The Edge of Healthcare: The Heart of Leadership: Prioritizing Patients and Embracing Growth

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: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of The Edge of Healthcare. Lessons from leaders to use today. My name is Martin Cody, senior vice president of Madaket Health, and I am fortunate to host this podcast where we can talk with leaders in the healthcare industry and pull from them some of the lessons that they’ve learned over the years so that you can put them in action today and hopefully avoid some of the mistakes and the trials and tribulations that we’ve all faced. Propel yourself in a career of healthcare and lead to greater fulfillment. With me today, I’m excited to introduce you to Aparna Ananth, who is coming to us from Seattle, and she has a diverse career in healthcare and specifically today works with leadership in healthcare. So Aparna, welcome.

Aparna Ananth: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here, Martin.

Martin Cody: It’s interesting. I’ve been in healthcare a long, long time. And when you say things like leadership in healthcare, many people today would say that’s oxymoronic. There actually is a lack of leadership in healthcare, and sometimes in business, and sometimes certainly in politics. There seems to be some abrasion in those two concepts about leadership. But I want to get to kind of your upbringing and your path into healthcare. So take us back to the early years, and it can be high school, it could be college and kind of where you decided to go and what guided you on your path.

Aparna Ananth: Of course, if you ask my mom, she’ll tell you that from the age of, I don’t know, 3 or 4, you know, when they come and ask you, hey, little girl, what do you want to be when you grow up? I always said, I want to be a doctor. And then, when I could get my tongue around the word, I started saying pediatrician because that’s the only kind of doctor I knew at the time. It changed since then. I’m not a pediatrician, but I did stick to being a doctor, and everything that I ever did from that point forward was towards the goal of becoming a doctor. So it was the straight and narrow from the age of four till I got into medical school, became a doctor, did my residency, and went into practice.

Martin Cody: See, I’m closer to 60 than I am to 50. And you could ask me today, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I may not have a good answer for you. So how on earth did you know at the age of 3 or 4 you wanted to be a doctor?

Aparna Ananth: Okay, you know, paradoxically, if you ask me today, what do you want to be when you grow up? I wouldn’t have an answer for you, but apparently, I knew it then, and it worked.

Martin Cody: I like it, I like it. It was Mom or Dad. Were they in the medical field?

Aparna Ananth: Actually, no. I have one aunt who is a physician, but really didn’t grow up with her or spend a whole enough time with her for that to have been an influence. I guess it was just implanted somewhere along the way and it stuck.

Martin Cody: And where did you grow up?

Aparna Ananth: I call myself a world citizen. So I was born in India, and thanks to my father’s jobs, which took us around the world, I have grown up in Qatar, Sultanate of Oman, Dubai, and Jamaica. And I would say now I, the longest I’ve ever spent anywhere is here in the Seattle area in Western Washington, so this is home now.

Martin Cody: Wow, what a quite a diverse background geographically, which I love because that allows you to pull from all sorts of different experiences and be shaped by different external influences, which I think is fantastic, makes you well-rounded. And from the aspect of becoming a physician to then gravitating to leadership roles, what was it about leadership that particularly appealed to you?

Aparna Ananth: Well, I do believe that all physicians are, by default, trained to be leaders. You’re responsible. You’re held accountable. You have to influence and coax and cajole and work with patients and your team members in using characteristics we very much ascribe to leaders all the time. So, by default, being a physician is equal to being a leader. Now, I would say if I had to describe my diverse career, as you called it so far, I would say I’ve always taken what I loved best about what I’m doing and moved on to do more of that. So as a physician, as an anesthesiologist, I’m trained as a cardiothoracic anesthesiologist. Loved the heart room. Loved the challenge, loved making things better, more efficient, and improving quality of care for the patient. So I started taking on leadership roles like Medical Director of Quality to make things better and improve quality of care for patients, and I loved bringing things to my colleagues that would help them improve the way they took care of patients and the way they felt fulfilled in their own careers. And that brought me to some of the medical staff leadership roles so I could work with more physicians on a wider scale, which then brought me to the opportunity of joining healthcare administration as a chief medical officer, where I now got to work with physician leaders to influence and inspire them to be better leaders. And as I was developing my leaders, I decided that coaching was what I loved best: professional development and coaching. So that brings me to where I am today, an executive coach in healthcare.

Martin Cody: And healthcare leaders. And that background conjures up about a dozen questions. And so first let’s start at the beginning with regards to how do you define leaders?

