The Backstory

By Jarrard Inc.News Business News

The Backstory episodes

September 20, 2023High Stakes: 008. Stability and Adaptation - The Biology of Change, with Larry McEvoy and Kevin Kearns
Here at Jarrard, we're always interested in not just how healthcare leaders are doing the work that underpins our system of medical care, but also how they lead through the work. How they develop and empower teams. How they demonstrate through words and actions how the work – which is often so difficult and exhausting – affects each person involved and how those people can be part of the shared mission and process.
With all that in mind, Kevin Kearns and David Shifrin spoke with physician, executive coach and former health system CEO, Larry McEvoy, MD. Larry is founder of Epidemic Leadership. There, he looks at the intersection of business, biology and health as a foundation for helping leaders innovate and adapt for today's complex healthcare challenges.
Key Takeaways:
Biology has a great deal to teach us about how leaders can guide and empower teams to be steady, stable and consistent. How do you win the math and get the best of people most of the time, even thought it won't be all of the time?
Often, performance (immediate) and growth (long-term) are pursued separately. But they go hand in hand and successful leaders find ways to help their teams perform well in the moment while adapting and evolving for long-term success.
It looks obvious on paper, but it’s important for healthcare leaders to remember that People still want to care. It's just a matter of identifying the things that get in the way of accomplishing goals and what leaders – and teams - can do about it. The question becomes, how do we stop adding barriers to people working together effectively and allow them to do what they already want to do?
How do you identify where to start? Sit down with your team and ask people to describe their best team experience…and then ask about their worst.

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29 min
September 06, 2023 High Stakes: 007. Neighbors Caring for Neighbors - Rural Healthcare with Michael Topchik
The National Rural Health Association is hosting the Critical Access Hospital and Rural Health Clinic conferences in a few weeks, from September 26-29. Our colleagues from both Jarrard and Chartis will be there, digging into the issues facing rural providers today. They’ll also be providing resources, research and education to rural healthcare leaders – content that will extend well beyond the conferences.

With all of that coming up, we wanted to lay the groundwork by taking a broad look at the challenges facing rural healthcare today through the eyes of two people who spend their time studying and working with rural providers.

Letitia Fecher is a Vice President at Jarrard and our Public and Community Health System Practice Lead. Michael Topchik is the National Leader of the Chartis Center for Rural Health. They’re also spearheading the presentations at NRHA.

In this conversation, Fecher and Topchik look at:
·      Regulation and policy
·      Workforce issues
·      Community engagement during operational change

Key Points
·      Quality is job number one. But it’s not just quality as defined by ratings organizations or regulatory agencies. It’s the quality patients feel when they receive care at a hospital, and how employees feel when they come to work every day.
·      Communication with the community must be ongoing. A rural hospital’s first message to its community should not be announcing a service line closure. Instead, rural healthcare leaders need to be regularly talking about the ways delivery of care are shifting and ways the hospital is changing to meet the community’s needs.
Nurse and staff engagement are vital. Retention is a major challenge for all provider organizations, with rural hospitals feeling especially pinched over the past few years. It’s critical to find out what caregivers are looking for even when increased compensation may not be an option. Invest in relatively simple things – better engagement with leadership, more two-way communication, focusing on the mission, offering career development opportunities.

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29 min
August 23, 2023High Stakes: 006. Building Teams and Pursuing Health Equity through Relationships, with Dorian Harriston
Dorian Harriston is the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Morehouse School of Medicine. She has been in the role for about six months now, having previously served in marketing and communications roles at Cedars-Sinai and The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
Harriston, as her current position suggests, knows healthcare marketing and communications inside out, having built successful brand positioning, digital marketing and content experiences throughout her career. But she joined the podcast to talk about a big part of her career – and work at Morehouse School of Medicine – that isn’t as obvious: Team building. Maybe Harriston’s biggest strength, lying just under the surface of the Marcomm job description, is finding ways to elevate people to do their best work. The result?
Aligned teams with every member fully bought into the work and goals in front of them
A more diverse workforce, with opportunities for anyone and everyone to grow and advance
More equitable, patient-centric care that comes out of clear and personal messaging from that mission-oriented team of marcomm pros.
In this conversation, Harriston talks about how…
Everything starts with strong relationships
Her personal and professional background influences her role at Morehouse School of Medicine
She has taken an already committed, strong team and not rest on that historical excellence but continued to push forward
She pursues a policy of confidence, honesty and openness with her team as a way to get the best ideas and outcomes out of the work – and giving those team members a chance to shine in the process.

