Ep 14: From Bedside to Boardroom: Ochsner Health Chief Nursing Officer Tracey Moffatt

Alright, good morning everybody. Welcome to the Overruled podcast, brought to you by the Scott Vicknair Law Firm. As my law partner Brad Scott and co-host here, just mentioned, it is a beautiful morning in New Orleans. It is 78 degrees. There is not Hades-level humidity, and so we’re a little bit happy this morning, right? A little bit, my hair’s less frizzy.

Luckily, we, have less humidity, but also lucky to have a really special guest for you this morning on the podcast. Tracy Maffett, who’s a very close friend of mine, neighbor, an incredible person. I can’t wait to talk to her. Tracy is the Chief Nursing Officer and Quality Control Officer for Ochsner, which basically means for those of you who are around here and familiar with Ochsner, that she’s a really big deal.

Tracy and her position at Ochsner is responsible for a lot of important functions in their healthcare system. As most of our listeners know, Ochsner is one of the largest healthcare providers, if not the largest, in the state of Louisiana. And Tracy’s responsibilities delve wide, not only just on managing a lot of their nurses, but on a lot of other things, which we’re going to discuss this morning. We’re really lucky to have her on. Welcome Tracy to Overruled. Good morning.

Good morning, and thank you so much for having me. I always like to talk about nurses. We’re, we’re all nurses are important. So I appreciate being on the program.

Awesome. Well, Tracy, I wanted to jump right into it first and have you tell a little bit, talk a little bit about why you decided to pick nursing, and kind of how your journey into nursing started.

Yeah, well, it sounds like a sad story, but honestly, it’s turned out with a with a very happy ending. Believe it or not, David and Scott, I don’t know you well, but David, you, you may be surprised by this. I actually thought when I was a teenager that I wanted to be an attorney. And I had a couple of female attorneys in my family who were kind of like inspiring me to go into law and you also know, because we know each other personally that I love to debate things.

And so I thought that I was going to be an attorney. But the summer I turned 16, my mother passed away from a terminal illness. Actually right, right in New Orleans at the Baptist Hospital, which is now an Ochsner, facility. And it was really a devastating event. You can imagine for a 16-year-old girl. And I had this kind of extraordinary moment, my mother was in a coma on my 16th birthday in the ICU at Baptist.

And I went up to the, ICU unit there to, read to her because, you know, they always say maybe they can hear you. And when I arrived on the unit, the nurses on the unit had like ordered balloons and they had a cake. And, we went in my mother’s room and they sang happy birthday to me, just kind of again, thinking that my mother, even though she was comatose, might be able to participate in my 16th birthday. And it was literally at that moment that I knew I had to do what those people were doing. I had to, there was no other calling for me other than just to try and figure out how I could become a nurse.

So, it was a little bit of, you know, it’s one of those life moments where you’re entire trajectory changes, based on a single event. And I couldn’t be happier with, you know, where that’s led me on my professional journey.

I guess many years later, being able to look back on how such a traumatic event could actually turn into a positive, along in your journey, life-changing. Yeah. What, what along that journey, losing your mother at that point in your life, Tracy, what has family meant to fueling that journey, moving forward?

I was very quickly surrounded, by a lot of people in my family. Most notably, my older sister who was five years older at the time. So she was 21. She had just gotten married. She was pregnant and kind of took me on, as a surrogate. And, you know, my, my home was, is, was in North Georgia. My mother was from North Georgia, a little town called Ellijay. That’s where her parents lived and, you know, kind of grew up there most of my, life.

But my father was a mining engineer. And, which is a little bit of an unusual, profession, I think as well. And he was in sales for a big company that sold mining equipment. And, interestingly for me, and I think one of the things that developed me as a person and a professional is because he was progressively promoted in his own career, we moved around a lot growing up. We lived in Pennsylvania for several years. We lived in later in Illinois. And so I kind of had the experience of being a little bit of a nomad, which I think also developed me as a person who, you know, it taught me how to make friends and it taught me how to enjoy the adventure of living new places.

And in some ways, that really has influenced my nursing career because obviously you’re with people as a nurse, when they’re either their happiest or they’re most vulnerable or they’re most devastated. And I think those skills that you pick up, kind of moving around the country sometimes and having to make a lot of new friends and learning how to relate to people, has kind of influenced my nursing career. And a good way.

