Empowering Women and Transforming Home Health (ft. Stacy Olinger)

On this episode of The Vurge, Rebecca is joined by Stacy Olinger, Vice President Home Care at BJC Healthcare. Olinger is a seasoned healthcare executive and nurse, who's been on a fascinating voyage from the organic chemistry lab to the echelons of healthcare leadership. Be prepared to delve deep into Stacy's world, her transformative experiences as a home health aide in rural Alaska, and how it sparked her passion for personalizing healthcare. She enlightens us on how her nursing background has influenced her executive approach, with the patient's individual needs always at the forefront. 

On this episode, Stacy doesn't just stop at personalizing healthcare; she passionately advocates for women leaders, sharing their stories, challenges, and successes. She unveils her expert knowledge on implementing highly reliable systems to increase patient access to home care, and explores her vision of incorporating artificial intelligence to lessen the burdensome electronic health records. In our conversation, we delve into her strategy of unlocking her full potential, using empathy as a superpower, and finding joy in connecting with her children. You won't want to miss this episode as Stacy uncovers her visionary thinking and shares her plans for innovating healthcare.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:09

Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the Verge. Today we have Stacey Olander with us and she is a seasoned executive in the value-based and post-acute space. Thank you, stacey, for joining us today.

Speaker 2: 0:21

Thank you so much, rebecca. It's awesome to be on your podcast today.

Speaker 1: 0:24

It's awesome to have you. We are both brought together, I think, by chief, the women's community that brings together executives, so it's so good to have that with us and get to partner with you. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are today?

Speaker 2: 0:45

Yeah, I'd love to. Chief has been a fantastic organization and is connecting many women leaders and empowering us to be our very best. I started out, actually, in an organic chemistry lab in Montana State University watching chemicals turn from orange to green. I said I cannot do this with my life. What do I really want to do next? And I ended up choosing the profession of nursing because I wanted to make a difference in the lives of people. And while I went to nursing school and I transferred to University of Alaska, inkerance, I had a really pivotal moment when I was working as a home health aide. I was driving out into rural Alaska to a woman's house which was a cabin in the middle of the woods, without any type of. You know, there's no road signs.

Speaker 2: 1:31

There's no paved roads and I had the opportunity to give her a bath with water that I heated on her wooden stove, and I think for me that was a moment where I realized that healthcare is deeply personal and what's important to people is that they're able to live off the lengths of the days with what matters most, and that really sealed my love for home healthcare and, I think, really changed the trajectory of really where it's been in the last 20 years. And so, after graduating from nursing school, moved pretty quickly into management and had the opportunity to help to work in both community and academic medical centers, growing the center of healthcare being home and helping to build clinical models of care, introducing technology and building really amazing teams to continue to innovate and bring the future of healthcare home.

Speaker 1: 2:22

You come, you know, with a clinical background and everything that comes with it. How has that sort of helped your career in becoming a seasoned executive and do you feel you bring something extra to the table? I mean, I know you do, but what do you feel, like you know, bringing that to the table?

Speaker 2: 2:42

offers. Yeah, I always say that you cannot take the heart of the nurse out of me and anybody who's gotten close and proximity to me will tell, will tell me. In fact actually had somebody tell me yesterday, like the more that I've gotten to know you, I understand how caring you are and I understand how much it's about the patient and I think if for me you can't take that out of anything that I think about, so you know, I really think through the lens of human-centered design and really think through the lens of what is important to individuals and always making it about the patient. In fact, in my career the greatest compliment that I've received is that I've made it about the patient and I think that partly comes from that. You know being in healthcare and being really close and that you can't take that out. I can't separate that for myself. I always see things through the lens of my nursing background.

Speaker 1: 3:33

So when you were younger, growing up, did you always want to be a nurse, or was that something that came on later in life? No, I think so.

Speaker 2: 3:39

I am type A to the core, and so I always wanted to do just what was the most difficult thing to do, whatever was excited me and curiosity. I was always interested in science and originally thought I was going to be a chemical engineer or a biomedical engineer, and I think that was that moment in organic chemistry lab that I had where I realized I really didn't want to do that. What I really wanted to do was make an impact on the lives of people, and I'm really in particular in the lives of women, and I think so that no, I didn't always want to be a nurse. I'm actually the first generation graduate from college. My family did not go to college. They didn't have a healthcare background, so I'm not one of those that has had a lineage of nurses in my family.