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26 min
August 09, 2023High Stakes: 005. Threads? What's Next for Healthcare Social Media with Abby McNeil, Meghan McCarthy & Tommy Barbee
Is Threads the place to be or, uh, boring and not worth it?
The latest loud social media splash is Threads, a direct Twitter – now X – competitor from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. It was the fastest social media platform to 100 million users, but since then engagement has dropped precipitously. Which all leads to the question above. More specifically, how much should healthcare provider marketing and communications teams be investing in any given social media platform? Is Threads worth diving into? Even beyond Threads, there’s the deeper issue of too many platforms and channels and not enough resources within hospital marcomm offices to be present everywhere.
So, where do you invest?
This week it’s an all-Jarrard podcast, with Abby McNeil, Meghan McCarthy and Tommy Barbee bringing their extensive background in healthcare marketing, communications and digital strategy to the Threads debate.
Key Insights
Threads doesn’t make sense for most organizations. Not worth it. Borin, even. Today, it’s a better spot for individuals and influencers.
That said, it may be worth having a couple of people on your team to sign up and keep an eye on the platform as it evolves
A few healthcare organizations are in a good position to use Threads. Namely, academic medical centers and research institutions that are known for cutting-edge innovation and that are looking to engage and recruit students or researchers – the people who might have that personal account.
In the end, it’s crucial to know what you’re trying to accomplish and where your target audience is before investing in any social media platform. Otherwise, you’re just stressing your social media managers.

Also, just to be clear, Jarrard Inc. is not on Threads. But you can find all of our thinking at jarrardinc.com/subscribe

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21 min
July 26, 2023High Stakes: 004. Is the Marketing Funnel Dead? Healthcare Marketing with Pattie Cuen and Abby McNeil
Is the marketing funnel dead?
That question started bouncing around among those at Jarrard Inc. who have backgrounds and specialize in healthcare marketing. It’s a provocative question, and provocative questions lead to sharp conversations that make for good podcasts. So, we asked two of those experienced healthcare marketers to have that conversation on the record.
Pattie Cuen served at UCLA for two decades. There, she established the medical center's first internal communications team and orchestrated an award-winning branding campaign for the system. More recently, Cuen held a high-level position at Cedars-Sinai.
Abby McNeil is a vice president at the firm and deputy lead of our Regional Practice. McNeil has served in a number of prominent roles, including vice president of communications and public affairs for CHRISTUS Health, where she sat at the helm of all corporate communications and helped guide the organization through COVID.
Key Insights:
The marketing funnel isn’t dead. But it’s not really the most accurate model, either. It serves a useful, mostly two-dimensional purpose to get a snapshot of how consumers move from awareness to conversion. It’s also helpful as a relatively simple tool to present marketing concepts and different levels of messaging to people outside the field.
The funnel doesn’t take into account the time involved as people move from one stage to the next. That time could be five minutes for a digital engagement or weeks/months for an out-of-home campaign like a billboard.
Another way to think about the customer journey is as an elliptical. Once someone converts and makes a purchase – or, in healthcare, becomes a patient – the selling process starts all over, and the patient has to choose you all over again. And again. And again. It’s not one-and-done. Meanwhile, each person is sitting in the funnel – or spinning on the elliptical – of other providers, making it a multi-dimensional environment for conversion and retention.
Because of that elliptical process, the patient experience has to be dialed in right alongside the marketing messages and platforms. If someone buys but can’t schedule a followup appointment for weeks, they’ll go somewhere else regardless of how great your marketing campaigns are.

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20 min
July 12, 2023High Stakes: 003. Don't Call it a Breach - Healthcare Cybersecurity with Barry Mathis and Dan Schlacter
Is it possible for a hospital to turn a small cybersecurity incident into a full-blown crisis based only on the words used and the approach to communicating about the event? What about the opposite – is it possible for a major incident to be mitigated and minimized with little reputational damage…just through effective communication?
The answer to these rhetorical questions is, obviously, yes.
That’s according to cybersecurity with Barry Mathis. Mathis is a principal at PYA where he draws on three decades of experience as a chief information officer, chief technology officer, and other roles to help healthcare clients plan, develop and implement complex IT solutions.
As part of that work, Mathis spends a lot of time advising healthcare organizations on how to reduce risk and avoid – or worst-case scenario, minimize – the fallout from cybersecurity incidents. For this conversation Mathis joined Dan Schlacter, a vice president in the Jarrard Inc. Health Services Practice and lead on much of the firm’s cybersecurity work, to talk about the best practices and the role of communications both before and after an incident.
Key Insights
Be strategic about the words that you use to describe a cybersecurity attack: Avoid the word “breach,” and instead opt for a word like “incident,” to reduce exposure and dial down the temperature in communications about the event.
Prioritize cybersecurity training and have a crisis response plan in place before an attack happens to ensure that your organization can respond to an attack quickly and efficiently.
Loop in communications experts and legal counsel during the early stages of a cybersecurity incident. (And don’t take anything in this conversation as legal advice. We are not attorneys.)