That’s fascinating. And I especially know you, Tracy, as a, a very independent and strong person. Do you think that there’s some role of that, part of your life of moving around? Did that sort of also fuel that side of you, you think? That independent strength that you have, that I, I, I’ve gotten to know about you.

Well, yeah, yeah. I, I do think that there, you know, again, losing my mother at a young age, sort of, I think people can swing either way when there are devastating events in one’s lives, right? And, I don’t know. There was a part of me that just knew that I, it was very, I had a lot of clarity in my mind at that moment and over the years until I finished high school, about what I wanted to be as a professional. But I also agree with you that I think this thing of if you’re an adventurous person and you learn when you’re young, and again, as I did, I changed schools several times because of my father’s career, you know, it’s the sort of thing that you figure out no matter where you go, you can make friends.

Right. And if you just kind of reach out and take a chance and connect with people, you know, typically you can find people that you relate to and connect with. And I think when you embrace that and you kind of grab a hold of that, it makes you a stronger individual because, I mean, really, what is there to be afraid of?

Now, shifting gears a little bit, Tracy. Looking back now, currently in your role, and you’ve been, I think since 2015, as the Chief Nursing Officer of Ochsner. But looking back to the beginning of your career in nursing, what are some of like the really cool or most valuable set of lessons that you learned? Two or three things that you learned as a, a front-line nurse, beginning in your career, that maybe your things that still influence and shape how you currently serve as a, in a role of very high-level administrative leadership?

Nursed at the bedside for several years and I and I think that’s one thing that is really important in almost any industry. If you, if you come in at the top, I, I think there’s a potential to really miss what it is that the industry that you’re working in is about. And so, you know, the experience that I had nursing at the bedside and taking care of patients, you know, in a hospital setting, you know, in the first few years of my career was a really important part of who I became as a leader. And, you know, I think I started my career as a bedside or as a as a leader, stepping away from the bedside for the first time at the old Mercy Hospital here in New Orleans, which is now boarded up as you probably know, but at the time that campus was part of the Mercy Health System based out of St. Louis, Missouri. So it was part of a big system. And I was exposed in my first management position to that corporate structure in St. Louis where I was served on several committees. And my first job away from the bedside was in, case management.

Which was really evolving at the time because of all the changes in Medicare and the then Medicare DRG rules and, you know, affecting hospital stays and how long people could stay in hospitals. And I got so sort of intrigued, frankly, by how much federal regulation could actually affect the practice of nursing and the patient care that we deliver, that it became kind of a passion of mine to be involved in things like discharge planning and case management. And, the Mercy Hospital in New Orleans, actually ended up merging with the Baptist Hospital in New Orleans. And our CEO, was transferred down to, a Mercy Hospital in Texas. And I had gotten so involved in leading case management and discharge planning and the management of the new Medicare DRG rules, that he invited me to, come down to, Texas where Mercy was building a replacement facility for a hospital they’d had there for 50, 55 years.

I was married at the time to Jeff, you know, my husband, David. And he was involved in an emerging field of nursing. He’s also a nurse, called nursing informatics, which now is a huge field of nurses that are very involved in virtual nursing and, telecommunications and innovation in nursing. And so they desperately needed a lot of nursing informatics and digital planning for their new replacement facility. And so Jeff and I kind of went, why not move down to Texas for a few years and take these, leadership positions. It promoted me there to an executive director. And, you know, because we were both pretty adventurous in our youth, we said, you know, why not? Let’s just go down to Texas and have a good time and do something really exciting with our careers. And that was kind of a pivotal point for me in moving up in the hierarchy from bedside to board room, if you will.

You know, it’s, it’s really interesting. I chuckled inside when I heard your answer because I really related with it. And I hope some of the people listening to this who are involved in business, maybe we’ll think about this a little bit. Is what I, kind of heard you hit on a little bit was like the importance that you learned of compassion. And if any of our team members at the law firm are listening, they’re probably like going to see be sick of hearing me say this because I’ve been like repeating this for the last four months, I feel like in a lot of our team meetings. It’s like most of our clients, whether it’s like a potential new client that comes to my practice group, who’s an injured person, or in Brad’s practice group, who has a death of a family member, they are looking for compassion. They’re just looking for somebody to listen and to understand and be compassionate with their particular situation, both as a potential new client, as an and as an existing client. And most of the time, if you just show them some compassion, like that customer service level will be exponentially better. And gotta be even more important, I would believe in your field and healthcare, right?

