What Data Means for the Future of Pediatric Hospitals

Transcript

This has been generated by AI and optimized by a human. 

Show ID (00:04):

The power of data is undeniable and unharnessed. It's nothing but chaos.

(00:09):

The amount of data was crazy.

(00:11):

Can I trust it?

(00:12):

You will waste money.

(00:13):

Held together with duct tape.

(00:15):

Doomed to failure.

Jess Carter (00:16):

This season, we're solving problems in real time to reveal the art of the possible, making data your ally, using it to lead with confidence and clarity, helping communities and people thrive. This is Data-Driven Leadership, a show by Resultant. 

Hey guys. Welcome back to Data-Driven Leadership. Today's episode is especially timely. We're talking with Theresa Meadows, who recently transitioned from 15 plus years as CIO at Cook Children's Healthcare System to a new role focused on operational healthcare systems as CIO in Residence at symplr, she's seen the full evolution of healthcare IT, the rise of electronic health records, the promises of AI, and most importantly, how real data can make a real difference in the lives of kids. 

This conversation is more than just health care. It's about what it really means to be a data-driven leader, how to make tough choices, build trust across teams, and use information not just to improve outcomes, but to save lives. One of my favorite parts is listening to Theresa replay some of her lived experience through the electronic healthcare systems, and then also to reflect on what makes it so unique to work with data in a pediatric hospital. 

Whether you're a healthcare tech business or just trying to make better decisions with the information you have, Theresa's perspective is full of wisdom, heart, and hard-earned lessons. Stick around. You're going to walk away from this one thinking differently about the role of data and leadership. Let's get into it.

(01:45):

Theresa, welcome.

Theresa Meadows (01:46):

Thanks, Jess. I'm so excited to be here. This is going to be fun.

Jess Carter (01:50):

I'm so excited too. Shockingly, I've never had the privilege of talking to a CIO, who's also been like a cardiac transplant nurse. Is that real?

Theresa Meadows (02:03):

That is real. That's how I started my career. I've been in health care my entire career.

Jess Carter (02:09):

Wow.

Theresa Meadows (02:09):

Ended up at IT by accident, but chose to be in healthcare to be a nurse.

Jess Carter (02:14):

Wow.

Theresa Meadows (02:15):

Just ended up, and I hate to almost admit this, over 20 years ago, probably almost 30, I was at a teaching institution that was implementing physician order entry for the very first time.

(02:29):

And the way they chose to do it is they took 35 nurses from all the various nursing units and had us be the physician trainers and the physician support team. And so all I heard my nurse manager say is, hey, Theresa, you're pretty good with doctors. Would you like to do this project for a little bit? And then you'll come back to work? And then I heard was no nights, no weekends, no holidays. I was like, sure, I'll do that. Because there really wasn't computer. I mean, it was before computers were really a thing where people were using them. We had dumb terminals and used it for charging and that kind of stuff. But yeah, so cardiac transplant nurse for a long time.

Jess Carter (03:10):

That's unbelievable. I mean, so you started by helping out in that one way and then did technology, did you fall in love? Did you just find it interesting? I mean, how did the rest of that sort of work out?

Theresa Meadows (03:24):

You know, it's pretty interesting. When I went, they first said, come see a demo and if you think it's something that you would like to do, then let us know. And I was fascinated with the idea that technology could potentially actually help give care and improve care and improve the work life of nurses and doctors. Now granted at that point in time, it probably wasn't improving the work life of anybody. It was pretty early stages. But I thought, this is just something that if this really takes off, this is really going to change the way healthcare is given. And sure enough, yeah, it took a long time. It's starting to really truly make a difference. But yeah, so I thought it was something cool and exciting that had no idea it could be a career that never really crossed my mind that this would be a career that I would spend my life pretty much doing this as something every day.

Jess Carter (04:18):

That's amazing. And congratulations on the CHIME CIO of the Year Award.

Theresa Meadows (04:23):

Yeah, thank you.

