The Edge of Healthcare: From Loss to Legacy: A Journey Through Palliative Care

Martin Cody: Welcome to The Edge of Healthcare, where the pulse of innovation meets the heartbeat of leadership. I’m Martin Cody, your guide through riveting conversations with the trailblazers of healthcare. Tune in to gain exclusive access to strategies, experiences, and groundbreaking solutions from influential payer and health system leaders. This isn’t just a podcast, it’s your VIP ticket to the minds shaping the future of healthcare right now. Buckle up, subscribe, and get ready to ride to The Edge of Healthcare, where lessons from leaders are ready for you to use today.

Martin Cody: Hello again, everyone! Welcome to The Edge of Healthcare: lessons from leaders to use today. My name is Martin Cody, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Madaket Health, and I’m thrilled to welcome someone who has taken numerous leaps of faith, reinvented herself on a number of occasions, and moved across country to do so. Please welcome to the program, Stacie Pinderhughes. Stacie, good morning in your area.

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: Good morning, Martin. I’m happy to be here.

Martin Cody: I really appreciate it, and I appreciate the introduction from a prior podcast guest. And that’s, I love when leaders recognize other leaders to say, hey, this is a person that you need to have on your program. And I was thrilled to meet you. And I know we talked previously that you’re from New Jersey. You’re now out in Arizona. But I’d be curious a little bit from a healthcare perspective, how you first got into healthcare in New Jersey?

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: Probably, I would say that started when I was in my tween years, my dad was an OB/GYN, and I had thought that medicine was something that I would never do because he was never home. He was always out of the house, in the hospital, delivering babies. And one weekend, he said, why don’t you come to the hospital on rounds with me? And probably because my mother said, get her out of the house; I need a break from her. But you know, I went on rounds with him. And I’ll never forget going into the hospital. We go to the OB/GYN unit, and the nurses all loved my dad, and I was just like jaded tween. So, I was always annoyed by my parents. But they all loved him and Dr. P, oh, it’s so nice to see you. You went into the patient’s rooms. He was like a hero. Both the women were there, their husbands, their family, their new babies. The nurses at the nursing station fawning all over me. Oh, my God, that’s your daughter. She’s so cute. Does she want a doughnut? You’re going to go to medical school? It was just, like, fun. And then we went to the medical floor because he had a patient there, and all of a sudden, the energy was totally different. The nurses were still the same. Everybody still loved him. He had great introductions, but there was a code blue, and he was running to get the crash cart. And there was all this energy. And I remember things slowed down. Try and slow down. And I just. My eyes were like saucers. And I was looking like, wow, this is really cool. This is really cool. I want to do this. And so I think that for me, that was the start, that it seemed really exciting and energetic.

Martin Cody: And how large of a town did you grow up in?

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: So I grew up in a town called Montclair, New Jersey, and it was fairly large, fairly large town, about 30 minutes outside of Manhattan; diverse, lots of great restaurants, lots of great schools. And so it was a great town to grow up in, I think because you feel like growing up in Montclair, you can do whatever you want to do.

Martin Cody: Right. I know I’ve been fortunate enough to know a lot of OB/GYN in actually smaller towns, not in big cities. And it’s always funny to hear the stories that they reflect upon, because more often than not, a theme will come through. He’s like, I delivered half the babies in this town type of stuff. So they know every single person in the community as a result of having delivered all of them. Montclair sounds a little too big for that.

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: No, that’s been my experience in my life. I can’t seem to go anywhere without somebody saying, hey, do you know … Pinderhughes? Yes, he’s my father. I got called for jury duty in New Jersey once, and I’d never been called for jury duty. And I remember I was, like, begrudgingly going there like, oh my God, I’m busy. I’m a doctor. I don’t have time to do this. And so I go down to the courthouse, and the woman who’s checking us in and responsible for that, she goes, Pinderhughes, Dr. Pinderhughes? And I said, yeah, that’s my dad. She goes, oh my God, he delivered my baby. And we started having this conversation. And it turns out that I was dismissed, that I got to go home. But yeah, I always meet people who know my father.

Martin Cody: That is great. And then so the tween years opened up your eyes to potentially. Well, medicine might actually not be that bad. And the path did you choose a clinical path at first, did you choose an administrative path, a technological path? What was the path that gravitated to you?

