Dr. David Callender, President & CEO of Memorial Hermann Health System

Well, we're excited to welcome to the studio today, Dr. David Callender, president and CEO of the Memorial Hermann Health System, along with reporter Jishnu Nair.

So, Dr. Callender, we're very honored to have you joining us in the studio.

We have a lot of questions to get to, so I'm just going to go ahead and jump right in.

Please.

Looking at what we're seeing at the hospital level, what are you seeing during this time of really serious public health challenges from measles to cyclospora to probably things Jishnu and I don't even know about yet?

Yeah, we all worry about what we don't know exactly yet.

And by the way, thank you very much for inviting me here to do this.

So it's a pleasure to speak with both of you and tell you a little bit more about how Memorial Hermann's thinking about what's ahead, both in the short term as well as intermediate and longer term.

A lot of public health challenges.

We know since COVID and with some of the mistakes that I think we made as a group of medical professionals, health professionals, and a lot of different groups that can be classified under that umbrella.

But in general, we just don't have the level of trust among members of the public that we used to.

And so I think that's having a big impact in terms of people's willingness to listen to advice, to prompting them to think about, well, why are they telling me to do this? And there's a lot of misinformation out there about vaccinations and other public health measures.

So it really has caused us to double down with effort in terms of getting good information out, seeking partners that are trusted by the public to help us deliver information, continually focus on the data and information that we gathered through years and years and years of study, point to that, talk about the methodology, why we think it's sound, to try to win back some of that trust.

Clearly, the measles challenge that we have in the country is related to falling vaccination rates.

We're very concerned about that.

There are pockets within the country where the vaccination rates have fallen to around 70%.

And that puts us at high risk for this sort of outbreak problem that we're seeing.

And of course, you need to light the torches in the right place and it becomes a nationwide problem in a very short period of time.

So we're all working to prevent that.

Again, the bigger issue, I think, is just regaining the public trust, being consistent, talking about the sources of information we've used, asking the public to look on their own at that information and, you know, come to their own opinion about what's right, what's wrong, what's questionable.

And then we're always available to talk with patients, members of the public about what we believe and the whys, the reasons for those beliefs.

Well, I've heard that, you know, trust is lost in buckets and gained in drips.

So how do you go about regaining the trust? What else can Memorial Hermann do? What else can the greater Houston community do to help regain some of that trust?

Yeah, you know, we definitely believe that old adage, you lose it in buckets and you regain it in drips.

And, you know, in fact, one of our values for Memorial Hermann is credibility, right? We work every day to try to maintain that credibility with the public, be seen as a trusted source of information.