Aparna Ananth: I define a leader as anyone who is able to inspire, motivate, and develop people.

Martin Cody: Okay. I like it, and there seems to be a tremendous amount of discussion blogs, webinars, podcasts and things of that. Did you know, basically getting at the foundational aspect of leadership, how it differs from management? What can it do from an inspiration and inspiring of people to achieve more, to get more out of themselves than they themselves knew was possible? And then. So now that you have that foundational understanding in your heart and mind of what leadership is, how do you overcome, you talked about leading the medical staff, which I don’t know if people know this, but there’s a lot of opinions on the medical staff, so I’d be curious. Sometimes, those opinions are not in sync, if you will. So what type of attributes would you avail to yourself and to others on how to overcome hesitancy, how to overcome restrictions, how to overcome disagreements, to be able to put something beyond personal gain? Maybe it’s the improvement of the staff. Maybe it’s the improvement of whatever the objective is, but it’s going to be met with resistance because not everybody on the medical staff is in agreement on any one thing all the time. So, what types of tools would you utilize to help meet the objective?

Aparna Ananth: So, I’ll say two things about resistance. Well, one thing is that for me, resistance is a four-letter word like pain. Pain is something very uncomfortable. It’s something we do everything we can to avoid, and should we be unable to avoid it, we do everything we can to suppress, right? And would you say we do the same with resistance? You try to avoid it, and then when we have to deal with it, we try to suppress it. The thing about pain, as any medical professional will tell you, is that it serves a purpose. Pain tells you that something’s wrong. Something’s not right. You’re hurting yourself. So if you put your hand on a hot stove, if you didn’t feel pain, you’d just leave it there until your hand burns off, right? It’s pain that tells you. Take your hand off the hot stove. Something’s not right. Resistance is the same way. If you’re doing something and that’s bringing about great resistance, then something’s not right. So what I tell my leaders and colleagues is resistance is your friend. It’s trying to tell you that you haven’t checked all the boxes. Something’s missing. Something’s not quite right. And here is your opportunity to fix it upfront rather than keep barreling forward till you get to the point of no return and then have the whole thing fall apart. So resistance is your friend. That’s one thing. The second thing is when people resist, it’s coming from a place of fear. And, you know, you mentioned self-gain and self-centeredness in a sense. And that’s how it usually shows up, because people like to focus on what they can control and what can they control, what’s in their contract. I want more time or I want more money is where they go, but it may be something else altogether that they cannot put a name to. So again, when it comes up like that, I see that as a form of resistance that is telling you that something is not quite right here. You haven’t checked all the boxes. So, to the leader, resistance is your friend. It gives you a chance to self-correct now.

Martin Cody: I like the analogy of pain and resistance as being your friend. And there’s a great many modern-day books on leadership that talk about that from go towards the obstacle, go towards the pain and resistance because it’s the growth that is on the other side of that. And there’s a very, very common phrase that, not necessarily around leadership per se, but it’s check your ego at the door. So when you walk into the boardroom of a physician leadership conference or a meeting at a hospital, say that dynamic seems to almost always be present. The ego. And how do you inspire individuals to leave their ego at the door and put the the betterment of the whole as the key objective, as opposed to leading with the self?

Aparna Ananth: Yeah. You know, ego comes into play when people are thinking about themselves. But one thing I can say about almost everybody in healthcare, I mean, it’s not something you go into because you want name, fame, glory, and money. The driver is usually a desire to serve, a desire to heal, a desire to care for. And if you can tap into that, if you can tap into that common value that pretty much everybody in healthcare shares, the community, the patient, the team. Usually, egos fall apart. Even if they made their way into the door, they get set aside.

Martin Cody: How? Maybe I’m coming from a different lens because I don’t see that getting set aside enough. And a perfect example is I have about 20 different subscriptions to various healthcare industry trade rags, and every single day, my inbox is flooded with examples of fraud in healthcare at the CEO level, at the physician level. And so I’m looking at that, and granted, I understand that if it bleeds, it leads, so this is a lot of this is headline-grabbing things and that sort of stuff. But there just seems to be an epidemic of poor leadership where people are putting themselves ahead of the industry, or their healthcare institution, or their hospital, or their physician’s office. And I’m wondering, how do we develop better leaders?