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: So initially it was a clinical path, but back up before that, I had made a shift. I decided that I was going to go into broadcast journalism. And so that’s what college for, to be a journalist. But then my grandfather, who’s also a physician, he was a family practitioner, and my grandfather was the love of my life. I would say both of my grandfathers, my maternal and my paternal grandfather, I adored them. But John Pinderhughes was this. My grandmother used to always call him an old curmudgeon, but he was this brilliant, very intimidating person. He graduated from Howard Medical School in the 1940s, and then he practiced at the Veterans Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama, for a number of years before moving his family back east to Montclair, New Jersey, and ultimately ended up as a medical director in pharma with Hoffmann-La Roche. But I adored my grandfather, and he got renal cancer, renal cell cancer, and it metastasized all throughout his body. And I remember when he died, he was at home, and they had converted the sunroom to a sort of a makeshift bedroom with a hospice bed, and he was on hospice. And I remember being with him the day that he died. And it was interesting, like family was there, but nobody was in the room. And I just felt compelled to be in the room with him and know anything about palliative care. I didn’t know anything about death and dying, but I felt compelled to be present with my grandfather, and I remember watching him at the end of his life with the kind Stokes respirations and the death rattle, and I remember leaning over to him and saying, grandpa, it’s okay, you can go. We’ll be okay. And I was there when he took his last breath and died. And I think that then years later after that, I took the path of going into palliative medicine. But I knew at that time that it was a sacred space for me. It was an incredible privilege to be with him in the light of his transitioning, and that, I think, more than anything else, along with my experience with my dad, pushed me back towards medicine.

Martin Cody: That’s awesome and very relatable, because I had a similar experience this past year in March with my mom, and my brothers and sisters were bedside with her, giving her that exact same permission. And it’s, it is a space that I have, and I love the word you chose is in sacred. And it’s amazing the just compassion and grace that these caregivers possess and are able to bestow upon the family and the patient. Sacred, I think, is a great phrase for it or adjective, because it is just. I hope no one has to ever experience it. But if you do, these people are literally angels among us. I’m intrigued that that drew you to a career in palliative care because that’s a heavy burden and emotionally takes a toll. How did you prepare for that? Where did you study for that and get me into the decision-making process, Staci said, this is what I want to do?

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: So I’m at medical school at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, which was also my dad’s alma mater, and I really didn’t like anything. I didn’t, I couldn’t I couldn’t think about going into pediatrics, just all the babies crying, and they all seemed so sad. And I knew I wasn’t going to go anywhere near OB/GYN surgery was out of the picture for me, so I did turn to medicine, and that landed me at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick. While I was there, they hired a researcher clinician. Her name was Elaine Rosenthal, and she was a geriatrician, and she was my preceptor in clinic one day, and I was just blown away with how she approached patients. It was so different from what I saw. My internal medicine leaders and teachers teacher’s doing. She had this holistic approach to the individual and talking with them about like what’s important to them and actually deprescribing, taking off some of the medications that they had accumulated over decades that no one was willing to take to stop. But I was just really impressed with her approach, and I wanted to be her. She was just, she became a mentor. And when I was finishing up residency, she said, well, there’s only two places you can go: Mount Sinai or UCLA. Those are the top two programs with for palliative for geriatrics. So that’s where you have to go. And I said I knew I wasn’t going across the country to UCLA. I never wanted to leave New Jersey. So I ended up at New York, in New York, at Mount Sinai in their geriatrics program. And that’s where I met my second mentor, the brilliant doctor Diane Meier, who was then starting this journey of developing hospital-based palliative care, which would ultimately lead to the development of the center to advance palliative Care and the MacArthur Award that she won for her brilliance and all that she’s done in moving the field forward. But when I met Diane and saw her engage patients and start talking about palliative care, and walking with patients in the light of their suffering, and managing their symptoms, and understanding their goals, I knew that I was home.

Martin Cody: There’s a couple of terms you mentioned that I want to pull the thread on a little bit, and one of them is geriatrics. We understand what pediatricians do. We understand what orthopedists do. We understand what cardiothoracic surgeons do, pull back the lens or pull back the curtain a little bit on what is the study of geriatrics and how, in a modality of science, do you interact with that?

