Hello. Welcome to the Becker's podcast.
I am so excited to be joined today
by doctor Lindsey Mazzotti, chief medical officer of
medical education and science at Sutter Health,
a large hospital system based in California.
My name is Paige Twenter. I'm a reporter
and assistant editor here at Becker's HealthCare.
And, doctor Mazzotti, I'd love to just turn
the floor over to you and hear from
you. To kick us off, can you introduce
yourself and kinda share a bit about your
background?
Yeah. I'd be happy to, Paige. Thanks.
I'm a hospital medicine physician by training. I'm
also board certified in palliative care.
And I knew early on that I loved
medical education and really fell into a role
of being a a teacher of physicians and
also,
I loved to grow faculty and develop faculty.
I was lucky. I I did my undergrad
at Stanford. I did my medical school and
residency at UCSF
where I had a lot of support to
grow as a clinician educator.
I spent about fourteen years at Kaiser Permanente,
in medical education roles and helping found the
Kaiser Permanente Bernard j Tyson School of Medicine.
And I've been with Sutter Health in this
role for about two years. I'm here because
we are building medical education programs and really
thinking about
medical education as part of our greater strategy.
Yeah. I then you spoke with my colleague,
Erica Serutti a few months ago about for
the past few years, Sutter has made
a really strong investment
and, you know, focused investment in adding,
it sounds like, 11 residency and fellowship
programs in the past few years. Can you
kinda share more about Sutter's physician residency
initiatives?
Sure. Absolutely.
So we started,
before I joined Sutter. Sutter's had a long
tradition of medical education both in San Francisco
as well as in some, outstanding family medicine
programs
in Santa Rosa and in Sacramento. So across
Northern California, we've always had an educational system,
but we had about 13 residency and fellowship
programs.
And as we started exploring
first the changes ahead in the in the
shrinking physician workforce and the anticipated shortages by
the end of this decade,
we thought really differently about how we might
continue to expand access to care, not just
for sort of, you know, growing more care
centers, but actually how to deliberately grow more
physicians.
And so medical education has been part of
that strategy. We've,
now have a plan to begin,
52 total residency and fellowship programs by,
2035.
So we're quadrupling our GME footprint.
We're growing to have roughly a thousand residents,
towards the end of this journey every year,
residents and fellows.
And that has been, I think, really critical
in in terms of how we think about
expanding access to care, training the next generation
of doctors,
particularly where access is gonna be limited
and is already limited.
And then thinking about how we actually
grow mission aligned local physicians who wanna stay
and serve in in the communities that we
serve. So it's been fantastic. We have five
new programs this year that are launching.
You know, we have hundreds of new residents
who joined us in July
and,
just, you know, thousands of people looking at
our programs,
100% match rate, all these, you know, kind
of outstanding indicators that we're we're moving in
the right direction.
No. I, podcast listeners, won't be able to
see that. I give a very shocked face
when you said quadrupling,
you know, residency and fellowship programs by 2035
up to 52,
nearly a thousand residents by the next ten
years.
How are you, you know, planning for that
infrastructure,
and all the resources you're gonna need for
that one.
It's, it's
very deliberate. It's very fast moving. So I
personally find that really exciting. I I love
the the building phase and kind of imagining
what's gonna be somewhere and then working to,
you know, strategically get there.
That said, it's a lot of new programs.
And so each program requires, you know, applications,
new faculty, maybe who in departments that haven't
had teaching faculty before,
new program directors who are, either
joining us as physician leaders or who are
entering into a new role as a physician
leader within Sutter Health.
And then the staffing that happens behind that
to support the residents that that I call
it the care and feeding of residents. It's
a it's a daily task and journey, and
it's a huge commitment. And so we have
to not just attend to building the programs,
but actually make sure that we're training them
well and making sure they themselves are actually
well as they're, on this journey with us.
For other
leaders,
at other health systems, what recommendations would you
give
if they're interested in also
taking on this crazy task of quadrupling
residency programs?
Yeah. I think understanding that there is,
there are resources to start graduate medical education
programs. And so
as you explore
growth, especially in underserved areas, in primary care
specialties,
and in hospitals that haven't previously had graduate
medical education programs.
There are both at least in the state
of California, there's funding, grant funding,
through HCAI and Song Brown
to actually pursue this and to support the
start up phase, which is sometimes quite expensive.
On top of that, you know,
Medicare reimburses, at least today, graduate medical education
in The United States. And while it's it's
imperfect and it's different in different hospitals and
settings,
You can think very strategically about the resources
necessary to start graduate medical education programs. And
so it's a heavy lift, but it's sometimes
not as fiscally resource intensive as one would
imagine.
That was surprising whenever you started this journey?
It was surprising to think about it in
a different way. So,
I'll give you a great example.
When you started graduate medical education program, you
have five year a five year window in
a new hospital to build programs.
And so you have to go very, very
fast and kind of deep within one hospital
in order
to be able to achieve the funding.
And so being strategic about starting things like,
there are transitional year programs that are one
year programs
for people going into specialties like radiology
or
anesthesia.
And you can start those programs and then
later actually convert those slots into fellowships and
medical subspecialties.
And so it's you have to sort of
begin with the end in mind and think
deliberately about really kind of starting
bigger than you might otherwise start
in order to,
maximize the opportunities for medical education,
especially in a really large medical center.
It's a heavy lift. It's not heavy lift.
It's not a two and a half pound
dump bill. It is not.