Aparna Ananth: Well, to help people be the better part of themselves. We’ve got to take away the threat when people feel threatened, whether they’re in a leadership position, their physician, or their everyday Joe on the street. When people feel threatened, they act in a self-serving, self-protective, self-defensive manner. So, we need to take away the threats. And we saw a lot of this after COVID. People’s behavior towards each other has changed. It’s like I will push ahead of you in line because I’m the one who matters, and you’re just seeing that on a larger scale here because of the headline-grabbing, you know, six-digit or seven-digit amounts declared in the fraud cases. So that’s where a lot of that is coming from. Now, I’m not talking about a certain percentage of every population is going to be deviant in that sense that, you know, they do take advantage of what is available to them. But for the most part, it’s kind of the 80/20 rule. We don’t want to let the tail wag the dog, but we don’t want more people to tend towards that because it looks like that’s how you’re successful if you’re able to grab as much as you can. We don’t want that to become the definition of success, which unfortunately, it’s starting to look more like, you know, you have the people who are, well, I’ll call them the low performers for the moment, who are the ones who indulge in fraud or try to grab more for themselves. And then you have the high performers, and then you have those in the middle. Those in the middle will just take a look on either side of them and look at who’s being more successful. And I’m going to do more of that. We have an opportunity to shift that group, and that’s where I say we need to move away from making money the focus of healthcare, because that’s when you lose focus of why you came into it in the first place.

Martin Cody: You’re right, and psychologically, there’s so much at play there. And you talked about fear and feeling threatened, and that is we could pull on that thread for a while because that can manifest in so many different forms, especially after COVID. And one of the things I think from and then we’ll leave fraud aside, the leadership in healthcare is healthcare always seemingly seems to be 50 years behind what, quote unquote, the private sector. Healthcare is single-handedly keeping the fax industry afloat. There’s so many advancements outside of healthcare that we look in healthcare and say, hey, it’s 2024, 1975 called they’d like their technology back. Isn’t the adoption of some of the more mainstream technological capabilities? Is a resistance to that out of fear that someone’s going to make a mistake, or do they not pursue these things because there’s just too many competing priorities? Why does it seem like healthcare is always chasing other sectors of various industries, just either because of technological walls or resistance or barriers or leadership barriers?

Aparna Ananth: Yes, to all of the above, and, you know, there’s only so much bandwidth that any human has. And you want to grow and learn and develop yourself and keep up with technology and all that. And, you know, every person that you’re thinking of, as you say, wants to use a fax machine at the office, has the latest gadget at home. So it’s not that people are averse to technology, it is that healthcare innovation occurs in the space of inventing new medication, new treatments, new approaches to treating people. And then there is so much other stuff that needs to get done, and then what’s left to learn and grow and develop technology? It seems like most of the efforts. Speaking as someone who’s been in healthcare administration. It’s pretty much all you can do to keep your hospital open and keep up with the regulatory requirements. So how do you then keep up with the latest technological innovation? You need to create space for that.

Martin Cody: And speaking of kind of the healthcare administration aspect, talk about some of the the more difficult challenges you’ve experienced and how you overcame them. I’m particularly interested in in what inner strength you drew upon the origin of that inner strength to see you through this because you have a very refreshing ideology on pursuing resistance getting past the fear. And I’m curious: how have you used those attributes to overcome personal challenges in healthcare administration, and where did that belief system come from?

Aparna Ananth: So I think it was, again, one of those pre-programmed things because I can’t go back to a specific incident that I recall shifted my way of thinking. But what I can say is, whenever I have been afraid of something. I have jumped into it to get over it. For example, the earliest incident that probably comes to mind is, as I was learning how to swim when I was four or 5 or 6 or something. I was scared of the deep end. So, one day, I just went and jumped in when nobody was looking, and I hadn’t quite learned how to swim yet. I guess I’m still here.

Martin Cody: Some might call that self-sabotage would be another phrase for that.