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: So geriatrics is really focused on whole patient assessment of individuals 65 and older. So, as we get older, there are a number of changes that occur in our body physiologically; menopause, for one, certain organ changes. So geriatrics is really focused on older adults and those physiological changes. We do a lot of whole-patient assessment in geriatrics. A number of older Americans acquire or accumulate medications as they go. And so we’ll see oftentimes geriatrics is that doctors will add on medications, but doctors are afraid to take them away. So the geriatricians will actually prescribe and do a whole assessment, a holistic assessment of what do we need, what’s going on now, what’s good to continue, what’s good to take away.

Martin Cody: Interesting. And the other word you mentioned, which I don’t think gets enough focus either inside of healthcare or outside of healthcare, is mentors. And there is no, that I know of, collegiate class that says how to be a mentor or anything like that. There’s just a way to behave that, more often or not, can lead to mentoring. And there are organizations that kind of foster that. But how did you find these individuals, and you’ve mentioned two of them already that had such a strong influence on your life. And what sorts of things does that allow you to then pay it forward? Might be strong, but how do you want to mold yourself around some of the experiences you had with them?

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: That’s a great question. I was lucky to encounter these women at opportune times during the course of my training. And Diane Meier, one of the things I remember her saying, which has stuck with me all this time, is that a mentor is not successful unless their mentee is successful. And that’s something that I really learned from her in terms of mentorship. So, the people that I’ve mentored, I’ve really wanted to make sure that I was present for them, that I introduced them to other individuals in the field, that I helped to broaden their network. If there was a position or a job or an opportunity that I could impact them being considered for, I would do that because mentorship is really important in medicine. It’s probably important in every field, but particularly I think, for women, mentorship is key.

Martin Cody: And it’s interesting. I see a lot of similarities between mentorship and leadership, because oftentimes, leadership is really described as you’re not successful as a leader unless the individuals that you are leading are successful. So it’s never about the leader. It’s about elevating everybody else from a productivity standpoint, fulfillment standpoint, career advancement standpoint. It seems the same can be said about a mentor.

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: Absolutely. When I during my tenure with UnitedHealthCare, one of the things we did with a group of women was form a mentorship program, and the mentorship program was focused on women, minority women and women that were in lower levels of management. They weren’t leaders, but they were in management, and they were looking to rise up in the organization to higher levels. So we developed this wonderful mentorship program, started out with women and then we expanded that to everybody. But we started with what we knew, and it was a wonderful experience. We paired each of the. It was a program that they had to apply to get into, but then we paired them with one of us, one of the leaders of the program. We recruited people who wanted to lead. We developed a curriculum. We had a number of people in the organization come and talk with them about leadership, about resume writing, about navigating the organization because it’s so large about networking. And it became a really wonderful program and opportunity. And if I’m remembering correctly, about 50% of the women who went through our program actually ended up elevating in the organization to a higher level than what they were in.

Martin Cody: Wow, that’s impressive. That’s a nice grade for per se. And the other thing that I think mentors have to do is take risks. Now you mentioned UnitedHealthcare. They seem to be in the news all the time and big organization. We’re going to get to them in a second. But you didn’t actually always stay in New Jersey, and you take a risk. And I want to understand the decision-making methodology of the risk because you moved all the way across the country, not to UCLA, stopped just short of UCLA. Tell us a little bit about the opportunity that came your way from Banner in Arizona.

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: So, at that time, I had left Mount Sinai, and I had gone up the road to a hospital in Harlem called North General Hospital. And it was actually at that time, one of only three sort of privately owned hospitals that were left in the city. All of the other hospitals had joined larger health systems and been acquired. But North General was right in the heart of Harlem, so it was serving a very needy and fragile community. And we had developed an inpatient hospice unit there, and then, I eventually transitioned to being the director for palliative care for North General. The hospital struggled, and eventually, they closed. They were unable to be acquired by Sinai or any of the larger systems, so eventually, they closed. So we knew that was coming, and we were all looking for employment. And where would we transition from the experience of North General? And one day, this opportunity came into my email box about palliative care program at Banner at the time called Good Samaritan Hospital in Arizona.

