Can Employers and Hospitals Build a Better Healthcare System? with Scott Polenz

I mean, I think you talked about on a podcast, on Becker's podcast, you talked about physician alignment, and we just talked about it again, engagement and retention.

I mean, Oakleaf is a physician-founded and physician-directed.

You're talking about building trust with these physicians.

So what does physician alignment actually mean in practice? How does the model differ from a large health system employing thousands of physicians?

You know, so it's interesting.

So when I was working for the larger healthcare organization, I was overseeing physician And APP recruitment and retention and kind of engagement.

And then I also oversaw the overall engagement journey of the whole healthcare system, which was about 1,500 physicians and APPs and about 12,000 staff.

When we were really getting into our engagement scores and we got them back from Fuscaini.

We didn't score very well.

We were in the bottom quartile in the whole country.

And my dyad partner and I, her name was Dr. Shaw.

We finally just looked at each other and said, you know what? We're never going to get our physicians fully engaged and ultimately retain them if they aren't aligned with the organization and where the organization wants to go.

And more specifically, executive leadership.

And this was kind of after COVID.

So our executive leadership during COVID and a lot of organizations kind of, you know, went remote and weren't there in the trenches.

And then even when we got out of COVID and people came back to work, we weren't necessarily as present as we needed to be.

So we just realized that if we're not going to get aligned and get our executive leadership to build that trust and trust.

Our physicians want to be aligned with executive leadership.

They want to be aligned with for permission and the vision and the values of the organization.

Until we get that right, we're never going to get them engaged and we're going to continue to lease them.

So that's something that I'm very passionate about here is I want what I've told our physicians, when you shake my hand or I shake your hand, it needs to mean something.

You may not agree with me or I may not agree with you, but when we shake hands or when we walk away, we respect one another because we're trying to build that trust and mutual respect and doing what's best for the organization and living our mission both in value.

So what I'm hearing from you, Scott, is that you're trying to bring physicians into executive leadership positions or at least get them exposed.

Here's the interesting part.

Obviously, you know, I'm originally from Pakistan, which basically means I know a bunch of physicians, you know, And so a lot of them are really dear friends of mine.