What can humble arguably even the most prominent surgeon in the country? In a word: empathy.
Cleveland Clinic CEO Dr. Toby Cosgrove was recently tapped by President Obama to lead the troubled VA, and by some accounts, there are few others who are more qualified to take the helm at the nation’s largest healthcare system (although he turned down the offer).
Fast Company has a good interview and story with the physician, noting that Dr. Cosgrove has performed some 22,000 surgeries, patented 30 different medical innovations, authored 450 journal articles, all while leading Cleveland Clinic’s cardiac care unit to being named the best in the nation for 20 years in a row, per U.S. News & World Report.
Yet despite the litany of resume boosters and wide acclaim in the medical world, apparently even Dr. Cosgrove was humbled when he took on the new position with Cleveland Clinic 10 years ago.
“…Soon after he took the job he painfully discovered there was one essential leadership lesson he’d yet to learn,” Marc Crowley says Dr. Cosgrove told him recently. “And it was largely a result of this late-in-life epiphany that he was able to transform the Cleveland Clinic into one of the most admired, engaged, and profitable healthcare organizations in the world.”
From Crowley’s piece:
The Harvard Business School was so impressed with the decades-long success of the Clinic’s heart care program that they invited Dr. Cosgrove to participate in a case study at its Cambridge campus.
While standing on a stage in an auditorium filled with students and faculty, fielding questions in what should have been an entirely celebratory experience, he called on a woman who’d raised her hand.
“My father is a doctor too,” she said, “and he has mitral valve disease. After doing research, we know you’ve done more of this kind of surgery than anybody else in the country. But we finally decided not to come to you because we heard you didn’t have any empathy. Dr. Cosgrove, do you teach empathy at the Cleveland Clinic?”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
As if that weren’t shocking enough, Dr. Cosgrove describes another instance, in Saudi Arabia, where the president of a newly opened facility said it would be “dedicated to the body, and the soul, and the spirits of its patients.” He looked over to see the Saudi King and Crown Prince in tears.
“What I understood in that very moment was that those tears were expressions of sheer gratitude–for the fact that we intended to care for much more than a patient’s physical body,” he told Crowley.
He realized then that he had unintentionally become a “cardiac surgical technician,” focused more on precision than understanding and connecting with patients.
And that, in turn, led to a dramatic shift at the Cleveland Clinic, where he vowed to incorporate empathy, kindness and compassion back into the clinic, in place of the “cut well, sew well, do well” mentality that previously dominated.
The hospital undertook several major efforts to tilt the organization in the right direction, including sending 43,000 employees to seminars that emphasized the emotional needs of patients and bringing in architects to incorporate better design and light to all facilities.
“We also discovered that one of the biggest complaints patients have is with their doctor’s communication,” Dr. Cosgrove told Crowley. “So we mandated that all of our physicians be re-trained to be more attentive, caring, and thoughtful.”
