HIT like a Girl - Maura Little Transcription

Joy Rios: [00:00:00] Hey there, and welcome to the HIT Like a Girl podcast where we're dedicated to amplifying the career journey, accomplishments and lessons learned if women everywhere, I'm your host, Joy Rios.

Robin Roberts: [00:00:11] And I'm your other host, Robin Roberts. During the day, together, we run a health IT consultancy known as Chirpy Bird, Inc., where we get to geek out on all things healthcare technology, and policy, but along the way, Joy noticed that so many women were running organizations, but too few were leading our being recognized.

So, we decided to change that.

Joy Rios: [00:00:30] Together, we're learning about the puzzle that is healthcare and sharing what we find with you, our listeners.

Robin Roberts: [00:00:36] You can expect us to be talking with some pretty badass women. We will even be exploring how the pandemic is impacting many of their professional lives.

Joy Rios: [00:00:43] This season, we've also formed a private community of both guests and listeners over on Slack to help make connections, offer support to one another and share the resources we come across. If you want to join us, check out our website @hitlikeagirlpod.com/community. And this week, our HIT Like a Girl pod Slack community, shout outs, go to Kim, Lindsay, Michelle, Rachel and Stacy.

This week's virtual high five goes to Michelle for her recent career move from Managing Director to VP of Program Management for a company focused on evidence-based clinical intelligence. High five.

Robin Roberts: [00:01:21] All right, enough already. There are too many awesome women to talk with. Let's get started.

Joy Rios: [00:01:26] Today. We're talking with Maura Little, Executive Director at Cambia Grove.

Her work helps bring together communities of changemakers to transform the healthcare system. We learned a lot from our conversation with Maura and think you will too. So let's get started.

Maura, Thank you so much for joining us today. We liken healthcare to  a 5,000-piece puzzle where none of us gets to be the expert in anything or everything, but we all share, you know, a piece of expertise.

And so part of our mission here is to really understand as many individual pieces as we can, and hopefully help put them together. You seem to have a very interesting one and we would love to hear more about it. So, if you wouldn't mind, could you please take a moment to introduce yourself and help us get to know your piece of the health IT puzzle.

Maura Little: [00:02:18] Absolutely. Thank you for having me today. And I agree it is a 5000-piece puzzle that we're all trying to put together. So my name is Maura Little and I'm the Executive Director of Cambia Grove, but I'm also a mom to two very rambunctious, crazy young boys. I've got a three-year-old and an eight-year-old.

And so when I think about the puzzle and where we fit, I literally just think about a story that happened yesterday. At Cambia Grove, we celebrated our five-year anniversary yesterday in mid morning, and it was a great celebration talking about bringing the community together and some of our programs that we've created and put on things that are all focused on helping connect community innovators and really catalyzing solutions to be able to create a better healthcare system.

A couple hours after our celebration, I got a call from my mom who was out taking my son bike riding, and she does this a lot. Rudy just learned how to ride a bike this summer and so it's just kind of their thing.

And I got this call while me and my team were having a small team get-together just to debrief from the celebration and just, you know, give our, thanks to each other. And my mom let me know that, Hey, we've had an accident. Rudy's doing okay, but he's bleeding and we need some help. So, I quickly got off that Zoom chat with my team, went outside, yelled for my husband to stop mowing the lawn and hop in the car.

And so he went off to go help my mom and Rudy figure out what's going on while I brought my three-year-old to the, you know, trying to figure out what was going on with making sure my three-year-old was old was okay. And then just deciding, you know what, I got to go see what was going on. Long story short, he ended up hitting a pole.

The pole hit right below his helmet and busted his head open to the point where they had to call 911 and get not stitches, but just glue on his forehead. And so everyone's doing okay. Parents are a little shaken right now, I should say, but where it relates back to the work of Cambia Grove, it's all of the supporting functions and all of the supporting elements that the paramedics needed, the first responders needed. My mom needed to be able to call us. We live in a rural area, so broadband and telephone cell phone service isn't that great. So, she had a hard time getting through to us. The paramedics, of course, when they were asking us questions, they, you have to go through all of this: he allergic to anything? What's going on here? Does he need, you know, does he have a prior history of concussions? Or what does this look like?

And luckily I have a pretty sturdy, healthy eight-year-old, but being a parent in that moment and trying to comfort your child as well as making sure that you're making the right decisions for him, not to mention the financial things that are going on in the back of your head.

There's so much room for the healthcare system to improve and be better for everyone. And so that's where Cambia Grove plays. Those  connection points between the, what we call the five points of healthcare: payer provider, purchaser, patient, and policy maker to make the system work more smoothly.

Joy Rios: [00:06:09] So can you give us a little bit more of an outline if somebody who has never come into contact with Cambia Grove? What exactly is your organization? How does it work within, you know, your community and of course, across the country?