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20 min
June 28, 2023High Stakes: 002. Tech and the Human Touch - Healthcare Staffing with Craig Ahrens and Courtney Kelsey
Can technology really augment and streamline healthcare operations and make the work of healthcare workers easier? Can technology help provider organizations actually manage their workforce more effectively?
The answer to both of these questions is obviously, “Yes.” And despite significant progress over the past few years, it still seems at times that technology and digital tools complicate and confuse as much as they help. The reality hasn’t yet matched the promise.
Still, there are tools and platforms that are accelerating the progress. And, helping provider organizations communicate and engage with their workforce in ways that can help those caregivers find even more satisfaction on their work while smoothing out the bumps of staffing shortages.
Greg Allen Ahrens is an advisor for ShiftMed, a new type of staffing platform. Delivering easy to use an innovative tools that help providers streamline their day-to-day operations and optimize their show rates.
Courtney Kelsey is an associate vice-president and strategic engagement and development expert in Jarrard Inc’s Academic Medical Center Practice. In her work, Kelsey applies her deep background in team optimization and people focused change management to help healthcare leaders enhance the entire employee experience.
In this conversation, Kelsey, Ahrens and David Shifrin talk about how technology can augment and support healthcare leaders, staffing, and engagement efforts, and how a new wave of tools exemplified by ShiftMed can save huge amounts of money while increasing job satisfaction and professional growth among healthcare workers.
Key Insights
Have a sense of urgency. Times are tough for everyone in the healthcare world. If you wait to solve your workforce issues while you’re focusing on other things, all of the talent will have already been scooped up by other systems taking the initiative.
Integrate technology with humanity. By listening to what your people want and understanding the “hotspots” in your organization, you can empower your employees to reach their goals with the help of technology.
Enhance your workforce via education. Investing in and educating your existing workforce gives you more control over your system’s capabilities while at the same time differentiating yourself as an employer and elevating your brand.

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20 min
June 14, 2023High Stakes: 001. The Beginner’s Mind - Workforce Engagement with Dan Shapiro and Kevin Kearns
Physician and nurse burnout.
It’s an issue that has been studied at an increasing rate over the past few years. It’s a ubiquitous topic in any discussion about challenges facing healthcare today. Addressing it is a moral and operational imperative – caregivers need to be cared for, most importantly for their own health and wellbeing and also for the sustainability of provider organizations.
So, how healthcare leaders move from knowledge to action when it comes to burnout?
In our latest podcast, we work towards some answers.
Dan Shapiro, PhD, is a partner at Chartis and the director of the Chartis Center for Burnout Solutions. In that role, Dan and his team assist leaders of multi-hospital systems in their efforts to reduce burnout and the turnover of high-value physicians, nurses, APPs, and other staff. Dan’s background includes a PhD in clinical psychology and a postdoc at Harvard where we focused on medical crisis intervention.
Shapiro joined Kevin Kearns, a vice president at Jarrard Inc. and expert in organizational development strategy, to talk about some of the issues underlining the rocky healthcare workforce landscape. They also dig into some of the best practices for organizational design and employee support needed to address burnout.
Key Insights
Different roles require different solutions: Don’t overlook the unique challenges and needs within different subpopulations of your workforce.
Utilize data to develop solutions: Ground your actions in evidence so you can implement a systematic approach tailored to your organization.
Start now, before it’s too late: Organizations that aren’t investing in their people when times are tough will see their problems exacerbated in the long run.
It doesn’t stop with frontline staff and managers. Engagement efforts must extend to the HR and leadership teams to ensure that everyone can thrive.

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19 min
November 20, 2022 Quick Think: Healthcare and the Amazon Whiplash
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Amazon is a sprawling, complex company rife with prominent leaders, disparate initiatives, investments, plans, problems, things that work, things that don’t, with all those discordant messages playing out on the public stage. On the regular.
Sound familiar?

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5 min
November 13, 2022 Quick Think: Everything's Moneyball
Healthcare is playing Moneyball. It's a model that comes from baseball and uses a ruthless focus on analytics to help teams build lean, efficient squads that outperform their higher-spending rivals. But healthcare, like baseball, is science...and art. It’s the powerful combination that creates the care and the experience we all want when we seek care. The pursuit of efficiency can't lead down a road where no one wants to live.

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6 min