This is where health care leadership comes together.
Becker's sixteenth annual meeting brings more than 3,500
hospital and health system executives and nearly 800
speakers to Chicago
April.
This year's event includes keynote conversations with Dallas
Cowboys legend Troy Aikman and former president George
w Bush. For the agenda and event details,
visit beckershospitalreview.com
and click on the events tab in the
upper right. We're looking forward to hosting you
in Chicago.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Becker's Healthcare
podcast. I'm Scott King, thrilled today to be
joined by a very special guest, Disha k
Brown, senior director, community clinics network operations over
at UCLA Health. Disha, how are you? Thanks
so much for joining us.
I'm doing well, Scott. Thank you so much
for having me.
Of course. Of course. And, you know, we
have a lot of of big topics in
health care to to lean on you for
to answer for us just a little bit.
Before you do that, I was hoping you
can give us a little bit about a
little information about your background and your career
in health care.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
So, Scott, currently, I serve as the senior
director of community clinics operations
here at UCLA Health, and I've been in
this role now for a little bit over
a year and a half. I have
close to,
twenty years of health care operations
experience. And currently here at UCLA,
I have the privilege
of leading over 200 community clinics
that delivers care to diverse communities across seven
regions.
Our clinics are often the front door
to our health system, and the work that
we do every day is centered on
one simple but powerful mission,
and that is healing with human kindness one
patient at a time. And I like to
think that what makes our organization special is
not just the scale of what we do,
but the intentional focus on bringing high quality
academic level care
closer to where patients live, work, and raise
their families.
Through our community clinic footprint,
we see approximately
close to a million outpatient visits a year.
And so we're expanding
access and advancing population health and really building
care models that are increasingly
team based and patient centered.
For me personally,
the work is deeply meaningful because it sits
at the intersection
of leadership,
operational
excellence, and community service. And so this is
what drives me and continues to inspire me
to do the work that I do every
day.
Thanks so much, Disha, for sharing your background
info there. And and, yeah, I I think
it's it's such a great, approach to focus
on just, you know, one patient at a
time. I think you end up helping so
many people that way. So thank you for
sharing that as well. And, you know, I
I want to start by
getting to the topics and asking you, what
was the most important initiative you led in
the last year? You know, what did you
do for that initiative, and what were the
results?
You know, as I reflect over the last
year and especially being new to UCLA,
it is a little difficult for me to
point to just
one initiative.
Leadership,
I believe, in a complex health care system
requires
balancing
the immediate operational realities while also trying to
advance
long term strategic priorities, and I often refer
to this as the duality of leadership.
When I stepped into my role,
over a year and a half ago, I
established six leadership
imperatives
to guide the trajectory
of my leadership platform.
And some of those
imperatives included strengthening our leadership teams,
integrated collaboration,
governance, standardizing
processes,
team cohesion,
and just building
a more results driven culture.
Unfortunately,
I had to shift focus. Within
nine months of me being here at UCLA
Health, we were faced with an unexpected
crisis
during the LA fires,
And I'm sure everyone
remembers and recall what a difficult time period
that was across,
Los Angeles and Los Angeles County.
My immediate focus at that time was ensuring
the safety
of our staff, patients, and operational
assets.
Unfortunately, during that time, we did lose,
one of our
facilities.
But, thankfully, due to quick action and just
quick leadership
of the people we had on the ground
and leading our clinics, no lives were lost.
And I'm very, very grateful for that because
certainly that remained
my highest priority to ensure that our staff
and our patients were safe.
If I step back and think a little
bit more, I would also
highlight the fact that over the past year,
we were able to continue advancing
one of our population health strategies that was
extremely
important.
I co champion an initiative to help improve
hypertension management
across our community clinic footprint,
and this focused on repeat blood pressure checks
for patients that were presenting with elevated
readings.
Our performance improved
by approximately
thirty percent in a very short period of
time
between July and December, and our fiscal year
is not over. And so I'm super excited
about the achievements
of the work that we've done in regard
to this metric and in regard to this
particular population because it represents
meaningful progress in reducing long term cardiovascular
risk for the population that we serve. In
addition to that, I just learned this week,
and I'm even more excited about it, that
an abstract we submitted,
in regard to this work was selected
for the Society of Internal General Medicine conference,
presentation
in May. So I'm super excited about it.
