On Unlocking the Value of the Clinician Executive with Erika Pabo, MD MBA
(If you prefer audio only, you can also listen on Spotify)
You know I love a good conversation. So it’s been such fun to launch this podcast where I just get to record myself chit-chatting with my incredible pals and together share all the incredible lessons we’ve learned as healthcare executives. What I’m hoping to accomplish here is to give you a sense of the possible, to broaden the aperture of what it means to be clinician leader in business, and to share the stories of those who have achieved success. At the same time, I think it’s critical to highlight the struggles and to shine a light on some of the longstanding and intrinsic biases about what clinician can and can’t be, what we can and can’t do. There’s so much opportunity to help change the way we think about the roles of clinicians in organizations and help our clinician leaders understand and unlock their potential.
So it is a great pleasure to share this conversation with my friend Erika Pabo. Erika is a physician, executive leader, and entrepreneur with deep experience building, operating, and transforming businesses across the value-based healthcare ecosystem. She currently serves as Chief Transformation Officer & Operations Leader for Humana’s Primary Care Organization, the largest senior focused primary care business in the country (you’ll most commonly know it as CenterWell Primary Care). Erika previously served Co-President at Author, a company she helped incubate and operate as a business segment within Humana and where she still sits on the board. Prior to that, she served as Medical Director for Population Health and Associate Director for Primary Care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital System where she still sees patients today. She received her MD and MBA from Harvard and her bachelors degree from Yale.
In this episode, Erika and I have a fun conversation discussing:
How she learned how to understand her value, show her value, and bring all of herself to her role as a clinician and an operator
Her inspiration to pursue an joint MD/MBA degree and other approaches to acquiring the skills needed to be successful
What she sees as the special strengths that clinicians bring to the business world and why she thinks some of the most transformative leaders are indeed clinicians
How success arises from having curiosity and mutual respect, developing a shared language, having a growth mindset, and from clear articulation of roles and responsibilities
On the heterogeneity and the historically limited view of the role of the "clinical leader" and why she has sometimes had to “over-index” on being an operator as a result
On navigating life and work and being present through it all
A special note of appreciation for the innumerable clinicians on the ground doing the hard work of caring for patients without whom the system would not function
And much more! Enjoy!