Speaker 1: 4:26

And what brought you into the post-acute space? Was it like a family member that drove you there? Did you just end up there? If, like for me when I graduated college, if you told me I was gonna be in healthcare IT, I probably would have laughed. I always thought I was gonna have a job in travel, and so did you always sort of have your eye on the post-acute space, or did you follow into it? I did Follow into it, like I said.

Speaker 2: 4:50

No, when I was going through nursing school I think I had this vision of what would a community be like if you could improve the health of the community, and so originally I was focused a little bit more in public health.

Speaker 2: 5:00

But as I kind of went through my nursing training program and had more experience, I realized I had huge passion for education and recognizing that to be able to take care of yourself and your family at home, you need to know the basics of how to do that, just like you need to know the basics to how to drive a car.

Speaker 2: 5:16

You wanna get from point A to point B and you have a car, you need to know how to drive it, you need to know how it works. And so I think that is what kind of really moved me towards the home care route. And again, I think in my early experience as a home health aide when I was going through nursing school, I think in really being able to see that healthcare is delivered and exists in the home it doesn't exist in the four walls of the hospital, really exists in home. And so I think that's what continued to drive me towards the home care space. And I'm always also somebody who skates where the puck is going, like Wayne Gretzky said, and so I knew that that's where the healthcare future is going, and so I have always wanted to be on the leading or bleeding edge of where healthcare is going, and that's also what has kept me in the home care space.

Speaker 1: 5:59

It's so coming your way. I feel like the home health post-acute wave is only beginning, with all of the EHRs mostly done in hospitals and in the ambulatory side. I feel like we're getting that kind of settle. There's still a lot to do, but now it's more. How are we gonna keep people at home and deal with the older generations and the baby boomers? And so, with that said, what are you all doing at BJC to help move that needle along?

Speaker 2: 6:32

Yeah, I think one of the things that we're doing that's so very important is we're helping people identify what's important to them. So many times we approach providers or we get on the medical train and we say we can do this and we can do this and we should do this and we should do this, but nobody ever stops to ask what's important. And when you have the opportunity to stop to ask what's important, then it really helps to align the care and the care team around the patient and their loved ones, and so by doing that, we're better able to identify. So that's number one, getting them connected into primary care and making sure that they have an established relationship. But it's also around really advancing care, what they're doing to care planning.

Speaker 2: 7:14

If you don't know what's really important to you and you don't understand what's going on with your physical condition, it's really difficult to know whether or not the best place for you is at home or in a facility or an acute stay in a hospital.

Speaker 2: 7:27

And so I think when we do more of that, when we understand what's important, then we're better able to translate what is needed at that very moment and then the best getting the right care to the right patient at the right time at the right place.

Speaker 2: 7:40

And so some of what we're doing is really doubling down our efforts with high-divicare and growing and scaling our palliative care teams, both on the inpatient and in the home-based side. And leveraging with Epic. We're leveraging machine learning to better identify and assist providers in identifying who is appropriate for those conversations, especially if they have a high likelihood of having a 30-day mortality. If you had 30 days left to live, wouldn't you want somebody to stop and ask what was important for you in the last month of life? And I think that's the gift that we have and the opportunity we have so that everyone is able to chart their own path. Most patients, when asked, wanna spend their last days at home. They don't wanna spend their last days in the ICU, but currently we don't always have the technology or the signaling to be able to have those conversations at the right time.

Speaker 1: 8:30

Yeah yeah.

Speaker 1: 8:30

My grandma's about to be 93. And although she did call me 12 times today because I didn't pick up the phone, I was on another call and then, when I call her back, she. She then proceeded to tell me that there was a spider in her house. And this is an apartment off my aunt's house that she lives in and there's lots of spiders, but this isn't my permanent home, is what she told me. I'm like really, grandma, what's your permanent home? She's like well, I don't know, but I will die sometime. And I'm like oh my.

Speaker 1: 9:01

God she's such a spitfire. So, with that story and the older generations that we help take care of, I call my MIMAW probably almost every day. What are the ways that we're helping to communicate with family members in terms of like my MIMAW, but she goes into the hospital, and so what are you guys using for IT solutions to communicate and keep the family members informed? Because you know my MIMAW will forget. You know what the provider said to her 30 seconds later. Right now, bless her heart. What do you see being?

Speaker 2: 9:41

Yeah, I appreciate calling that out, because so many times it's actually not about when we talk about petition. That's why we say they're loved ones. There's not always their spouse.