Martin Cody: Well, let me pause right there for a second. So, the financial viability of the hospital is front and center. And you recognize as an employee that, hey, this doesn’t look so good. And then, did you get any type of advance notification, any 90-day payout, any type of severance package, or did they just shut their doors?

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: No, they eventually shut their doors. And that was a big process in and of itself. At that time, I had moved into the role of chair for the Division of Internal Medicine. So I was part of all of that, but it proceeded pretty quickly. We knew it was coming, and there are processes in place that you have to go through because we had a residency program. You have to make sure those residents are safe and provided for and have another position to go to. So you can’t just shut your doors. And then there’s a big union in New York, I believe it’s called 1199. So, it was a very complex and rigorous process, one that I would hope to never have to go through again.

Martin Cody: Yeah, and so you had the responsibility of not only losing your job or the experience of losing your job, but then you have to, as a leader and as a chair, let others know that they’re about to lose theirs and find a safe haven for them, if you will.

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: I had actually resigned before they closed their doors. So, it was a strategic move for me. Of course, we all knew that it was coming, but I ended up being in a fortunate position of finding this other opportunity before they officially decided to close their doors.

Martin Cody: And what was the decision-making prospect? Because that takes some emotional fortitude to recognize. Okay, now, my career is going to hit a major speed bump from a standpoint of the hospital is closing, I’m resigning. Where do I go next? And so what kind of type of internal tools did you call on to to overcome that obstacle?

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: At the time, I was very confident and hopeful that I would find another opportunity, and I knew because of good mentorship that when you are operating at the level of like a chair chairmanship, that those opportunities are few and far between. So they say, on average, it’s going to take about a year to find another leadership position. So I had actually started looking a year before that sort of informally but formally looking for opportunities and positions. So I was always looking, I was always networking. I was always staying hopeful and positive and reminding myself that I was a highly skilled, trained individual and that there would be other opportunities that would present themselves to me. And the Banner opportunity, like I said, it just came across my email. I don’t even know where it came from. It just came across my email. I saw it.

Martin Cody: How the universe provides; we just have to open up our eyes sometimes.

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: So palliative care director for Banner Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. So I said, okay, well, I’ve never been to Phoenix, Arizona before. Sure, I’ll send my resume in. So I sent my resume in, and about 48 hours later, I got a call from a woman who said, oh, Dr. Pinderhughes, Dr. Sander, who is the chief medical officer of the hospital at that time, he’s out, but he’s seen your resume, and he’s really going to want to talk to you, and we’d like to get you out here, fly you out here for an interview. And I thought, oh my goodness, that was fast. I really, literally did not expect that. And so I said, okay. And they flew me out a couple of weeks later, and I spent all day talking with different stakeholders, doctors, ICU doctors, social workers, chaplaincy, various leaders. I spent an entire day there, and I had no intention of moving to Arizona. I just thought, I’ve never seen Arizona before, so this will be a nice little mini vacation. While I often these nice people at Banner, but there’s no way I would leave the East Coast, and at the end of the day, I was excited. I thought, oh my God, I enjoyed everybody that I talked with. It seems like a great health system. They’re really invested in building palliative care consultation services the right way. It seems like it would be a no-brainer, but I had this daughter who was starting high school, and I was like, afraid that she would say, how can you do this? Mom, I don’t want to leave, da da da da da da da da. So I ended up talking to my daughter about it and my mother about it. And my daughter was like, hey, if you want to move to Arizona, I’m game.

Martin Cody: Wow.

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: She’s.

Martin Cody: Wow. I would never have expected that. Never have expected that. Especially entering high school.

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: Especially entering high school. But she’s that type of spirit. I could see her moving to a foreign country and being fine. So he’s fine with it. My mother said, I hate to see you go, but she said, I just have a feeling that this is the opportunity for you. I just have a feeling that you have to take this, and so we did.

Martin Cody: So it’s a great lesson in taking risks. It’s a great lesson in putting yourself out there. And it’s interesting that you got knocked down to a degree because the hospital closed. You were you resigned. And life is going to throw us some curves. And I think it’s interesting that you called upon some mentors, sought some counsel, and then decided to take a chance and take a risk. And how long were you at Banner?

