In honor of March being 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. Those conversations take us into April.
Today, we hear from Kavita Patel, MD, a primary care internist at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Patel is also a fellow in the economics program at the Brookings Institute and the managing director for clinical transformation and delivery at the institute’s Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform. She served in the Obama administration as the director of policy for the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement and as the deputy staff director for the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee under the direction of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy.
Q: What role do women have as decision-makers/leaders in today's healthcare sector?
A: Women have an increasing role, I mean, especially kind of spurred by the numbers of women graduating from, like, master’s in policy programs, MBA programs, medical degrees programs, which are now getting to, like, half-and-half in terms of gender breakdown, especially in medicine itself. However, if you look at sectors there’s more women in policy roles but when you look at the leadership of key policy institutions or key agencies, there aren’t as many women as I personally would like to see. The Obama administration has done, I would say, a record breaking job of putting women in really senior positions so that’s, I think, a great signal that women can not only help to do something during a very politically difficult time as well as lead some of these hard health reforms, implementation, health systems, but also it shows that the president, I think, is personally invested in making sure that he has a really broad set of women leaders across these different sectors in healthcare. Nancy-Ann DeParle in the White House. We’ve got Marilynn Tavenner at Medicare and Medicaid. We have the secretary of Health and Human Services, obviously, Kathleen Sebelius. And then we have several assistant secretaries who are women also, in different areas of expertise. So it’s a pretty amazing time, but I would say that it’s still something that when I look at leaders at large institutions, etc., there are not as many as probably a lot of us would like.
Q: What do women bring to the table to shape the future of healthcare?
A: It’s always kind of a tough question, like, how are women different from men per se? But I do think and I know there’s at least been, not only my personal experience, but there’s been some professional studies that have looked at this. I think healthcare, especially right around now, is so fraught politically and charged with a sense of there’s this divide, if you will, like the pro-health reform people and the anti-health reform people. I think what women do is kind of bring, almost not necessarily just an ability to convene or negotiate around these issues, but what they do is they bring both the personal experiences, because in many cases the women are also in roles such as moms, spouse, cousin, sister, daughter, and they bring sort of through that personal experience as the people who really have to take care of a lot of issues in their family, or even when they’re not the caretakers there’s a level of empathy for that role, and that is matched with kind of (a) savvy of navigating these tough politics. … I saw Nancy-Ann DeParle do it personally in the White House. She was just really brilliant at bringing people who would never say that they agreed on anything – to bring them together. She had this kind of subtle yet direct, in a way, kind of getting them to talk to each other and then coming out with some sort of agreement. Is that exclusive to women? No. But I do think that it’s generally been an asset that women have had that give them an advantage.
Q: What do you personally believe should be the path forward to better care and lower costs?
A: I think that having some sort of ability to really bring the patient into this experience will be the pathway forward. I think that this is really difficult. … (P)eople would speak to me a lot during the debate around healthcare reform about patient accountability and they would make the claim that nowhere in health reform do we say that patients have to be accountable for what happened to them. That if they went and had a Big Mac and fries for lunch and they were told by their doctor not to eat something like that – people in healthcare were frustrated by what individual patients would do with their own personal decisions. I think having a way to bring patients more into the way the healthcare system is actually structured and delivered is going to be the key. At the end of the day, nobody feels comfortable being in a doctor’s office or in a hospital or in any clinical setting, so the more we can do to kind of break down the psychology around what we do in healthcare I think will be able to help ourselves make better decisions and I think that’s going to be key. But I think nobody knows exactly how to do that, but I think that will be what really turns the corner in a lot of ways.
Follow HFN associate editor Stephanie Bouchard on Twitter @SBouchardHFN.