Maura Little: [00:06:24] Yeah, absolutely. So we were founded five years ago by Cambia Health Solutions.

We are fully funded by Cambia Health Solutions and we're funded to be a neutral convener to push the boundaries of healthcare, healthcare innovation, and healthcare transformation. And what we focus on is really the ability for ecosystems and state-based ecosystems to improve and optimize key elements that enable innovation to succeed.

What we've found over the last five years is that regardless if you've got a good solution, if you're a startup, if you're an innovator entrepreneur, and you've got a great idea, a lot of times, those great ideas fail. Not because they're not great ideas that they're failing, because the system isn't ready to take them on.

And those barriers specifically are what we've identified as infrastructure, incentives, and culture. We need the right physical and technical infrastructure, like broadband, like interoperability, like access to care. But when Rudy hit his head, we weren't able to see and get his head glued back for about three and a half hours because we live in somewhat of a remote, rural area.

So that's infrastructure incentives is that payment it's how do we incentivize value over volume? And how do we make sure that solutions that are focused really on that on patients and being able to give them the best care are being able to be put in place because we have a system that's able to pay for them?

And then culture. Culture is the ability for solutions to be created that have the cultural competencies for the end user. We've heard stories about diabetes management tools that fit on a belt loop and most women don't typically wear belts. And so that's a hard one to have women be able to utilize effectively.

We've heard stories of global health organizations creating at-home birthing kits, but the packaging is mostly in white and in some cultures, white is the color, white is a sign of death. And so those kits weren't being used and they had to better understand those, the culture that is trying to use those packaging.

So, specifically for Cambia Grove, what we have done is we've created the Healthcare Innovation Advancement Framework Next Generation Playbook to help States be able to not only create solutions, but help those solutions create impact in the market.

Robin Roberts: [00:09:20] You know, I would imagine in the era of COVID that even the solutions being deployed or the rapid acceptance of now, you know, the digital delivery of care, these sorts of things, really more being done in nine months, than maybe the proceeding nine years,  that that must have shifted how you're doing things. What impact fact has COVID had on how you guys are operating or some of the innovations that you know, are now either coming up with things that may need to pivot?

Maura Little: [00:09:49] You know, it's a great question because fundamentally we haven't shifted things. The work we do around the ecosystem, building around infrastructure, incentives, and culture has become even more clear as COVID has impacted. the country and the world, and our communities.

Of course, it's actually become way more clear that when we are looking at delivering these solutions, I take telehealth,for example. COVID hits - we talk to some of our provider partners during a telehealth panel discussion that we had virtually on Cambia Grove's platform. And they said we've seen telehealth skyrocket from 10% to 80% usage in just one month. And when you look back at telehealth and the deployment of telehealth,  it rests on infrastructure, incentives, and culture. It is the broadband infrastructure that needs to be secured across the country.

There's a ton of, when I was back working for a member of Congress, I actually worked on the implementation of the Stimulus Bill back in 2009. And part of that was around broadband and we still have, I think the estimates around 142 to 162 million Americans still are without broadband, but that's just an estimate.

So, in order for telehealth services to truly be able to impact the care for individuals and families, we need to have that basic infrastructure right now. CMS has temporarily included a couple of payment options for telehealth services, but they're are temporary. And I know there's a big discussion about how we pay for telehealth services. Long-term that needs to be addressed.

And of course, culture, I was, even though I live in a rural area, I was hesitant as a healthcare innovation leader. So, I'm embarrassed to say I was hesitant to utilize telehealth services, but me and my family, aside from, you know, getting your head busted open, me and my family have been using telehealth services for some of our healthcare needs over the last couple of months to save a trip to, you know, to the big city. And so when we look at the advancements of innovation in this era of COVID, absolutely things have shifted for what the demand and the needs are.

And I think the question now is how we sustain it and we believe it's, it really is from the advancement framework, focusing on infrastructure, incentives, and culture.

Cambia Grove, like on a more tactical, I should mention, we have a physical space in Seattle, Washington, and we also have a presence and we have one of our managers working to convene the community in Salt LakeCity in Utah. And from a physical location situation, we know we haven't been back to the office since March 3rd, I think it is.

And I don't, from what we can tell, we're probably not going to reopen and convene people in person for a long time. What we have done is we've opened up a Cambia Grove membership. So, we welcome people to join us through our Cambia Grove membership, which is free until we can convene in person again, and it's a great platform to help innovators connect and stay connected during this time of COVID.