Yeah. And that’s the thing. I think, you know, the connection that I made early in my career during that transition was, you know, hospitals and health systems had to respond to all the federal regulatory changes, around reimbursement at that time. But we really could, David, if we, if we tackled discharge planning and things like post-hospitalization case management and began to explore the ways that we could use post-acute care settings, home care, durable medical equipment, palliative care, hospice. All those things that at that time, frankly, it’s better for people not to be in a hospital. It’s safer for them not to be in a hospital. And that was one of the ways I ended up moving into my passion for hospital quality and safety is, we can very safely and effectively take care of people outside of an acute care setting. It’s a safer environment for people to be in their home, frankly, very often, than it is to be in a hospital. And so all of this really became something to me that felt like it fit together in a way that I got, again, just really excited about and wanted to contribute to in a bigger way in my career.

So, one angle, a question I really wanted to ask you, especially I think like some potential listeners who would be really interested to get your perspective on this. Like from, I know you’re a very humble person, so this may is going to make you angry if I say it, but you’re a great example of somebody who took your career from the standpoint of you began as a front-line nurse, and you have span the entire gamut to be at almost like the penultimate of growth from both being front-line to moving into administration to now being like a Chief Nursing Officer at a huge system. What when you shifted gears and kind of went from being a practicing nurse into management, what was one of the, what was one of the key drivers that like pushed you to take that leap? Was it, what was one of those? And then two, what was one of the things that kind of helped you like also get that drive to push through, like getting in a new arena and healthcare and moving from the beginning of management to moving up?

Thank you for the compliment. I do consider myself a humble person. But I’ll say this, I don’t think ambition is a bad thing, if it’s for the right reasons. You know, no one goes into nursing to get rich. Let, let me be clear about that. But the business of healthcare was changing so fast, you know, over the past few decades, that it was really fascinating to me and this idea that we needed to build and create less costly post-hospitalization care, while still keeping the patient, you know, at the core of that decision-making process, was important to me. And the second thing I’ll say about that is, I saw that the people making decisions that most impacted care delivery at the bedside, whether that’s in a hospital clinic setting or a home setting, were people that were pretty far away from the work. And, you know, at the end of the day, I felt like I needed to be part of that. You know, not to just toot my own horn, not to say that, you know, I’m necessarily smarter or better than anyone at the top of any health system, but I do feel like sometimes when I look across healthcare, there’s not enough people who have practiced at the bedside who are sitting in board rooms or sitting in executive suites. And so, while we were in Texas, my husband and I, were, again in Texas, I decided that I was going to go after a master’s degree in healthcare administration. I attended Trinity University in San Antonio to achieve that master’s degree. And then once I had achieved that master’s degree, it was just the ticket for me for my career to take off, take on higher levels of leadership in the field and pursue a little bit more at a higher level about what was really exciting to me about patient care. I don’t know if that answered your question, but hopefully it did.

I think it definitely did. And I think it was not necessarily what I had expected, but a fascinating answer from the standpoint of that you felt that you wanted to be at, have your voice at the table, so the leadership decisions involved somebody who actually had front-line experience, right?

Yeah. Exactly. I think it’s that important because we have a lot of business owners who listen to our show. And that idea that a lot of times, and like you’re describing, this is a, this is a top-down approach. A lot of things that are happening at the top really drive the customer service at the end of the day. And a lot of times, unfortunately, the people at the top are making these decisions do not have the hands-on experience of what’s going on in the service that’s being provided. There’s that show, what is it, Undercover Boss, where they go behind the scenes. And these people are horrified when they started getting into some of their businesses and seeing what’s happening behind the scenes. And I think it’s a good lesson for a lot of our business owners. Sometimes you have to get in there and get your hands dirty a little bit and see what’s going on behind the scenes and how service is actually being provided. So you can be a better leader and deliver better service from the top down that way.

Definitely. I’m I’m sure your perspective is, you’re way more open-minded and open to going to the front line today in the last year, in the last two years, and listening, right? Like how has that impacted your ability to listen and understand the importance of listening as a leader?