Jess Carter (04:24):

2023. That is so cool. You just started at symplr, is that right?

Theresa Meadows (04:28):

I did, yeah, in June, so only about six weeks in, so it's still pretty new, but I was looking for a change. Change is really good. And I had done the CIO job for a really long time at Cook Children's of 15 years in that role. And this seemed like a good way to help the industry and to help improve healthcare, but just from a different angle. So when this role came available, I was like, I want to try that out. I think that would be something I would really be interested in. And my role at symplr is really to be an advisor to the company. I always say we have the fun parts of the CIO job, so really looking at the strategy, looking at product development, how do we help our customers be more successful? What are the things, how do I bring the voice of what our healthcare practitioners need into the company and into that development process without having to do cybersecurity and managing people and all the things that the CIO does. So it is been fun. It's been a fun six weeks. I've really been in learning mode. I'm learning a lot about the company and how to best help my coworkers on improvements. So yeah, it's been fun.

Jess Carter (05:42):

That's amazing. My aunt has been in nursing research her whole life and has been teaching nursing. And so she did a lot of studies on patient falls inside of hospitals, how to prevent that, et cetera. So I have a great deal of respect for nurses. They have a dear place in my heart, and I love that concept of this spark in your brain that thought, hey, what if we could leverage this to improve patient outcomes? What if this could be a critical future move for the health of humanity? I mean, I think that that's so neat. And now to fast forward to now where that's definitely the case, right? I mean, it's just super exciting to me. So can you walk me through fast track of you went from this nursing to helping with that implementation, and then boom, we got to CIO. So what was the rest of the career? Can you play back for me a little bit?

Theresa Meadows (06:36):

Yeah, so I really enjoyed that role, educating, teaching, supporting the physicians, but I thought there's got to be more. And so one of the very first master’s in informatics programs was started at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and they created the program around how do you develop a future CIO? And I'm like, you know what? I'm going to go get my master's degree in informatics. So that's kind of how it started.

Jess Carter (07:04):

Great.

Theresa Meadows (07:04):

And then after I did that, I went, I was like, well, what's the next thing I could do that would kind of help me get to my goal? At that point, I had decided I want to be in leadership. I just didn't know exactly what at the time. So I went and worked for Earnst and Young Consulting and was there during Y2K. That dates me a little bit. And survived Y2K. We made it through the year 2000 with no major hiccups.

Jess Carter (07:28):

That's right.

Theresa Meadows (07:29):

And then I decided, well, maybe I'll go work for a web development company. So I went to WebMD and worked for them during the .com really early days when we were doing software development and WebMD was actually purchased. And so at that time, I ended up going to another software company called McKesson. But during that timeframe, I really was like, I miss the bedside, I miss the acute care environment. And one of my customers, I said to him, I'll pretty much do any job that you have if you'll hire me. And he did. And so I ended up going to Ascension Health, working on clinical implementations and doing some of the early CPOE, physician order entry, clinical documentation, those types of things. I just kind of moved up through the ranks.

(08:16):

And that CIO, he was one of my long-term mentors. He asked me, Theresa, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I said, and I kind laughed and said, I want to be you. And then I was like, oh, that was probably a bad answer. And so he helped me find opportunities, and he was the one that kind of said, you're ready for the CIO job. I don't think this is going to happen here for a really long time, but here's this job at Cook Children's and I think you'd be perfect for it. And so that's kind of how I ended up at Cook Children's and I think you’d be perfect for it. So that’s how I ended up at Cook Children’s. He kind of kicked me out of my nest because I would've stayed. I was happy with what I was doing. I was really enjoying the job, the role that I had. And he's like, you're ready to go. And so never forget that ‘cause I thought, am I being fired? I thought I think I’m getting fired. But really he was really trying to just, I had said I had a goal and he helped me kind of get the goal. And so I always look for opportunities like that now with people that I work with. If you have a goal that's figure out how do we get you to the goal that you would like to aspire to, and now this job is totally different than anything I ever thought I'd be doing. So it's been fun. It's been a fun career.