Joy Rios: [00:13:30] Yeah, because practically speaking, what I understand you and Cambia Grove serve as a little bit of a connector where, you know, if somebody has a big idea that they want to get out and meet other people that are innovative and working in the healthcare space, you provide a space for them to actually network and build the relationships that they need, get the information that they might need to take their idea and, you know, get it out into the world in a way that it's going to make an impact and fit into the systems that we want to see for our future. And I imagine that has been a bit of a challenge, but it seems like you've also taken it to embrace the virtual aspect of it, to not need the physical space, to make those connections happen and still foster change in culture.

Maura Little: [00:14:18] Absolutely. I have an awesome team. My team has been able to transition everything to be virtual for the time being. They rose to the challenge and saw this as, you know, connecting is - it has always been important. It's so important right now, as we work as health innovators to help try and end this pandemic.

And so we are that connector. And from that vantage point, we also are looking at ways to be an "Excuse Buster." Really it's  something that we talk about is that we have all we...  we're building a critical mass of innovators who want to change the healthcare system. And always when you get big changes or big ideas going forward, there's always a barrier.

And we see our jobs as not only connecting, but helping break down those barriers to enable the innovator is to catalyze those innovations that are truly important.

Joy Rios: [00:15:31] You are already so forward thinking and kind of acting from the future and that you would like to see, but you are also kind of really well planted in reality and, what exactly like, okay, well, what are the rules and what are boundaries and the limits of what we have to work with in order to get from here to there, given what you know, and if you were in a position and also given your extensive Rolodex and like all of the different parts of the sectors that you're so familiar with, if there was any problem that you could literally make, wave your magic wand and just solve it without having to think about the CPT codes or the systems or the, you know, the money and resources and time, what problem would you choose to solve in healthcare and why?

Maura Little: [00:16:21] So it's so funny you asked me this because this is one of my favorite questions to ask others is the  wave the magic wand. It's something that I ask people on stage. And I love the question. The hard thing is of course answering it, because there's so many different things that you would want to see.

Changed the vision of Cambia Grove and how we're looking at this is that one day we would love for companies to fail because they're bad ideas, not because the system won't implement them. And that's key to what we're up to all the time.

Robin Roberts: [00:17:00] People come out with solutions and they haven't understood the problem.

And you're like, you have to solve the problem. Right? Like some people tell us about stuff and I'm like, that sounds horrible, like I understand the spirit behind it. But I love your wish. This is my favorite. Okay. I'm going on record. This is my favorite wishever, please continue.

Maura Little: [00:17:21] So well, it's true. I just see you're right. I. we have the exact same discussions with people where they come and they say, we've got the greatest technology that's based off of blockchain and has an AI algorithm, and you go, well, what does it actually do? And they're like, Oh, well, You know it, I don't know, I'm making this up. It makes your cat "meow" less.

Or I don't know that wave your magic wand to create, or to achieve this wish of companies failing because they're bad ideas and not because of the health care system won't implement them is actually backwards thinking.

So you mentioned that you like the thing that, or you like how I'm thinking about this in the future tense.

My magic wand would actually take us back maybe a hundred or so years and look to actually design the system. One of the things that we continue to hear from the five points of healthcare during our five points conference is when we ask, how is the system designed to work? Those who have spent their entire lifetimes working to transform the system, typically laugh and say the system was never designed.

And that is the problem. What's happened is that we've had all of these seemingly small changes or well-intentioned changes to different segments of the system without actually understanding the consequences to the rest of the stakeholders within the healthcare system. And a lot of times patients get lost and that's a huge issue.

So, if I could wave my magic wand, I would invent a time machine. I would go back a hundred years and I would hold a convention to design the system before any of these different incentives were created or structural elements were created to ensure that patients come first.

Joy Rios: [00:19:32] I'm going to go on the record and say, that's actually my favorite answer to this question as well, because. I think you're absolutely right. I think a lot of what we're dealing with is unintended consequences of decisions that were made in a completely different time, you know, and for a different reality.

And I think a lot of us are wishing we had acted differently even this year. Like, okay, well, we're now in a new reality here currently sitting in, you know, what is September, or the fall and like how different would our world be if we had changed the way that we responded, you know, earlier in the spring or earlier  this year? And it's just like, okay, well here's the mess we have. And now we've got to figure out how do we move forward with it? And if only we had done something different back then, so I love that.

Maura Little: [00:20:27] Yeah. One of the books I read. A couple of years back, was I Elizabeth Rosenthal called, "An American Sickness," and, we had before COVID hit, it was, I can't believe it was just in January. We had Dr. Rosenthal come out and speak at a Cambia Grove fireside chat in Utah. We've got our physical space in Seattle.

We also do a ton work in Utah with an innovation council and supporting the innovation ecosystem out there. Yeah. And Dr. Rosenthal has in the book gone back to understand the historical context of where we were and how it has unfolded to where we are today. And so, I would really recommend people who are interested in that understanding to read the book. Even people who are just interested in getting into the healthcare space, that book has helped me a ton in understanding the different nuances of why we are here today.