Yeah, David, it’s such an important, it’s, it’s a still to me today, a very important, function for me as a leader is to spend time on, quote, the shop floor. And, you know, again, whether you’re in manufacturing or, you know, you’re building cars or, you know, you’re running a health system, if you’re not spending time on the shop floor, talking to the people that do the work, day in and day out. I don’t know. I just don’t know how you can lead. I, I recently saw a video clip of, the former CEO of Kellogg’s. It was just a leadership interview and, and he said, you know, as the CEO of Kellogg’s, the cereal comes in on the first floor, just like plain flakes. Plain flakes. By the time it gets to the top floor, it’s fully frosted. And his point was, nothing really gets to him that’s entirely honest. It’s been frosted by the time it gets to his office. And I just thought that was fascinating that I think it’s true that in a highly reliable organization, which healthcare has to be a highly reliable organization, there, there cannot be this tendency at the top to oversimplify what is taking place in the organization. And in healthcare is very complex. There’s no question about it. It’s highly regulated. But it is also a people service. We aren’t taking care of an automotive line. We are taking care of patients. And I think the day that you kind of stop, start to lose that perspective is the day that you stop paying attention to and listening to the people that are engaged in the work. And that has been a guiding principle of my whole, whole career. It’s how I became a Chief Nursing Officer, which I actually never thought, midway through my career, that I would ever be a CNA, CNO. I was really excited to be leading things like quality and safety and case management and discharge planning and those kinds of things. Never really saw myself moving into a Chief Nursing Executive position. As you shifted gears and you went into, the management side of healthcare, got your MBA, and went along that journey before your time as CNO of Ochsner. What are some of the big takeaways that you learned about yourself as a leader during that period of your career, that have kind of shaped you into the position that you’re filling today?

And most professions, you sort of work your way through a series of leadership positions to wait, make your way to the top. And I think in nursing, there’s often an expectation that you’ve been a unit manager, and then you’re a unit director, or you’re running some clinics, and then you move into an associate vice president role, etc. You know, in my career, I think what moved me through the organizations I was working for was really, I was willing to take on anything.

So, ultimately I ended up, Jeff and I ended up leaving Texas. I was invited to come up to, Mercy’s flagship hospital in St. Louis, which is a thousand bed, major academic medical center. And, by that time I had been with the Sisters of Mercy, you know, in two states. And they were looking for a vice president to oversee quality and safety for the campus. So I pursued that and, and Jeff and I got that position. And Jeff was with Siemens, and we could have lived anywhere where there was an airport. So, I think, that was a big step for me to go from a 350 bed hospital, to one well over, you know, twice the size and also an academic medical center. And the big lesson for me, I think, is, and I learned this very quickly in that new position as the Vice President of Quality and Safety at St. John’s in St. Louis, is you cannot change anything without collaboration and data. And in an academic medical center, the physician, the nurses, pharmacy, engagement. All of that in quality and safety is really critical. And, you know, my job at that point was actually to point out opportunities, to really smart and talented people in areas where I felt like we can improve on patient care. And, you know, accepting the need for change, comes easier for some people than for others. And, and so for me, one of the biggest lessons was, you can be a great change agent in any level in an organization, as long as you can articulate for people the necessity for change. And then you can kind of get people excited and engaged in, you know, what are the solutions. And, that is another element of my career that has really guided me, into every change in my career I’ve made. And, and for me, serving in that vice president of quality and safety role for, that flagship hospital in St. Louis, St. John’s, was a very pivotal moment in my career because I think I realized with the right motivation, and the right consideration in mind, which patients for me is always first, if you, if you pursue that change with that, your mission, your vision, that fundamental grounding passion that you have in mind, you can almost convince people to navigate any important change. And that was real, really important for me once I became a CNO. And it was particularly important for me, certainly over the past few years during the COVID era.

Yeah, I think it’s a fascinating little nugget. I just listened to you say that, that, really hit home with me is the quote where you said, I was willing, and at that point in your life and your career, you were willing to take on anything. I mean, look at your success in your career and how many of the, you know, successful, the business owners that I know and I’m friends with, and, and I know Brad and I talk about this, it’s like, I wish people would just understand like if, if, if a, if a person who’s a good leader and leadership in any organization sees a team member of theirs who’s willing to take on anything, those are typically the people who succeed and move on up, isn’t it?