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: I was at Banner for about 7 years, 7 or 8 years. And we actually started with Good Samaritan, which is now Banner University Medical Center, the flagship hospital, and we built a palliative care program there. But when I interviewed, I asked to speak with the chief medical officer of Banner Health System, his name at the time was John Henson, and I pitched to him the idea of a system-wide program using resources and tools that I got from the center to advance palliative care. And I said to him, palliative care has such potential to improve clinical outcomes, to improve patient satisfaction, and to decrease cost. Why would you not want to invest in a system-wide?

Martin Cody: And if memory serves, there’s no shortage of the patient population in the Arizona region.

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: There’s no shortage of patient population in Arizona. And he said to me, if you can do what you say you can do at our flagship hospital, then I would support a system-wide program, and that’s what we did. We started with Samaritan, now Banner University Medical Center, and we very rapidly grew to a multi-system, multi-hospital palliative care-based service. We ended up with 7 or 8 programs throughout Phoenix, Arizona, two of our hospitals in Colorado, and at our hospital in Alaska when Alaska was in the health system. And we were so successful doing that, we parlayed that success and pitched it to Banner Health Network to pay us a per diem rate for a community-based care program. And so then we built and grew a community based palliative care program, and we published that data in the Journal of Palliative Medicine. So it was very successful.

Martin Cody: Wow. Had you ever done anything like that at that scale?

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: I had not.

Martin Cody: And, which is another example of putting yourself out there and pushing beyond your own boundaries because if you had stayed within your psychological walls, if you will, that says, this is my comfort level. This is where what I know best, and not put yourself out there, none of this would have happened.

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I would say to younger people in the field coming up, don’t be afraid to take risks. Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. Don’t be afraid to reach out to people and try to say, hey, would you mentor me? Would you? Would you be willing to mentor me? Would you be willing to talk with me? Would you be willing to have a conversation with me about this opportunity? Don’t be afraid to do that. Don’t be afraid. Afraid to build relationships and reach out.

Martin Cody: Yeah, and I would also add on to that, I see a tremendous frequency of people presenting problems that they observe. I think it’s the exceptional employee that not only observes and identifies the problem that they bring to leadership or management but they’ve also put together a solution so everyone can point out problems, right? What’s not working? Why is this frustrating to the staff? But it’s additional to say here’s what we’ve noticed is a problem. Oh, and by the way, here’s two solutions. We think, as a team or as an organization or a department, that can solve this problem. Here’s what it would mean to the larger organization. That, it seems, is what you’ve done. And I’m not certain where you learned that. But in bringing that opportunity to Banner leadership, they seized upon it. And hundreds, if not thousands, of patients benefited from that program.

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: Absolutely. And that was a cornerstone, I think, of my leadership. And perhaps I learned that innately in going through palliative care training and education, because we tend to be very collaborative. We tend to be very solution-focused and palliative care. You have to be because, building these programs that you’re like an entrepreneur; it’s your own, your very own program. But within our division, I cultivated within my doctors and nurse practitioners, you guys have to come to me with solutions and not right. And when you come to me with solutions, then we will problem-solve and we will brainstorm together. So it made us all better.

Martin Cody: Great point. Come with a solution. Words of wisdom for certain. And then, from Banner you went to United, which ultimately led to another speed bump in the career trajectory and setback. Something that I think we’ve all experienced. But walk us through the transition from leaving Banner, going to United, and then what happened after a certain period of time.