Aparna Ananth: And then, you know, the reason I did a cardiothoracic fellowship was because when I was in my residency, the heart room was the room I was most afraid in. And it was not because of the patient and the case complexity. It was the personalities in the room, the cardiac surgeons, and they intimidated me. And so I was like, I need to go in there and learn how to talk to these people. So, I did the fellowship. So, I tend to lean into that. So the first step is recognition that when I feel internal resistance. Recognize that I’m feeling the internal resistance, and I can usually track it back if I ask the right questions to what am I afraid of, and then I lean into what I’m afraid of. And in terms of dealing with people, which is usually the issue when you say obstacles and issues that come up, it’s bringing people along. That’s usually the greatest challenge in healthcare leadership to throw a blanket on the whole thing. And when I find myself having trouble bringing people along, I usually have to ask myself what is keeping me from meeting them where they are and bringing them along? And sometimes it’s me being afraid to talk to a certain person because I’m afraid they’ll say a certain thing. So I push instead of going to them and bringing them along. And when I recognize that, I can change my approach to it.

Martin Cody: Well, a couple of things to highlight there. And I think it’s interesting. The first reaction you have when you feel that discomfort. And it’s usually emotional, mental, psychological discomfort that, as you mentioned earlier, and I agree, is kind of rooted in fear. And it’s also your body’s parasympathetic nervous system, as you know better than anybody that’s telling you, hey, slow down. This is very uncomfortable here. You might want to proceed with caution, but you flip that on its end to say, hang on, why am I feeling this? So the first action you take is to ask the question, versus running away or retreating type of stuff to get out of quote-unquote harm’s way may not be harmful at all. You’re just your body is alerting you that something is something you need to pay attention to acutely right now is happening.

Aparna Ananth: Correct.

Martin Cody: And if we can train ourselves to ask that question, what am I feeling, and why is this scaring me? Then, you can better address ways to go through it, over it, and develop something to get to the other side of it. And each time we do that, and it happens over, you know, days, weeks, months, and years, right? Just building up that muscle memory to say, oh, something’s uncomfortable, let’s get through this versus let’s retreat, because the retreat is where people stagnate in somehow way, shape, or form. You quickly assimilated this into your arsenal of leadership skills to embrace it per se, and know that I’ve got to address this in that way. And I love the part about bringing the other person with you and meeting them, that I think a lot of people in healthcare today can learn from. So, thank you so much for sharing that. That is very helpful. Those are the internal questions that we have to train ourselves to ask. What are some of the external questions when you’re trying to bring someone, meet them halfway, meet them a quarter of the way. Try to understand their vantage point. Is there some go-to questions that you ask to elicit from them the desired feedback to produce the conversation, to advance the initiative?

Aparna Ananth: Well, it’s actually not a question. It is. Tell me what’s happening for you right now.

Martin Cody: Well, it’s a sort of a question. You tell me. It’s a direction.

Aparna Ananth: It’s a direction. Just tell me what’s happening for you right now.

Martin Cody: Tell me how you’re feeling. Tell me why this is causing heartburn. Tell me why this? So you’re basically building a dialogue.

Aparna Ananth: So starting with, tell me how you’re feeling, usually elicits I’m angry at best or a total denial of feelings altogether because people don’t want to go to their feelings right off the bat when they’re feeling threatened. Tell me why this is causing you heartburn, usually takes them to very superficial elements of it. It’s going to cost me money. It’s going to cost me time. But that’s not the answer I’m looking for. I’m trying to find out what’s under that. So I just leave it very open ended. Tell me what’s happening for you right now.

Martin Cody: And then what would a possible answer be? Because when they say, you know what, I’m upset that this is going to cost me hours of time. I’m going to get nothing out of it. In my opinion, those would be a little bit self-serving per se, but if that’s a superficial response in time and money, how do you then counteract that and dig deeper?

Aparna Ananth: So it depends on the situation, of course. But say you’re asking for more money because now I’m asking you to work more nights, and you say it’s going to take more of my time away, and I don’t want to do it. Then I go back to, okay, then let’s talk about how you want your patients to be cared for, and let’s see how we can do that. Tell me how you see this happening. And then they work through it. And then you’ve got to be totally open to where they want to take it. And sometimes it can go to something like, I have childcare responsibilities, and this thing just doesn’t work for me. Or it can be something like, I have a sleeping problem, whatever. You never know where it’s going to take, you know?

Martin Cody: And I like that because when you ask the question, tell me how you see this working or how you see this. You’re inviting them to be a participant in the solution. And they, obviously, if they are participating in the solution, they have some skin in the game. And it can then be their idea and their involvement, and their heart will be more in it than just following directions, which I think is always a good method. Is there leadership skills courses, books, and things of that? In your current position that you are attending reading and trying to learn from?