Yeah. And, and I wish more people would, would really get that. It’s like I’m, I’m sure there’s some of that even in your position today where it’s like, you’re not above anything. Like ultimately, it’s a team, right? And you’re trying to achieve a result for the, in your case, the patient, and get the best outcome possible for them and their family, right?

That, that’s exactly right. And, and again, I think if whatever business you’re in, and if that, if you have a core philosophy that is something people can respect and attach to and have passion about. There’s a willingness for people to be different and for people to take on, you know, improvement. And, you know, quality and safety in healthcare is, it’s paramount to what we do. And, you know, we’re imperfect. Humans, right? Yeah. That’s right. And so, you know, when we introduce things like new technology to make healthcare safer, that requires people to transform the way they work day in and day out. If you don’t think change is hard, you know, try brushing your teeth with your left hand tomorrow if you’re right-handed, you know? It’s getting into new habits and in the professional realm, the way that we advance quality and safety for patients.

And that’s the thing to me, no matter what you do, success isn’t success to me isn’t like the top of the ladder. It’s not the executive suite. Success to me is truly waking up every day and saying, Oh my god, look back over the last two years, look what I got to do. It was unbelievable. And, you know, to be in that position and be able to do that and still be excited about it. That to me is the hallmark of success. I couldn’t agree more. And also maybe from my perspective, it’s also like the growth of that you have gotten as a person through that period, right? And definitely. So talk a little bit if you can, Tracy, about your current position at Ocher as Chief Nursing Chief Nursing Officer. What does that mean? How many people are you overseeing and what kind of systems and what systems are you overseeing from the standpoint of like business systems and quality control, things like that. Well, let me, before I do that, David, let me, just say that I will tell you that when I was in St. Louis, I want to give you a little bit of backdrop about how I skip jumped into the current position. I mean, because it was a it was a hop and a leap. But I’ll quickly tell you, when I was in St. Louis, about halfway through my 10-year, tenure there, they, hired a new CEO. And it was a female CEO and she came in like a dynamo and the nurses there were actually unionized. And they, they were not with a nursing union, they were actually with the food, which we were all sort of curious about. And they were pretty entrenched for eight years, they had been unionized and the CEO came in and she was like, The only thing broken in this system is that the administrators and the and the nurses are not talking to each other. And we need to overcome that. And she came to me and she said, you know, I’d like for you to be the CNO. And I just started laughing. I was like, Okay, I’ve never been a unit manager and I’ve never been a director of nursing and so I don’t think you really want me as your CNO. And she said, Yeah, but you’re a change agent here and you’ve been working on quality and safety and people trust you. And they listen to you. And so I want you to be my CNO. And I said, no. So no, it, it, previously when you said, like I’d be willing to take on anything, you know, maybe not. And so she came back a couple of weeks later and she was like, Have you thought further about, you know, about taking on this position? And I was like, no. And she said, well, I’m really not asking. And, that was when I realized, you know, I was going to be the CNO. And, we, I ended up short story, ended up taking on the role of the CNO for the next eight years. We overturned the union, we were later named one of the top employers, in healthcare by Modern Healthcare two years later. I mean, it was like really a fascinating. And look, I’m not against unions. But I think, you know, if professionals are going to be part of a union, it ought to be their, their professional union. And so that was a learning opportunity for me, but it also grounded my opinion that at the end of the day, leaders and frontline staff have to be connected, they have to be talking to each other. But at the end of my tenure there, I turned 50 and I decided that I knew everything there was to know about healthcare. And I went to work for a consulting firm. And my job was to travel around the country and consult with healthcare organizations and do strategic planning. And it was the worst mistake of my career. And I think people have to acknowledge when they make mistakes and they choose the wrong path. And, I hated going in and advising people and then like not being part of the work. And one of my clients in Tennessee picked me up and asked me to come and be the chief operating officer of their seven hospital, multi-state system. And again, once again, in my career, had never been a chief operating officer. Had never been a system executive. And I jumped at it. I just said, sure. We had done a lot of work on their strategic planning and I had earned a little bit of trust on their board. And, it was fascinating to me. But I realized quickly that, you know, we were just over a billion dollars in revenue, which I know sounds like a lot of revenue, but in healthcare, that’s nothing. Our margins were not great. And realized pretty quickly