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: So, I grew up in these academic, highly matrixed, large health systems, and I loved being a palliative medicine clinician. But I got to a point where I thought, we’re getting all of these patients really late in their disease trajectory. Now they’re coming into the hospital on their seventh or eighth hospitalization, and now they’re ready to transition to hospice. And we need to find a way to do this upstream. We need to find a way to get to these individuals when they have several years left to live, and we need to find a way to align their goals with various disease-directed therapies, which is what they want. And in order to do that, I recognized that I didn’t have a skill set that understood outside of the hospital. I didn’t understand value-based care and relationships. I didn’t understand capitation, ACOs, all the different language and worlds for me. So I thought if I want to now transition and work on growing these programs outside of a health system, I’m going to have to just develop a new skill set. So that’s what prompted me to move into the health plan space because I thought, what better space to learn this than a health plan? And there was an opportunity that was available within Optum, within the Arizona market for their … plan, their …. … is a sort of a globally capitated plan, taking care of patients that are in the nursing home. So, that’s where I first landed within the organization. So I was a medical director within this program, and it was a wonderful experience, worked with a lot of nurse practitioners who were out in the nursing homes seeing our patients and working with Smiths. That lasted for about a year. And then a chief medical officer role opened up within UnitedHealthcare on the Medicare and retirement side. So I moved into that role, and that was a that was a steep learning curve. It was just like Medicare Advantage 101. It felt like being an intern again or a medical student. You know, I say, I got my MBA from UnitedHealthcare because that’s really what it was like. It was a steep learning curve, but it was a wonderful experience. And I learned a lot about leading through influence, because in that particular role, we did have the chief medical officers of the markets. I had five markets: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Montana. We didn’t have direct reports, but we were responsible for working with large medical groups and health systems that were engaged with us in various value based incentive relationships. We wanted to. And so what we needed was for them to perform well from a stars perspective, because we, of course, wanted to be a five-star plan. So, none of these people reported to me. But we had to build those relationships and build that influence to be able to influence their behavior so that they were receptive to the United team that was coming into their office or system and giving them information about how they were performing and how we could work together to improve.

Martin Cody: So you mentioned something a moment ago called a matrix organization, and you just provided unknowingly, I think, a perfect example about that, because you had these five major markets. And for those of you that are listening, that are entering into healthcare, you may not have experienced a matrix organization yet, but every organization generally is one. And basically, you have to, you have a manager above you, but you have to work across teams that you may not report to. They may not have anything affiliated to do with you that you have to influence, not manipulate, influence, work together, collaboratively. Solution. And the larger the organization, especially when you get outside the state boundaries and your particular geo, it gets more complex. So you just talked about, you had to influence five different regions that were not direct reports. They may or may not want to listen to you. And let’s be honest, oftentimes when you’re coming in with the UnitedHealthcare moniker, it’s like you’re walking in as Darth Vader. So you may not be well received to begin with. And what skills did you draw upon to be able to influence, collaborate, work with them because you knew that you had a mission to accomplish and you needed their help to do it, but they are not direct reports, so you just can’t, quote-unquote, order them? Tell me a little bit about that skill set and how you were able to accomplish what you’re able to accomplish.

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: That’s a great question. I drew a lot on my, from my palliative care experience, honestly. So, we always start with the needs assessment and palliative care. So, we always start with our stakeholder and trying to understand what keeps them up at night. What’s their biggest challenge? What is it that they want to fix? What are they proud of? What’s working well, it’s not working well. And then how can we what can we bring to the table to relieve some of their stressors or things that are not going well? So a lot of it, a lot of the skill is really relationship-building, and that relationship-building starts with listening. I think too often leaders do a lot of talking. They go in, and they talk about your life. But really, the best way to build relationship is to shut up, listen, and ask a lot of questions. And so, that’s a skill that I called upon. And I think that was probably the biggest, the skill that helped me to be most successful. So going in meeting with a chief medical officer of a health system or a leader of a large medical group was a conversation. Tell me about your group. Tell me about what you’re proud of. Tell me about what keeps you up at night. What are you most worried about? Huh? Okay, we are concerned about that, too. And that’s something that we can actually help you with. We can help challenge that you have. And so you develop a level of trust and relationship, and you develop some shared values. So, out of the first one, first or second conversation that I have with these leaders, I’m establishing that trust. They feel listened. They feel listened to. They feel like they are heard. We then establish some shared values. And from there, I’m able to then go back to United and go back to the various teams in that matrixed organization that also don’t report to me but that are going into the doctor’s offices and into the health system, giving them information about their performance and go back to that team then and help them bridge any challenges that they’ve been having with the organizations. And so I did a lot of coaching as well for individuals within United to help them increase their awareness, I would say. And also with the health systems, if you are able to help someone increase their awareness, then they will change their behavior because we’re not going to be successful at changing behaviors.