Jess Carter (09:23):

Okay. Well, so that helps paint a picture that I think is really interesting. So there's a few things I did want to play back ‘cause I’m fascinated. So we've had some people on talking about health care, but we've never talked about, when you mentioned Cook Children's, we've never talked about children's hospitals, pediatric care. And one of my questions is are those just a different version of a general hospital? It sounds like they'd have a completely different set of needs. Are there challenges, data challenges that are pretty unique to pediatric care?

Theresa Meadows (09:53):

The data challenges are very unique. They have some very unique needs. So an easy example is medications. Dosing of medications in the pediatric institution is more complex than it would be with adults. They're all usually based on the child's weight, their age probably till you get to about 12 or 13. The calculations for those dosages are very unique. The diagnoses that children have are very unique. The long-term care is very unique. We do a lot of unique ancillary things like we have child life, which is how do we ensure that the child is still developing from a education, personality, cultural standpoint while they're ill. And so there's lots of really unique data challenges related to pediatric care. A lot of the predictive models are designed on adult-based data. They don't work in pediatric care because the data is mostly, it's usually age-based, there’s a lot more criteria. So for me to run a sepsis protocol that's been based on adults against a child, it won't give you the same results. So there is a really unique data story with pediatrics that's different.

Jess Carter (11:10):

That is unbelievable. And I imagine, too. The other thing that…this is way less interesting than any example you just gave. But part of me is also all of that data then is, there's guardianship. It's children, so it's protected. And you have all of the guardian…I assume that that's just another fairly pivotal component of a children's hospital, right?

Theresa Meadows (11:33):

Yeah. It has a layer of complexity, especially around privacy and security because you're granting access to the child's record to the parent or the grandparent or the guardian or whoever the person is. You have to build that layer of information. And it's also important to have the information about the parents as part of that record. So if the parents have some sort of disease state or genetic makeup, having that information. So imagine having a patient chart that's the patient plus the parent's information and having to sift through what's the right information that you need. So there is, you're exactly right. There's a lot of uniqueness there. And then the other interesting thing is most pediatric data is highly regulated, so we have to keep a child's record for 27 years.

Jess Carter (12:25):

Wow, really?

Theresa Meadows (12:27):

So that's a Texas regulation. So in every state there are regulations about how long you have to keep the data from that particular chart. You can see where this gets super complicated. Then if they have childhood cancer, I think we have to keep the record forever. It's like, okay, how do you manage that amount of data in various forms? Because even some are still on paper because of those rules. And so you have to figure out how do you manage and maintain all of that information.

Jess Carter (12:58):

People have probably heard of this, but I don't know that I've ever had anyone on the podcast explain the move to electronic health records. So is that something that you were either a nurse or you were in hospital systems for? Can you give a commercial break? I don't even know if that's possible. Is that possible?

Theresa Meadows (13:17):

Yeah. If I look back, I have been part of all the firsts around clinical documentation, electronic health records. I really got into that by accident with that one project. And so it is a very complex process where decisions have to be made. And honestly, early on there was no conversion from paper to electronic. And so we could scan the record, but it still wasn't automated or searchable or those types of things. So in the early days, there was a lot of, okay, we're going to figure out what the data elements are that are most critical and we're going to manually enter those.

(14:00):

So if you can imagine 900 beds, 900 patients going through a conversion from paper to electronic, there was a huge team of people, which I did this where we entered key data elements into the record to have a starting point, and then we scanned all the paper stuff, or we just put it in boxes and just if we needed to go back to it, we would go find it, right? And so that's evolved a lot, especially with the advances in technology and natural language processing and some of the scanning technologies. Now you can scan things and get some discrete data without having to start from scratch. But even conversions from one electronic system to another are very complicated. The data structures are just not the same no matter how hard you try.

Jess Carter (14:47):

I don't think people know or appreciate how important that data conversion exercise is because I think people just, and I think that's where I think it's really interesting, Theresa, to see where the, I dunno, the world is going because the customer's expectations are that this is all flawless. Of course you would know, of course, this is my health, I'm putting my life in your hands. And there are real data conversion challenges with some of these systems. And so it's like the expectations couldn't be higher, the challenges couldn't be more complex. And you're doing your best to manage it without any major cracks in the sidewalk, right?