Aparna Ananth: Oh my. In the last year, I’ve really imbibed a lot. The most recent readings are, well, Simon Sinek, I am a huge fan, have read and heard his podcast and read his books multiple times over. My most recent read is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.

Martin Cody: What a great book.

Aparna Ananth: And it’s amazing how they all kind of come back to the same points. Another interesting read was Dan Siegel’s The Mindful Brain. Again, goes comes at it from a neurobiology point of view and comes back to the same points. So, depending on who my client leader person is, these authors and thought leaders have helped me, again, meet them where they are. If neurobiology is what they will get, I can talk about it in terms of neurobiology or neurochemistry, or just plain leadership or values or emotions. I can talk about it in any from any angle, but it all comes back to the same.

Martin Cody: It’s great. And Viktor Frankl, and I’ve referenced his material several times, and specifically in Man’s Search for Meaning, you’re 100% correct. It is amazing to me how much we can control or how much is within our control, just in that moment between stimulus and response. And we can’t control any of the external factors. We can, and this is innocuous, as someone cut you off in the taxi cab lines, there’s 100 of these interactions a day. You can’t control any of them, but we can only control our response to them. And sometimes, our poor responses in those situations manifest the anxiety, the discomfort, the stress, and it’s all within our control to a large degree. So, I love that reference. And Simon Sinek is obviously par excellence, and some of his material over the years has just been so profound. Another one I’d recommend is Warren Bennis, On Becoming a Leader. This book came out, I think, in the 80s, and he’s often referred to as one of the thought leader gurus in the last 50 years, but a great book for aspiring leaders. I’m curious in your day to day job today, tell us a little bit about that in the organization you work for on developing healthcare leaders.

Aparna Ananth: Sure. I currently work for Navvis Healthcare segment of them called MEDI Leadership as the executive coaching and leadership development arm. That’s primarily who I work for, so I basically travel out to our clients, or the clients come to me. We coach both individuals in the C-suite and director level and VPs, and we also coach teams, stuffed teams, teams who are new. The ultimate goal is to help them get to their full potential as individuals and as teams.

Martin Cody: I like it. Fulfilling?

Aparna Ananth: Very, very fulfilling.

Martin Cody: And give me some of the aspects that kind of warm your soul and nourish your heart as it relates to helping develop other leaders.

Aparna Ananth: Well, most of my day is having conversations like this. You know, with my clients. It’s very easy, very organic. It just flows. You could do leadership coaching, where you have a bunch of tools that you share with people. But guess what? AI is going to do that in a little bit. So, I’m not here to give you tools. I can give you tools if that’s what you need at the moment. But to be a better leader, to be the best version of yourself, to achieve your full potential, you first have to be open to everything that you are. You have to be accepting of everything that you are, and you have to be curious about yourself, about others, and about the circumstances. So that’s what it’s all about: curiosity. We ask questions, and we talk. And my, the heartwarming moments are those moments when people’s eyes light up, and they go, ah. That’s where this is coming from. I didn’t know why this person made me so uncomfortable all this time, and it has nothing to do with them at all. And now I can go talk to them with a completely different attitude.

Martin Cody: Correct. And it wasn’t personal at all. It might have been something going on in their day, more often than not. Great point. Speaking of asking questions, I want to transition to the word association speed round. So, I’m going to ask you to comment on the first thing that pops into your mind, and you’re going to be doing it as a leadership role, if you will. And I’ll set up some of these things with a little bit of context. And the first one has to do with the payer world, the insurance company world. It’s widely known that the insurance companies, and pick anybody Aetna, Anthem, United, Cigna, Humana, Humana is in the news recently for some of these challenges, their provider directories are anywhere between 40% and 65% accurate for the most part. So, if you’re a leader of this organization, how would you get their provider directories, their member-facing directories more accurate so that the member experience is enriched?

Aparna Ananth: Remember why you’re there. Remember why you exist. If you’re there to serve the members, then you got to do what makes you useful to the members. We forget who our customers are.

Martin Cody: Great point. Remember who the customer is. If you were the leader of CMS, what would the first initiative you would have them put into action be?

Aparna Ananth: Get rid of the stupid stuff.

Martin Cody: Pull on that thread a little bit because that could be a much longer conversation. With regards to the stupid stuff, what are some of the things that you feel are the stupid stuff?