we were going to have to merge. There was a lot of healthcare M&A activity going on at that time. And, that was also very interesting to me to watch a lot of merger and acquisition activity. And we ended up merging with another system. And by that time, I was 55 and I thought I might retire actually. And then I saw this position open up at Oschner about nine months later, that they were looking for their first, system CNO and vice president for quality. And it was an opportunity for Jeff and I to come back home to New Orleans, which is our home. And wow. Had no idea of course, when we came back in 2015, that, you know, I would be part of leading the organization through what we’ve been through for the past few years. So I had to take a little bit of a side bar. I hope you don’t mind on, you know, how I ended up here, because, as I mentioned earlier, I never really thought I’d end up in a CNO position and certainly never ended up thinking that I’d had the opportunity to be the system chief nursing executive for the largest health system in, you know, the Gulf Coast. So it’s a it’s a really exciting place to be for me. And I’m great, really grateful, frankly, that I’ve had the opportunity to lead nursing for Oschner. So I’ll tell you a little bit about, about what I do now, if that’s okay. Yeah, I mean, I just thought it was really interesting that you mentioned, and I think a great mark of a leader is owning a mistake or owning, like when you just took and made a mistake and look, owning that and acknowledging it lets you to get back into where you where you were and led to where you are now. So, it worked out pretty good, but just owning if you thought it was the wrong decision, right? Well, look, you know, look is a wonderful thing. I, I, I, I, I, I, sometimes you can really make a mistake and looks not on your side. Sometimes you make a mistake and I think at the end of the day, I just got lucky. Yeah. Born not to be afraid of making those mistakes though. That’s the biggest thing. You gotta have there and take risk. See what works, see what doesn’t work, and be willing to be flexible and backtrack when you need to and go to another direction. Yeah, well, the trick there, the mistake was, as I said, I turned 50. I had been running healthcare for many years, a couple decades at that time and I thought I knew everything. Big, that was the mistake. The mistake wasn’t going into consulting. I probably did a decent job consulting, but, the truth of the matter is, I made that decision for the wrong reasons. And again, I think it’s a lesson in any decision people make in their healthcare. If you’re making it for the right reasons, it’s probably a good choice. If you’re not, you know, could turn out to be a big mistake. Yeah, and it’s it’s it all centers back to me mentioning earlier from my perspective. And I love, one of my role models is Warren Buffett. And I always, am always amazed. He’s always prioritizing humility and and that type of thing. We talked about humility with you earlier. And it’s like, how many mistakes have I made in decisions and business and there have been a lot. And most of the time when I go back, I’m like, that’s because I was in a role of like making the right decisions and that head blew up just a little too much and I wasn’t too critical and I wasn’t humble enough. And then capone. That’s when the big ones happened. Yeah. So yeah, Tracy, I was hoping we could shift gears here and you tell us a little bit about your position at Ocher now. What it entails, a little bit about how many people you manage, so people can really get a scope of the the amount of team members that you’re truly managing and impacting on a day-to-day basis and what that role really entails. Yeah, some days I have to admit it’s a little bit mind blowing, to me, you know, what I do here. You know, it’s shocking and some days it’s a little bit scary. But, we have across the Ocher Health system, just over 40 hospitals. When I got here in 2015, I think we were 11 or 12, owned, managed or affiliated hospitals. And today I think we’re just over 40. It, it changes a lot because we’ve done a lot of, mergers and acquisitions over the 8 years that I’ve been here. And I really have the privilege of overseeing the practice of nursing for just shy of 10,000 nurses, across the state of Louisiana and into Mississippi. And we have one little critical access hospital in Alabama. And we also have 700 or just over 700 clinical locations. And, you know, my responsibilities are about ensuring that we have capable and competent nurses, that we have, an appropriate supply of nurses, so that means working with a lot of our academic, organizations to make sure that we’ve got people coming into nursing that they’re being well educated. I oversee the significant portion of labor for the health system because nursing makes up the largest single segment of the workforce for an organization like Oschner. And, making sure that we have a safe and effective, workforce at the bedside in our clinics and in our ambulatory, care locations. And as my role as the system vice president of quality and safety, I also help to guide the organization in managing, a lot of data systems that point to where we have deviations in care. We have a big event recording system that tells us, you know, when we have made, errors, and again, it is a, it is a human, profession. People do make errors and that helps us drive, through really deep evaluation. And what, what, whenever an event occurs, going through a process