practical. What are the next steps? On the other hand, you don’t want to be limited by what exists in front of you in thinking about where we need to go and what needs to happen. I think there’s tremendous abilities that we have to be able to help combine those two things.
Q: What do you personally believe should be the path forward to better care and lower costs?
A: I think we all have to embrace and own these two goals: better care and lower costs. I would add to that better health of communities. The better care when people need care but also better health of our population. That happens to be the three-part aim that the Affordable Care Act is based on and that Don Berwick (former Centers for Medicare & Medicaid administrator) espoused during his leadership there. But it’s not owned by any one entity. It’s really something that I think the entire society would benefit from. See, you have to kind of look at what your piece of it is. For me as a physician and someone interested in quality of care and the access to and affordability of care, I think every professional has to take ownership of the fact that there are things we can do that improve quality and reduce costs. We have to get busy working on those things with other people. One of the things we see a lot in healthcare, because it’s such a complex business, is that we all point fingers at the other guy. It’s the hospital’s fault, or it’s the insurance company’s fault, or it’s the government’s fault, or it’s the doctor’s fault or it’s the patient’s fault. The fact of the matter is that we all have parts of our assumptions about healthcare, the way we use information, the way we organize care, that produces waste and that sometimes produces harm to patients because they don’t get what they need or because they get something that they didn’t need. Together, I think, recognizing that the decade we’re now in offers us enough data and enough scientific evidence that we know what we know and we know what we don’t know so we ought to be able to map that path in a much more specific way. I guess the short version of my answer is that everybody in the healthcare world needs to take ownership for exactly those goals: better care and lower costs.
Follow HFN associate editor Stephanie Bouchard on Twitter @SBouchardHFN.