Joy Rios: [00:21:28] Well, our next question,kind of goes into a little bit more personal career advice. Is there anything, any lesson that you have learned along your vast experience that you feel that, you know, others would benefit from?  Like any sort of hurdle that  that they may maybe able to skip over? A challenge they could avoid?

Maura Little: [00:21:52] Oh my gosh. I would love if we could do the whole interview on things that I I could say, Oh, I wish I would have done that differently. Or I wish I would've known this.

I would focus on two things. Early on in my career or when I was thinking about what I wanted to do, I would over-plan things.

And what I've realized is that in thinking about my future, I need to build in a healthy amount of spontaneity. Because I never thought I would be in healthcare. And it's so important to enable yourself to learn from different areas and learn from different angles. Now, their example is when I worked for the utility company, I worked in renewable energy for the utility company.

And I had a really hard time taking that job because I thought that the utility companies were, were the problem, and that we needed to go outside the box and pressure the box to fix itself. But I learned so much about the barriers facing the implementation of renewable energy from that time.

That has helped me understand that when we look at change and we look at progress and we looked at being activists-- it's-- you can still be an activist.

But you'll be a better activist for change if you are able to look at that change from different perspectives. So, that's one thing is to build in a level of spontaneity, because you never really know where you're gonna end up within your career path, but just make sure that you go there with curiosity and excitement.

The second thing is that networking is key to both your own personal success, as well as the success of the projects that you're working on. I'm really fortunate to be at Cambia Grove, because we have an incredible community of individuals and members who take their time, their talent to share with each other, what they're facing in the healthcare innovation world and this community that we've built just is so energizing, especially at times where you just feel like we can't change anything. You'll always find someone there that has been there or has a piece of advice or a new way of thinking, or a really difficult question that spurs your thinking in a different way. And so, I would say networking and being open and making time to connect with individuals will help you tremendously throughout your career.

Robin Roberts: [00:24:49] I like that. And I can't count how many times Joy and I have worked on something or been in the middle of something or come across something where she says, you know, no one could be an expert in everything where we've said, you know, we can just send a message to him, ask her who would like to geek out about this for like ,10 minutes and just. like you said, showing up ready and excited and curious and ready to learn.

This is such a big industry and everyone has a vast level different, you know, vast experience. And so I like that you're talking about just being enthusiastic and showing up with that positive attitude to do, and a willingness to learn through those things.

So if somebody wants to connect with you, they want to be part of one of your conferences or challenges, or they want to just learn more about you personally. What is the best way to connect with you?

Maura Little: [00:25:34] I'm pretty open. I think my email's on the website. It's just, it's maura@cambiagrove.com. LinkedIn is a great way to connect with me as well.

I would say those two things reach out directly and say, hi. I love connecting with new people and understanding where they're coming from. And I'm a connector at heart. That's one of the things that I love to do. So, feel free to free to ping me or email me, or look me up on LinkedIn.

Joy Rios: [00:26:01] And question about Cambia Grove. Does somebody as an individual, can they be involved or does it have to come through their organization?

Maura Little: [00:26:09] That's such a good question. We focus on individuals because we know that innovators can be from anywhere. And so we just set up in March actually, it was pretty coincidental that we were launching this membership in March.

And the membership itself is for individuals, not organizations. And we specifically made that key because we know that individuals take on different roles within organizations, but it's the individuals who are making changes. Of course within organizations or outside of organizations. So if you're interested, feel free to check out our membership.

It is currently free for anyone to join. There is an application page on our website @cambiagrove.com and we've got almost 200 members right now from around the world. I know we've got some great people who chime in from London and Ecuador and a couple other places around the world, talking about the COVID response and other challenges to innovations and ways to support each other.

So ,check that out as an individual and we would love to have more people to join our community.

Joy Rios: [00:27:26] Very cool. Well, thank you so much for talking with us today. This has been a real pleasure getting to know you and getting to know more about Cambia Grove.

Maura Little: [00:27:34] Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity and really appreciate this platform that you all host and share and work on. It's so important to enable women in health IT, this platform. So, I I thank you.

Joy Rios: [00:27:49] Well, we appreciate it. We're really trying to just create more of a culture of support and empowering each other. So we're happy to do it and happy that you're part of it.

Maura Little: [00:27:58] Thank you.

Robin Roberts: [00:28:00] And thank you for listening to the HIT Like a Girl podcast.

If you want to know more about us or this guest, check out our website @hitlikeagirlpod.com

Joy Rios: [00:28:10] While you're at it, if you found value in this episode, we'd appreciate a ratings on iTunes or simply tell a friend. You can also connect with us on Twitter or Instagram at the handle @hitlikeagirlpod. Thanks again.

See you soon.