Martin Cody: Unless that happens, I also think my guess would be that you encountered some ego along the way with these individuals, and you could probably teach a course that would occupy the rest of your life, on overcoming ego and how to work in a collaboration. And you hit upon something, I think, two important things, one, ask questions and shut up and listen. Don’t be so quickly eager to actually want to insert your viewpoint, but there is a subtle shift in a person’s perception and willingness to engage when they recognize with authenticity that you are indeed interested in helping them. And sometimes the barriers come down, and you’re able to just be effective. And that comes through, as I’m sure you are aware, trials and tribulations. Trying some avenues that may not produce the results, but it comes through. Experience doesn’t happen overnight. Would you say that’s an accurate statement?

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: Absolutely. It absolutely comes with experience. Leaders aren’t born good leaders. Great leaders aren’t born. They’re taught. They’re practiced. They’re intentional. They sharpen the saw, so to speak. And so it’s something that has to be intentional and perpetual and continual as you go forward. But you’re right when you ask questions and when you shut up and ask questions, I think unconsciously what happens is it builds that trust. And that person says, huh, as you said, they’re listening to me. They’re interested in what I have to say. They respect my opinions. And the same thing occurs with people who have great egos. Sometimes, you just have to stroke the ego a little bit. You have to say you’re really good at doing this. It’s great to have you as a partner because you have this strength and you have this skill set, and I don’t have that strength and that skill set. So I’d love to draw upon that and learn from that, and that’s usually enough to quiet an ego down. They just want to be acknowledged.

Martin Cody: Very good point. Very good point. And things are going along swimmingly. And then you, life threw another roadblock at you. What happened?

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: Yeah. So then I moved out of that role into a role, back into role with Optum as a market chief medical officer. And lo and behold, we had all of the challenges that occurred with CMS in their most recent update, and that was really a game changer for a number of health plans and large medical groups, because it was going to really affect reimbursement, because it was changing the methodology for how they were reimbursing based on codes that doctors were documenting. And the organization ended up going into a phase where they had a lot of a number of workforce reductions, a number of workforce reductions. And my position ultimately was one of those positions that was eliminated. And it was a shocking sort of experience because you become a doctor and you never think that you’re going to be in a position where your job is eliminated. You just don’t think that as a doctor. But I think that in this day and age, particularly because there are so many doctors that are choosing to not pursue a clinical path, and you see reductions in clinical spaces as well. But you see so many people pursuing work with health plans and sort of other opportunities outside of the four walls of the health system. There’s a bigger risk of being in a position where your position may be eliminated.

Martin Cody: Yeah, that’s never fun. It is almost, I think, given the intense and frequent fluctuations of the industry, either on the clinical side, the technological side, the administrative side, there’s it’s not a matter of if, but when you will experience a reduction in force, and you will get caught up in that. So I think it’s something that a younger generation has to prepare for. And the two things I’m interested in learning from your perspective, this happened less than a year ago, is number one. Where did you find the resiliency to pick yourself up and move on? And number two, how do you not take that personally?

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: Those are great questions. So, first of all, how do you not take that personally? You do a lot of work and you get support where you can get support. I worked with coaches, professional coaches that I had worked with throughout my career, but I think that you need to lean into whatever support system you have, whether it’s coaching, whether you need to sort of unpack that experience with a therapist, whether you have a support group, whatever the case is, you need to find a source of support that you can talk about this with, and you can debrief from the experience. As a senior leader in the organization, I understood that it was a business decision, that it wasn’t personal, but when it happens to you, it feels personal. You know, it feels personal. I just, it’s like I hadn’t not worked since college. So to, all of a sudden, not have a job to go to was just shocking. I didn’t know what to do with that. So I called upon network, my close friends, family, my coaches to really did a lot of reading and self-help, meditation, mindfulness, whatever I could do. But I decided to very intentionally just be quiet and not actively look for another role because I thought, okay, this is horrible and it doesn’t feel good. But it was a business decision, and it’s not personal. And I know that I am a highly skilled person that I’m going to find a job at some point. But maybe this is a time to reflect about, what do you really want to do going forward, Staci? What’s important to you? What’s the best next step for you?