where we do root cause analyses and then we determine, you know, what was the source of an error if a, if a patient was harmed in the process of that, how do we prevent that from happening in the future? How much of that could be solved by new technology, like barcode scanning or automated pumps for IVs and those kinds of things? And so, I’m involved quite often in things like product selection or the implementation of new technology. So it’s, it’s, it’s broad work, but it’s also, pretty deep work. And I, and I, again, I love every bit of it. So we talked earlier, Tracy, a little bit about, prior to taking your current role at Ocher in 2015, you thought you knew everything. And then you take your current role. And then boom, 2020, COVID hits. So I hate to take you back to that time. I know that was a very hectic time. But what did COVID change, in the healthcare industry from what you think you knew and what you did moving forward? Can you talk a little bit about that, just generally? This is, that is not something you can foresee, frankly. And, and so, you know, there’s no way to really prepare for a situation like that. I was the co-incident command center with our CVO of our centers of excellence and our service lines. And I think we realized early on as the co-leaders of that command center that running a command center for an international pandemic, you know, wasn’t like running a command center for a hurricane, for example. We knew this wasn’t going to be short-lived. We knew it was going to be catastrophic. You know, my boss, actually connected the two of us with two military leaders who, very quickly within the first couple of weeks came in and coached us on how to be a, a quote general in a situation like this. Because, you know, not to sound overly dramatic, well, it was a very dramatic situation, but it almost felt like we were at war. It was that kind of sensation that you are battling to come up with solutions day in and day out to keep people from dying. And so, for the first time in my career, spending time on the shop floor wasn’t going to work. Like we had to be strategists. We had to be commanders and we had to run fast. And again, in healthcare, when we’re making changes, we don’t often run fast. We’re very deliberative about those things. And so it was unnerving in some ways to have to be in that position where we were trying to run the organization and run really fast in a situation where we had never done anything like this before. But people were dying, our staff were getting sick, you know, and again, I’m not comparing myself to someone in danger of being shot, but, you know, a lot of people were dying at Ocher and around the world. But, you know, we were back in with refrigeration trucks outside the morgue for overflow. So it was an all hands on deck, you know, situation for sure. And, and while that’s not necessarily a lesson, because I wasn’t surprised by it, you know, the people at Ocher Health are the best in the world at doing hard things. We do hard things every day, but we are really an incredible team. And every person in our organization, you know, jumped in and did things they never imagined that they would do. And I think what I learned, probably most from that is the idea that, you know, innovation at its finest is sometimes born from that kind of chaos, not paralysis. You know, we became incredibly innovative. We quickly stood up. Everybody had a role at this point in time in how we were taking care of patients. You know, people who were pretty far removed from the bedside when you think about, you know, all of our folks who run our electronic health system, they were in the background working with our clinicians trying to figure out how could we do more patient visits without bringing people into the hospital? You know, sometimes we were doing hundreds or thousands of vaccinations, a day. And nurses and physicians and pharmacists and everybody were involved in, you know, establishing testing stations and, you know, we educated nurses who hadn’t worked at the bedside in a few years and kind of brought them back. And we did just in time training. And, I guess, you know, at the short answer would be, don’t, don’t ever doubt the power of people. And, you know, it was just really overwhelming and wonderful to watch what happened, even though it was a really chaotic and challenging and tragic time in our history. I, I would like to share, you know, I remember having the feeling because I did get vaccinated at that mass vaccination, drive at the shrine. And I remember having the sense when I was waiting in line in my car, like, wow, I can’t believe that, you know, really kind of the greatness of America, but also the people, that in such a quick amount of time, with a tragedy like this, which we really didn’t know anything about, that there was a vaccine that was tested, brought to market and then a system like Oschner could coordinate a mass vaccination effort like that, which, which, you know, takes an immense amount of coordination, work, planning, strategy, implementation at many different levels. But also the other story I’d like to share is I have a good friend who’s a surgeon at Oschner, a close college friend who I’ve mentioned to you a couple of times. And I remember just hearing the stories of him getting home, you know, back in that time when we didn’t know much and he was on the COVID team, he was one of the COVID units at Oschner. And he would take his clothes off in the garage when he got home so that he