Theresa Meadows (15:29):

Hundred percent. Yeah. One of the biggest challenges is just patient identification and making sure that you're merging the right records to the right patient together since we don't have a universal identifier. So it makes it difficult sometimes to do data conversions, especially when you're going from two separate systems and you want to be sure that you're getting the right patient data on the right patient. So it starts with basic things like that where you're like, okay, how do we validate that this is accurate? If I have the wrong information on Jess and then I give Jess a medication that hurts her, that's a problem. And so that's just a small example, but there's millions of those data examples through that process.

Jess Carter (16:12):

It's so important. We have a tool we use at Resultant. It's the realm of what you're talking about just for listeners, is called Entity Resolution. How do you figure out when Jess is the same Jess in two different data systems or structures? And to your point, I've worked with enough clients to realize they all have some approach to that. And it is so concerning. It's so concerning to look under the hood exactly how sophisticated that is or how well it matches. So we have a tool that allows us essentially to fine tune it to say, to say, hey, if I'm doing patient record consolidation, this needs to be a hundred percent match on her first name, her last name, her address, her phone number, whatever. So whatever it is, versus like, hey, it's a marketing exercise and we roughly to the point of 70% confidence need whatever, but you've probably been living a whole career and we need like a hundred percent, right?

Theresa Meadows (17:07):

Yeah. And it's hard. It's real hard. Even with little kids sometimes they're not named sometimes immediately when they're born. And so then the child gets named and then, is this baby one the same as Theresa Meadows? I don't know. So there's a lot of complexities and a lot of human intervention that needs to occur with validations and other things to make sure that you do it accurately and safely all the time.

Jess Carter (17:37):

Yeah, this is all so fascinating to me. To me, the epitome of the devil is in the details.

Theresa Meadows (17:44):

100%.

Jess Carter (17:45):

You can say my conversion is a hundred percent done, and that doesn’t mean it's done to a fidelity that's necessary.

Theresa Meadows (17:52):

Yeah, it doesn't. So yeah, in the age where data's king, it's super important, but it's accurate. People are making really critical decisions based on what they have.

Jess Carter (18:02):

So in your new role, are you starting to get—maybe it’s too soon. Are you starting to get a sense for what applies here too versus what's totally different?

Theresa Meadows (18:12):

Yeah, I think what applies here is some of the similar things. So symplr operates in the hospital operation space. So think about things like quality and risk management, physician scheduling, nurse scheduling, credentialing a physician to be able to practice in the organization. And so those data elements are highly critical and integrate to your electronic health record. And so if I'm sending physician data for physicians who aren't appropriately credentialed to the electronic health record, that's a problem. And so there is a lot of important data. Symplr kind of resides between the electronic health record and the ERP or the Enterprise Resource Planning system. And so sending the accurate data to those systems is highly critical. And so some of the same principles apply and making sure that data is accurate in the products that we use.

Jess Carter (19:11):

That makes so much sense. And I love the way that you're approaching your role as to use your words, you kind of take the best parts of the CIO role and you get to do those things. So much of that is about strategy. One of the other things I could imagine would be interesting is, so you've been around for six weeks. So for people that are jumping to a new gig, do you look back and have any advice on the first 30, 60, 90 days?

Theresa Meadows (19:38):

Yeah, I mean, the biggest advice I have, and it's hard when you've been in the industry a long time to do this, and I have a hard time doing it, and it really is listening and learning. Because you want to make snap judgments or decisions about what you're learning, and you may only have a portion of what's going on because these organizations are complex. And there's a lot of complexities to learn, and there's a lot of things about the product that maybe as a CIO, I never was really intimately involved in every detail of how a product worked, but in this role, I need to know how do these products work and how do they fit together and some of the more granular details. And so I think really taking the time to learn and talking to a lot of people, talking internally and talking externally to my peers and just getting feedback. So what do you think about symplr? You're a symplr customer. Tell me what you think about it.