Speaker 2: 9:48

It can be whoever that they call at all times today and that could be a neighbor, it could be a granddaughter, it could be their spouse, it's whoever they identify as the person most important to them and with that you need that. Social interaction is actually also what keeps you know individuals healthy and helps in recovery. I mean there's great data that supports that and so there actually is technology that's helping to do those connections, whether it be through virtual care or through other social platforms that are helping to innovate in the market. Yeah, I think we've done many advances with Epic and care companion and other in my chart and ways that we can connect the care team with proxies and those that are with the care. But also I think that's where you've seen remote monitoring really helped to be that extra bridge in between the care team and the care team, I will say is more broadly, that's the providers or the clinical trained professionals, and then it's also the patients, designated loved ones, who they want to care for them and being able to actually connect everyone with one communication.

Speaker 2: 10:50

I think there's a lot of opportunity in this space as well that we have to innovate and to do things better and to make things visible. I think one of the biggest gaps that we have right now is that the information isn't always available to the right person at the right time. So you may have had a and, with your me, mom had a really great conversation with the primary care physician, but then, when they have an encounter with a specialist or maybe they have a, you know, er visit, that information that was exchanged isn't always readily available. It's becoming increasingly so, but we still have a long way to go. So, you know, I think both you and I have been in healthcare long enough to see the transition and the change and we felt the difference, but we still are on this journey and have a long way to go.

Speaker 1: 11:33

Yeah, I mean, I definitely think of again, you know, picking on my poor me mom who's in Tennessee, but her, her, you know, sons and daughters are all over the country, and so how do we get them all that information from the primary care doctor? And so it's not like that telephone game of you know, as it gets worse throughout the telephone to chains of telephone calls and they can actually just look online and be able to see it. And and I know it's happening out there some you know, to some proportion. But I think that we saw such a long way to go in this particular space of the digital health movement. I just wanted to happen.

Speaker 2: 12:14

Yeah, I think you're seeing sparks of innovation. I think that's what their palliative care teams are really helping to bridge the gap. So they'll you'll have a provider, or a provider, or a team. They'll have a nurse and a social worker and the provider get on the phone call with, with, and that's what virtual technology now enables us. We're able to get on a HIPAA secured video call with, with everyone, whether they live on the east coast or the west coast, and the patient everyone's able to get on the same page at once. And then it's been a huge game changer so that we don't have a telephone or, as a. You know, a patient's condition changes from hour to hour, day over day, and then it's a different story. And then that sometimes what's bad? The confusion.

Speaker 1: 12:56

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We've talked a lot about what you're doing now, but let's talk about your new adventure that you're going to be going on here, you know very soon. Tell us about what you're going to be starting here in the next couple of weeks.

Speaker 2: 13:12

Yeah, so I'm pretty excited. I think one of the things that I am passionate about identifying what's most important to individuals and organizations and having them reach their best potential. And I, through my experience of being in both community hospitals and large academic medical centers and, in post acute areas, also individual privately owned home health and hospitals organizations I have a unique background and not only being a clinician I have been a chief nursing officer, and so I am able to speak to the nurses, but also be able to speak to the CMOs, the chief medical officers and the chief nursing officers and the CEOs, but also have a strong operational skill set. So, being trained in Japan with the Toyota production system, I understand how to implement high reliability systems and sustain change for good, and and have a technical expertise with the numerous numbers of remote monitoring and electronic health implementations and expansions into virtual care.

Speaker 2: 14:17

And so, having it, this unit, I would call myself a unicorn and being able to have all of those different aspects I really want to increase access for patients who do need an organizations, to need care at home, and so I'll be working with health systems and home care agencies, also vendors and suppliers who are working with those individuals to help them to understand how to put together playbooks, how to understand how to take what they already have and then continue to look at new and novel ways to expand care at home.

Speaker 2: 14:54

And I think another emerging area that I'm really excited about getting into is reducing the burden of whether it be the electronic health record or even adding in the adoption of AI, so that we can bring the joy back to the clinical work and being able to understand what that looks like, and from a strategy perspective, but also clinical implementation. And so I want to take what my experience throughout all my years and what I'm passionate about and actually really set more into the world, and that's what I'm about ready to get ready to do.

Speaker 1: 15:27

Yeah, and having that clinical experience and nursing experience, coming up through the ranks, as you will, to be able to bridge that gap. You'll be so impactful in doing so. So I want you know you've talked a lot about women. We're both members of Chief. What are you doing today to support women and maybe mentor women or, you know, bring them along so that they are going to be the best leaders that they can be in the future as well?