I wanna make sure we have enough time
to, you know, talk about your other priorities
outside of, obviously, this really incredible work with
GME,
what other priorities would you say are top
of mind for the rest of 2025?
For Sutter Health, I think, you know, we're
really focused on expanding access. So we've talked
about the physician work force. We're also looking
at opening more care centers.
We've talked about sort of that next generation
and building local pipelines.
We wanna make sure that we're creating great
learning environments where our learners are thriving, where,
also, our physicians are thriving, and that's been
really an incredible partnership that I've seen since
I've started at Sutter Health is the relationship
between
Sutter Health and the physicians
that are,
working within our hospitals and our ambulatory centers.
And then there's just a huge focus right
now, obviously, on the patient experience. And so
we wanna make sure that, you know, we're
providing seamless, digital, personalized care,
and we wanna make sure that we're teaching
teaching our residents and fellows and our medical
students within our walls
how to practice medicine in this ever changing
environment,
including AI, including virtual care. You know, it's
a really different system than it was when
I trained, and it's gonna be different tomorrow,
and it's gonna be different in ten years.
So I think that's a really critical piece
to the journey right now of of being,
a learning health system.
I'll also say, you know, personally speaking, we've
been doing a lot of work in undergraduate
medical education, which is thinking about going, you
know, earlier, going upstream to think about medical
students.
So we have,
nine schools that we have affiliations with, and
we have a really exciting
deepened partnership with Charles R. Drew University, which
is based in Los Angeles
and is the first,
historically
black,
medical school West Of The Mississippi.
And so we've been committed
to helping their students pursue research and scholarship
and then their clinical training with us. So
that's been a really exciting journey for us.
It's a great time to be at Sutter
Health.
Yeah. Your mention of the patient experience, I
really wanna tap more into that with just
higher acuity, higher patient volumes
across the board, and even further projections of,
you know, more patients than higher acuity cases
and,
a smaller pool of physicians who can care
for them. Mhmm. You said, you know, in
five years from now, kind of that training
education needed is gonna be different.
What are you already kind of planting seeds
for?
That's a great question. I think
we wanna be focused on making care easier.
We want care to be easier for our
patients to access.
So whether that means on demand video visits,
two way texting, you know, really utilizing technology
so that
you know, even personally,
year over year, I'm seeing it so much
easier to to get help in the care
that I'm seeking for my family, for myself,
and we want that to be accessible and
just kind of, you know, in your pocket.
So
that's really critical.
I think also, you know, on the flip
side of that,
physicians are really busy. And in the era
of new technology,
work never stops. And that's a great thing,
but it also means we have to be
really careful
to set up infrastructures
where our physicians are doing their best work
and their most critical work
and having support, you know, whether through nursing
or through, advanced practice clinicians
so that things that can be managed by
other team members and,
really relieve the physicians of that type of
work. And so technology plays into that. You
know, it's amazing. And then, also, I think
I would add,
when you are a physician and you're caring
for large numbers of patients, especially in primary
care, you're thinking about things on a population
health level.
And so
being able to pull information
from, you know, digital technology, wearables,
to understand what people are doing in real
time and intervene
and intervene in a digital way. That's all
possible now in a way that it really
wasn't even possible five years ago. So tons
of exciting work. And then, you know, making
sure that our physician our current doctors and
our incoming physicians
are all training on how to do this,
you know, effectively, efficiently,
and in a way that really serves our
patients and communities.
You mentioned before also you felt like whenever
you joined Sutter Health, you saw a really
strong relationship between the organization and the current
physicians,
right, and that support.
I just always go to the advice piece
for maybe other, you know, for listeners who
are struggling for that. Any kind of recommendations
for them to find that foundation?
Yes. I think that's been very deliberate.
Our CEO, Warner Thomas, has been,
very committed to ongoing communication. And so that
means bringing people together
on a regular cadence
and listening and and also providing information and
updates and communicating strategy.
And so it can be very easy, especially
in a large health system like this, I
think, for people to retreat into their silos,
whether it's their hospital or their office or
their specialty and department.
And so as you're, you know, spreading
messages and strategic imperatives
and and really trying to overcommunicate,
I think that's been a key,
success of Sutter Health in the last few
years because of Warner.
And
in that,
sometimes I think the business of medicine can
stay on the side of the business of
medicine, and the physicians can stay on the
physician care delivery, you know, on the on
the on the care of patients and their
specialty.
That bridging that is very critical.
And so making sure that as a business
in health care that you have physicians at
the table is crucial.
And I've been really excited to see that
at Sutter Health because we have new service
lines. We're, you know, expanding and better connecting
services like cancer care and heart and vascular
care, orthopedics,
neuroscience.
And in each of those in each of
those service lines and those settings, there's partnership
between physician leaders and administrative leaders. I personally,
as a physician leader in education, have an
administrative partner. And so we work in tandem
in these dyad partnerships, and I think those
also are are key.
We only have a few minutes left, and
now I wanna give you as much time
as possible. What have we not touched on
yet that you really wanna highlight?
I think we covered everything.
I wanted to just say, you know, education
is part of our strategy for both growth
and for patient experience, and we're thinking proactively
about our future physician workforce
and the skills and experiences that are needed
for tomorrow's doctors.
We're really committed to raising that next generation
of physicians.
Wonderful. And we're excited to do that. And
thank you so much, doctor Mazzotti, for joining
us today. I really appreciate it. You bet.
It's been a pleasure. Thank you.