(20:41):

So really just gathering information and learning a lot is where I'm at right now. Making recommendations probably will come at some point, but it's good. And then educating. So I'm spending a lot of time educating internally about, what are the challenges that the CIO has and how do I help you understand that? So when you go in to talk to a CIO, you don't have to say them, tell me what your challenges are, because that's frustrating to a CIO to be asked that. You should know that if you're going to show up here, you should know that.

(21:13):

And so some internal education about some of the challenges that CIOs have and the environments that they work in and the things that they're trying to solve for the organization and the importance of partnership. The CIO, yes, decision maker, but 90% of the decisions I made I made in partnership with the chief nursing officer, the chief medical officer, somebody else in the organization. And so it's not always up to me as the CIO. And so I think those education points are really important. And I just recently did some education on change management because that's a huge thing for healthcare organizations. How do we manage all these changes? There's thousands of changes that happen every day, and sometimes your change is just not a priority, it just isn't compared to everything else that's going on. And so yeah, a lot of internal education too, which is fine.

Jess Carter (22:05):

I think it's really neat that yeah, you have this technology, nursing and hospital, you have all these different hats that you can put on to empathize and really seek to understand all of the customers that you have, which I think is really helpful. I mean, the other thing you just mentioned, it's so funny to me, if you haven't spent your career in health to hear you say chief nursing officer, chief medical officer, I hear CMO and I think chief marketing officer, I don't think chief... So it's such a unique organism, and I realize you've spent your whole career in it, but the concept that you have an entity that is a hospital that has to stay, it is a business, it has to stay in business, and you have the doctors, you have the patients, you have the nurses, those are such wildly different customers with wildly different needs that all require technology.

(23:01):

So to me, I just think about the role you play almost, I just imagine this spider web, this connector that has played so many of those roles, has done it in the past, has been essentially what I would imagine is a symplr customer. And now you really get to step in and say, okay, now let's drive forward to the future. And so maybe that's one other question I was going to ask is do you have a sense for, you've seen where we've been, as you said, you've been on the cutting edge of our deep dive into technology and health. Is there an outlook you have on something that you're excited about when it comes to innovation or technology in the health space?

Theresa Meadows (23:41):

Oh, I think to be in this industry, you got to be excited all the time. So there are lots of things that I get excited about, and 98% of them don't pan out or the timing is just not right. And so if you think about, I dunno how many minutes we are into this, but we haven't talked about artificial intelligence, but...

Jess Carter (24:00):

Let's do it.

Theresa Meadows (24:01):

AI is something I'm super excited about for the first time. I can truly see the thing that I saw 30 years ago, which is we've almost perfected the electronic health record. Same with ERP. We're at a point now we can actually use the data we've been collecting for years and years and years to make actual exponential improvement. And I think artificial intelligence, whatever version of it, however you label it, is really going to be that thing that's going to help us do more with less, especially with the challenges that healthcare has today with clinical shortages, employee shortages, burnout, financial pressures to reduce costs. So anything that we can do to take some of that burden off of the caregivers and the operational teams that are running a hospital and automate that is going to be super important. And I think now technology's finally caught up to what we envisioned 30 years ago or 20 years ago.

Jess Carter (25:09):

I think that that's a great point. And yes, I try not to force AI into every conversation, you can imagine it shows up. But I'm really excited to hear you say that. I imagine you probably aren't encouraging everyone to go use AI to self-diagnose.

Theresa Meadows (25:22):

No, no.

Jess Carter (25:24):

But to leverage that in an operational way in hospitals and medical communities to say, hey, these are not just like, here's the next questions we should probably ask as we're doing intake or as we're getting ready to see a patient, but these are the questions that statistically signify likely impact or outcomes for this exact patient and the conditions that they're in. Or the research, the ability to leverage all that data to say, what can we now know? What can we now learn? What can we test? So I'm with you where I think both front-end patient experience and backend operational efficiencies, this is going to get super fun.