Martin Cody: Great advice, and sometimes it’s easier in hindsight to look at that advice than it is in the moment, but it is. You hear these platitudes like, well, when when one door closes, another one opens. And it sounds trite and overly simplistic, but it actually is true. And if you can train yourself or have the resiliency to actually embrace that philosophy, and I think you did a masterful job of having the courage to ask for help, which some people think that might be a sign of weakness when you want to ask for help. But really, there’s a whole network of people out there that would be willing to help you. And then B, the other element you mentioned, which I think is fantastic, is to be quiet. Just let yourself feel, be immersed in the moment. Not a frenetic pace of analysis, of self-analysis and woe is me and victimization and stuff like that, because that can go down a very slippery slope as well. So congratulations to doing that. And it has actually led you to what you’re doing now, which is amazing. So, share with us how you transform that, and to use another platitude, turned lemons into lemonade.

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: Well, one of the things that I’ve always enjoyed doing is public speaking. And in the beginning of my career, I did a lot of public speaking, but it was more academic. It was about palliative care, it was about value in complex care, and how do you grow hospital-based programs. So I thought, I want to get back to public speaking because I enjoy it and I’m good at it. I ended up joining a speakers group that was part of a masterclass, and it was a group of leaders, some of whom you’ve interviewed on your show, but all of us were in a situation where we were in a transition for one reason or another, and we were thinking about what we wanted to do with our life. And out of this group, with these wonderful individuals, many of us have actually pursued a path of writing a book on a various topic. But for me, something I never thought I would do is decide to write a book. So I formed an LLC called Rise Up Keynotes and Consulting, and I thought, I’m going to write this memoir about my life, about my experiences as a woman, as an African American woman in medicine. This experience of being part of this workforce reduction and other things. And I’m going to talk about it because there are a lot of things here that I think have helped me, and tools in my toolbox to be resilient and to navigate bumps that I think are relevant and can help other women. The other thing is that working with these executive coaches also really changed my life. Coaching is something where it’s not therapy. Therapy is looking back to past years and trying to heal those. But coaching is really looking forward, and the coach and the coachee are equal partners. And the goal is to really raise awareness, to have clear goals and to have outcomes that you are able to look at and measure going forward and to increase the awareness of the coaching. And I’ve had some amazing transformative experiences with the coaches I’ve worked with. And I thought, gosh, I think coaching is something I’d like to do, especially as a palliative care doctor. I think I have a skill set that lends itself to learning that. So I’m in the process now of getting certification in executive coaching and organizational development coaching through the International Coaching Federation. And that’s a process I’m in that now. But I think at the end of this row, so that’s a lot of what I’ve been doing this last ten months or so, part of it started with being still and being reflective and being intentional and then moved into action. Okay, what do you want to do? And it’s scary, right? Like I’m a doctor. What do I know about writing a book? Do I know about being a coach? But this is a great time to do it. I have the time to focus on this, and I will walk this path and then decide what I want to do if I want to do something else specifically in life.

Martin Cody: I absolutely love it. Love it. If an organization and there are, I’m sure many want to get in touch with you and have you provide a keynote, how do they get in touch with you?

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: The best way to get in touch with me would probably be through LinkedIn at this point. So I would say I have a LinkedIn profile. Go to that LinkedIn profile, message me, and I will.

Martin Cody: Awesome. Staci, thank you so much for sharing some of the journey with us. I think it’s fascinating how you’ve continued to reinvent yourself, called upon all of the resiliency within, bettered yourself at each level. Took the setbacks in stride. And you mentioned coaching. I think coaching is another nice word for mentor. And so now you’re in the mentor position to where you yourself can pay it back to others. And it’s almost come full circle, and I can see the gratification that you’re drawing from this. So, congratulations to you.

Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes: Thanks, Martin. It was great talking with you.

Martin Cody: Thank you so much for being a guest, and I look forward to sharing more with the listeners on The Edge of Healthcare. Take care everyone.

Martin Cody: Thanks for diving into The Edge of Healthcare with us today. I hope these insights will fuel your journey in healthcare leadership. For more details, show notes, and ways to stay plugged into the conversation, head over to MadaketHealth.com. Until next time, stay ahead of the curve with The Edge of Healthcare, where lessons from leaders are always within reach. Take care of yourselves and keep pushing the boundaries of healthcare innovation.