Aparna Ananth: Well, I don’t want to go into detail, but I think anyone you ask will tell you that CMS comes up with very well-intentioned regulatory requirements. What they do less of is get rid of other things that have now become obsolete. So now your checklist just keeps getting longer, and you’re unable to focus on the pertinent and important stuff because you’re still trying to check the boxes on the not-so-pertinent stuff. So, I think that’s where they have some opportunity to invest some of their energy in.

Martin Cody: And as a leader, comment on what you think of when you hear the phrase quadruple aim.

Aparna Ananth: You really want to know? I think that it’s not a particular order of things. I have seen it presented in one way, where you have four circles in a Venn diagram which addresses all of those, and you have one little area of overlap. And I believe that’s where we ought to be. Currently, when we hear quadruple aim, we think if we get two out of the four, we are good. But no, having any 1 or 2 or even three is not sustainable. We have to have all four in equal measure. So when you say when you list them, it gives the false impression that you’re fine if you’re doing 2 or 3 out of the four.

Martin Cody: Yeah, great point. And I also, that’s another one of those aspirational things that I’m not certain has a material benefit when, like you mentioned, we could spend hundreds of thousands of hours and millions of dollars trying to attain that. And at the end of the day, where are we when we have that completion? Are we any further along from that …? And I think it’s good philosophically, but I haven’t seen it really put into action.

Aparna Ananth: Well, I will actually draw upon a mathematical theory here. I forget what exactly it’s called, but I think it boils down to if the whole fails, the individual parts will also fail. And if you focus on the success of any one or more individual parts at the cost of others, then those might succeed temporarily, but then the whole will fail. And when the whole fails, all of the component parts will fail.

Martin Cody: Great point, and I think it’s incumbent upon a leader to instill that point among the other individuals in the organization to say, let’s remember why we’re here, type of stuff, like you mentioned earlier. All right, last one. One of my favorite two words, also one of the least favorite two words in the healthcare industry from a provider’s perspective, but as a leader, what would you do with prior authorizations?

Aparna Ananth: Clarity. Clarity.

Martin Cody: How so?

Aparna Ananth: Well, again, this comes to getting rid of the stupid stuff to some extent. And also clarity on, you know, there are some things that need to be done urgently and those should not require prior authorization. We’re all in healthcare. We know what they are. There are things that need okay, fine, we’ll do prior authorization. But this is the time frame and there should be accountability on both sides. It’s not that you, the provider, the organization has to submit the forms in 48 hours and … the insurance company can take as long as we like about it. You know, there’s got to be accountability on both sides. Because what we’re forgetting, it’s neither about the organization, the healthcare organization, nor is it about the insurance company. It’s the patient, the customer, the ultimate customer that is paying the ultimate cost in terms of their health and chances of wellness or survival in some cases.

Martin Cody: Absolutely agree. And I like that to say it’s not about the insurance company. It’s not about the health system or the provider. It’s about the patient. So again, getting back to what seems to be a consistent theme today is if you remember why you’re here. And more often than not, it’s the patient, then a lot of these workflows will take care of themselves, and it’s incumbent upon leaders to make certain that’s happening. So that is a great wisdom, and I appreciate it. You survived, so I hopefully that was painless, but you would probably like to approach a little bit of pain because that’s the way we grow, correct?

Aparna Ananth: I wouldn’t say I like it, but if it’s coming, then I’ll take it is what I would say. And yeah, I will leave you with that, that, you know, it is ultimately about remembering why you’re here, what is your purpose? And that goes for the leaders, too. You are here for the success of the organization that you lead, for the success of the people that you lead. And when you lose sight of that, that’s when you get all the issues that you alluded to earlier.

Martin Cody: Correct. And also, keeping in mind that the success of the community in which you serve is also a large factor as well. Yeah, because those are your neighbors, and those neighbors are ultimately going to be patients at some point in time because we all touch the healthcare system in one-way shape, or another. So, Aparna, absolutely fantastic to learn from you, and I’m indebted to your time today. So, thank you so much for sharing with us your wisdom. I love the background. I love the mini experiences geolocations you can draw from for inspiration, and knowledge, and wisdom sharing. And it’s my sincere belief that what you’ve shared today will actually help folks going through some struggles trying to find resolution in either leadership roles or managerial roles, and so that, we are eternally grateful. So, thank you so much for sharing.

Aparna Ananth: My pleasure. That’s why I’m here. So, thank you for the opportunity.

Martin Cody: Awesome. Wishing you a great day. And thank you so much for tuning in to 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.