Theresa Meadows (26:05):

And there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that doesn't impact patient care and that improves a process or improves something that people spend a lot of time on. I mean, just collating data into a summary. The amount of time people spend going through records looking for information. If I can Google search it and AI finds all the things and summarizes it for me, that's hours of time that I didn't have to spend looking. And so I think there's just little things that can have exponential improvement before we even get to the clinical part.

Jess Carter (26:39):

I totally agree. And there's some work that we've had the privilege of doing another state where essentially connecting and getting permission from citizens to leverage their data and to connect it. So to recognize, hey, this person doesn't have great outcomes. Well, they couldn't get to the doctor, they didn't have a car, they didn't have transportation. So how do we refer them before they leave our office to transportation services so that they can make sure they get on a bus route or that they understand that they have vouchers for parking or something. I think about all these ways, to your point, that it's not just in the clinic, in the room, in the patient room. It's like there's all these wraparound, the social determinants matter. They play a role. And so how do we prioritize all the right things with all of this data? It's an exciting time.

Theresa Meadows (27:21):

It is. It's super exciting. And there's all kinds of variations of AI that could meet that. It doesn't all have to be agentic AI or those types of things. It can be machine learning, it could be natural language processing, it could be simple AI, too. So I think there's variations of what we can do now that we couldn't do before, which is super exciting.

Jess Carter (27:43):

I agree. And I am going to request that you come back because you just dropped so many important terms that I love, but what I care about, I don't like talking about NLP or things when it's just like a technical walkthrough. It's like natural language processing in the medical community. You're right, it's on fire. People are finally realizing how important that is and how much it's creating better outcomes and better patient experiences. So I reserve the right to ask you to come back.

Theresa Meadows (28:13):

Okay. I would love to because there's a lot to unpack there. There's a lot to talk about. And honestly, AI is, I don't know if the Swiss army knife is the right answer, but you got to get the right tool for the job. You have to find the right solution for the business problem. So the way we've approached AI at Cook was, first of all, tell me what the problem is we're trying to solve, and then maybe we'll use AI to solve that problem. Maybe we won't. We'll use some other technology to solve it, but let's not try to find AI that's cool, and then find the problem that it goes with. And so really think about what are our key business problems and what is the best way to solve it? And technology doesn't solve everything. And so just trying to figure out what tool is the best route sometimes. Sometimes we go about it the opposite way ‘cause it’s cool and it's neat and it's fine.

Jess Carter (29:02):

I really appreciate your data-driven leadership because I would argue people who are just generally born and bred, they just have a natural inclination for technology, sometimes make me nervous because of that, because they just want to play with the next new toy so much that they'll find room in their budget to do it. They will. Versus someone who's passionate about nursing and passionate about patient outcomes, who learns those things in order to figure out how to make a difference. I'm not villainizing as somebody who just loves technology, but I think that there is a important check you put on yourself and your own interest to say there is a time and a place for a really fun hobby, but if you're not integrated into your organization's outcomes, strategic plans, what really matters, and leveraging tech in the right way around their prioritized business needs.

Theresa Meadows (29:49):

Yes.

Jess Carter (29:49):

We might need to check ourselves.

Theresa Meadows (29:52):

Well, and there's a place for both of those things. You want to stay kind of on the innovative side, and so you need people who are constantly like, that's a cool thing. That's a cool thing. But you also need the people who are going to say, that's a cool thing, but we don't have a way to integrate that into our business process just yet. That might be too early. And it's fun factor for us to be able to get that going in the right way.

Jess Carter (30:16):

It's fun factor. I love that.

Theresa Meadows (30:18):

Sometimes you're like, oh, that's really cool. I can fall into the, I like to play around, too. So I'm like, that's really cool, but I can figure out how to even make that work in the real world. The hardest thing about AI is when we built our systems, we never envisioned that the data in those systems would be used in that way. And so there's a lot of data opportunity and cleanup and reorganization of data that needs to occur. And the only way you can do that is to understand the business problem that you're really trying to solve.