And as I think about
both of these
areas over the past year, the experience demonstrates
to me our ability to navigate crisis
while still delivering
measurable
health outcomes.
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. You
know, it's unfortunate to hear that a a
facility was lost, but but, you know, it's
nice to hear that everyone kinda banded together
and everyone was okay and and just, you
know,
a great great leadership got you guys through
that crisis, it sounds like. And I kinda
wanna go back to something
you said about leadership.
In your introduction, I think you kinda broke
down your role as as focusing on leadership,
operational excellence, and community service. And what I
wanna ask you is is out of
those kind of three sectors you divided your
role into, do you think that leadership
is the most important? Because, obviously, good leadership
leads to good operational excellence and good community
service.
Absolutely. At the end of the day, regardless
of whether we're talking about being
results driven or being more people centered
or even focusing on improving patient experience, at
the end of the day,
it all connects back to leadership.
And that is why leadership
became one of my
first imperatives to focus on in regard to
ensuring that our leaders,
are strong and they're presenting strong and that
they have what they need to succeed in
their roles.
Absolutely. And and leadership will get you through
a a crisis like you just shared with
us, and and you'll
able to learn from that crisis.
Absolutely. Like that again.
Yes. Absolutely.
And so the thing I wanna ask you
is, what is what is the hardest thing
you'll have to do in the coming year,
you think?
I think for me, the hardest thing that
I would have to do is continue to
focus on leading sustained
culture change.
Strategy
definitely
is essential,
but culture, I think, at the end of
the day, ultimately determines
whether strategy succeeds.
And culture change
is very difficult, and I often say, as
leaders, we must learn to do hard things.
We have to, and we have to lean
into it. And and
change can be certainly hard, and it requires
consistency
and certainly
a lot of courage and patience at the
same time, as well as, I believe it
means, holding ourselves accountable
to the behaviors
we say we value
and how we live up to those behaviors
even when it is uncomfortable
and staying committed to the long game despite
competing priorities.
I often say I believe the real work
of leadership
is often unseen.
It's not just achieving operational wins,
but building environments where excellence becomes the norm.
I think this level of transformation
requires intentional effort every day,
and I see that as both the greatest
challenge
and the greatest opportunity ahead.
Disha, where do you see the best opportunities
for organizational
growth?
You know, I am incredibly
fortunate to be part of an organization
like UCLA Health whose vision centers on healing
with human kindness. And as demand for care
continues to grow,
access remains one of our greatest opportunities.
I have this joke that I say all
the time that, oh my gosh, I wish
I had a garden so I could grow
more physicians.
It seems that we cannot simply hire enough
physicians to meet the demand. So we must
become smarter
about how we design our care delivery models
and focus on
advanced team based models and optimizing the roles
of all of our,
providers and our clinical staff and even being
able to leverage technology thoughtfully.
I believe that if we can do that,
when we build systems that are efficient,
team based, and people centered, we can expand
access and improve outcomes
and at the same time,
position the organization for long term sustainable growth.
And, Disha, I think you have such a
great perspective on on leadership and and what
good leadership you know, what that entails in
health care. I I want to to close
this by asking you, how do you think
you evolved as a leader?
I
think, you know, when you're starting out as
a as a young leader, at some point,
it it really appears to be daunting. It's
like you're looking at the mountain.
I was fortunate that throughout my leadership career
and I began my
experience in health care with the department of
veteran affairs, I have the opportunity
to really grow through various leadership platforms
and trainings.
In addition to that,
matriculating
through various senior positions,
I think, also prepared me very, very well.
And also facing that duality of leadership, trying
to balance crisis while at the same time
focusing on operational
goals and initiatives.
I think what has developed me the most
as a leader is my commitment to being
people centered
and focusing on the human element
of this work that we do every day.
I I believe so much of what we
do, especially in health care, but especially in
a senior leadership role is human centered, and
we must connect to the human element in
order to drive operational excellence.
Yeah. I think it's such an important point
as we deal with emerging technology, you know,
in health care now to to to make
sure we're staying people focused. I think it's
a a great perspective. And, Disha, thank you
so much for a great conversation and for
joining us on the podcast. Look forward to
working with you again soon. Thank you. It's
certainly been my pleasure.