Speaker 2: 15:57

Some of how I support women right now is just by being who I am.

Speaker 2: 16:02

I think I had I finally got to the point that I recognize that being my very best self is inspiring to others, and some of what I'm doing now is actually by understanding my why and what my dream and my vision is and following that is supporting other women to believe that they have a why within them. They are created and have a calling and can impact the world, and they need to do that. And supporting them by identifying those limiting beliefs and journeying with them through the process and through my learnings and all my symbols, and sharing that and journeying together with encouraging them that well, certainly I can do it. I can do it too. I also spend some time sponsoring women in organizations right, you know, there are many times it's helping them to understand how to how to either have a network or to introduce them to others, to help to expand their network and to sponsor them into new leadership roles. And then mentoring nearly 10-year-old leaders is where I spend most of my time helping to support women leaders. I love the journey.

Speaker 1: 17:02

I love it. As you know, I'm all about supporting women leaders and helping them through the ranks, so we're both very passionate about that. Switching gears over to unrelated work. Are you passionate about? When you're not working or working on anything healthcare related, what do you do outside?

Speaker 2: 17:22

Yeah, so I think where my other passion is about, you know, really figuring out what creates flow and energy and inspiring others to be their full potential, so I spend a lot of time myself figuring out what creates energetic flow, how to end up at the end of the day with more energy than I started, and so some of that is been figuring out what works and understanding my mindset journey, understanding my health journey, understanding relationships and putting in a lot of other creative activities that I, frankly, have left latent.

Speaker 2: 17:55

I love creating anything, and so I recently picked up pottery. I'm going to reteach myself to piano. I love anything I do or, and so that kind of speeds my creative space. And then really, you know, spending also a lot of time and understanding what that looks like in those other areas of my life as well, to reimagine where energy is and that your attention is a limited and finite resource, and how to think about that differently to unlock my full potential. I think I've been through burnout several times and you don't go through burnout several times about realizing how can I not get here again, and so I am super passionate about really finally met in about how to actually think differently, how to live differently, how to think differently and really make that transition from being a human doer to viewing a human being.

Speaker 1: 18:51

Yeah, I love it. I do too. I try to find that flow and I do. I run, I work out, I'm avid at all of that. But I find that like pausing in the day when my kids are around and hearing their giggles or them giving me a hug is like takes that like battery and just like boosts it up so much more than my run or something like that. And so pausing each day to help them and just laugh with them and listen to their you know we'd call them crazy questions but they're like full on serious about it. You know, like, why is the sky blue? And the other day they asked me why we live in Portsmouth, which is, you know, near the ocean. They wanted to know why the seagulls poop white. And I'm like, good question, I have no idea why they're poop is white. Like we need to Google that and I'm like just laughing. You know it just makes it so much fun.

Speaker 2: 19:51

If we can only yeah, if we can only channel kids' curiosity, and I think you hit on exactly that.

Speaker 2: 19:57

If we can do more activities in our day that bring us energy and put more of those in and titrate back or delegate out those areas that don't, that's, I think, where we're able to leverage what that, you know, that's go. You know, that magical happiness place that we all seem. You know we all want to be on every moment of the day, and nobody, nobody, ever told me how amazing it would be to have my kids make each other laugh, and that's been the same since they were, you know, when they're toddlers up until now, and they're preteens, I, I, the same. I just sit in the other room sometimes and just I, just. That's when I'm the happiest, when I hear them make each other laugh, and it just never ceases to bring me joy.

Speaker 1: 20:36

Yeah, the giggles that they have and you know, like the regular giggles, but then they're like we're kind of getting into mischief giggles and I, those are my favorite, although I can't ever tell them that I I hear that a lot of empathy from you. I think that is one of your superpowers, but I always ask everybody what they think their superpower is that they give out to the world. So what would you think your superpowers?

Speaker 2: 21:02

I am a very empathetic leader and, again, I think, as a nurse, you can't take that out of me, but I will say that I would describe my superpower as being a visionary, being able to see what hasn't been created yet in the future and taking the existing resources and connecting about some different ways to create new, a novel, either whether it be models of care or ideas to transform the world. So that's my superpower.

Speaker 1: 21:24

I love it. I love it Well, Stacey. Thank you so much for spending some time today. I can't wait to follow and connect with you more on your next adventure, and we will be in touch soon. Thank you so much, Rebecca.

Speaker 2: 21:38

Grace be on your podcast.

Speaker 3: 21:46

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