Jess Carter (30:50):

I think that you're right, which means you need good leaders with good strategy that have the ability to make those calls. So Theresa, before, I know we need to wrap up here, but one of the things I did want to ask you, so you mentioned that you had a really wonderful mentor. You gave us a whole bunch of insights about how that person pushed and encouraged you. What about people who want a mentorship? That phrase can be so packed, and I think there's a lot more people who want one than have one or can find one. How did you work out that relationship? How did you kind of tee that up?

Theresa Meadows (31:22):

I think a couple things. One is he was my boss, so that kind of helped. And he actually was generous enough to ask me what I wanted. And so I think as leaders, when we have teams of people, if we've never said to them, hey, Jess, what would you like to do? Is your goal to be the CIO or is your goal to be the podcast host? If you don't do that with your teams, you don't open the door, number one.

(31:52):

And then secondly, you have to ask sometimes for what you want. If he had asked me what I wanted and I was too scared to say, look, I'd rather do, I was just stupid, but I'd rather do your job. If you're not brave enough to say to your leader, hey, I have these goals and this is where I'd really like to get to, they don't always know that that's your route. And I think women are probably more guilty of this than men where we don't tell people what we want or what our goal is. And so I've always coached people, if you want somebody to be your mentor, you have to ask. They don't naturally just sit there and think, oh, I'd be a good mentor for this person. So I have several people that I mentor. It ebbs and flows. It's not something that happens once a week or once a month. It really is just an ongoing relationship, and sometimes we don't talk for six months, and sometimes we talk once a week depending on what's going on.

Jess Carter (32:47):

I think that's really important. So in my experience too, very few, especially women, feel capable of being a mentor. And so it actually, a secret trick is, and from my perspective is just ask them to get coffee regularly and then treat them like a mentor. Don't tell them they're your mentor. They get freaked out. And even men do that. They insecure.

Theresa Meadows (33:09):

That's good advice.

Jess Carter (33:10):

Just meet 'em and ask them a questions and be thoughtful and make sure it's a good use of their time. And they'll probably do it again. So I have topical mentors. There's certain people I call under certain circumstances, but I've never once told them that they're my mentor. I would ruin it. It would ruin everything.

Theresa Meadows (33:25):

Yeah, one hundred percent. And the thing about being a mentor is you usually get as much out of it as you put into it. And so even some of the people who I'm their mentor, I learn as much from them, tell me things that are going on in their organization. I'm like, man, I never thought about that that way. I don't know if I'm the best mentor for that, but that's a really good idea. I learned as much from them.

Jess Carter (33:49):

That's awesome.

Theresa Meadows (33:49):

A lot of the time, too.

Jess Carter (33:51):

Well, we're really excited to have you here. So it's been an absolute honor. If people want to keep up and see what's next and how your career is moving, what's the best way for them to keep up with you?

Theresa Meadows (34:01):

Yeah, LinkedIn. I have a LinkedIn blog that I've just started. That's something new I'm learning.

Jess Carter (34:06):

Awesome.

Theresa Meadows (34:07):

I haven't been as good at that. So I've been blogging about some of the why I went to symplr and some of the reasons why I did that. I'll have some new stuff coming out soon where I'm looking at some of the Big Beautiful Bill, everybody's favorite topic, and some other healthcare regulations that are hot on the horizon. So then how to mentor and how to partner with your clinical counterparts. So we'll see some info on that. So yeah, LinkedIn's the best way to find me.

Jess Carter (34:37):

We will put a link to your LinkedIn in the show notes so people can find you. Okay.

Theresa Meadows (34:41):

Okay. Hunt me down. I respond.

Jess Carter (34:44):

Thank you so, so much again for being on the podcast.

Theresa Meadows (34:47):

Thanks for having me, Jess. It's been fun.

Jess Carter (34:49):

You got it. 

Thank you for listening. I'm your host, Jess Carter, and don't forget to follow the Data-Driven Leadership wherever you get your podcasts. Rate and review, letting us know how these data topics are transforming your business. We can't wait for you to join us on the next episode.