didn’t, you know, very unlikely that, and not a medical professional, but the club, but at the time, right? Like he was worried about spreading it to his wife and the kids. And so it was like the pure courage of some of these people and what they risked to serve others and to help others with it. It must have really blown your mind, right? Yeah, I mean, it, it, it, it, you know, if you ever lose your faith and people, a situation like that restores your faith and people because people were doing, you know, what humans do. We take care of each other. Well, fascinating lessons from that experience and you’ve had such an interesting career and an incredible career. What are some of the, if you could distill it, Tracy, one of the one or two lessons that you would like to impart on that you’ve learned, from your role and being a nurse and now leadership, along your journey. Yeah, I think, I know that’s kind of a hard question. I think, you know, it, it, particularly in quality and safety, you know, there’s a saying that perfect is the enemy of good enough. And I think what I’ve learned over my time both as a nursing leader and as a quality and safety leader, that, you know, we don’t always have to be in pursuit of perfection. Sometimes good enough is really good enough. And, you know, passion can swing both ways. It can become obsessive and it can lead to, you know, ideations of perfection and those kinds of things. And so I think that’s been a big learning for me. And it’s also been a learning for me in my personal life. You know, we, we as humans are imperfect, as we’ve said. I think maybe the second thing, and again, I’ve said this repeatedly as there’s really very little you can lead when you’re leading people from behind a desk. And so, you know, wherever you are in your career, and whatever you do, you know, get out from behind your desk. Understand the impact that you want to have on what you do for a living. And, and it’s unlikely, at least in healthcare, I’ll say that you can do that from behind a desk. And so those are a couple of, of lessons that I feel like have guided me, throughout my career and in some ways in my personal life as well. So now I want to make you uncomfortable, Tracy, and force you to talk about yourself. Because you are a humble person. I know you don’t want to talk about yourself. But I’m hoping that you could share with our listeners, what your superpower is. What is the, what is the one unique trait about you? And, and all of us are unique, all of us are different. But what is, would you say is a unique trait and characteristic of you that’s been a key or pivotal superpower trait of yours, that’s helped you succeed in your career? You’re so wrong for this. You’re just wrong for asking that. I don’t know. But like, just, I think at the core of who I am in my personal life and my profession, that, that I believe that most of the things we really want in life. That, that those things are within our reach. And, you know, just thinking, again, back to the story about my mom, when, when, when I lost my mom, and I wanted desperately to be a nurse after losing my mother, you know, my parents were divorced. And my mother had left me some money, but a very smart woman. She, I, I couldn’t access my trust fund until I was 28. And I literally found myself with without any money to go to college. Jimmy Carter was in office and there was a, a government training program called CETA. And I applied to a Votech school and became an LPN and I had a government grant that gave me a living stipend. And I had food stamps for a year. And, you know, I became an LPN before I became an RN. And it was my gateway to everything else. And, and so whether that’s a superpower or not, I, I really believe that most of the things that we really want in life, and again, if they’re for the right reasons, are within our reach and they’re achievable. We just have to, you know, we, we have to have perseverance. One of my favorite books is a book by, Angela Duckworth called Grit. I don’t know if any either of you have ever read the book Grit, but it’s about harnessing the combined power of passion and perseverance. And when hard times come and real test and trials arrive at your doorstep, the only things that keep us going sometimes are the passion for what we do and our will to persevere. And I think that’s, maybe if I had to call that a superpower, I’d call that my superpower. It is your superpower. And it definitely, it definitely is because it’s your vision of seeing something that you want to be accomplished and just your relentless pursuit of making sure it happens. Making it happen, right? I mean, it’s like, that famous Michael Jordan quote, it’s like, some people want it to happen, some people like it to happen, some people make it happen. So fascinating, discussion, Tracy, as well as that book. And I will tell you as a side note, I’ll take it, as a personal preference that I think, I, the last book I just finished was the new CEO of Ocher. I read an interview of his like six months ago and his favorite book is Leaders Eat Last. And that’s a really fantastic book. I’m glad I bought it and read it. And so I saw his recommendation of that, but I am going to check out Grit as well. So Tracy, thank you so much for being with us today. Once again, an incredible guest, Tracy Moffett, who’s the Chief Nursing Officer for Ocher Health. Very, very lucky to have you as a part of the show today. It’s been a fascinating discussion, a lot of interesting topics, and things that we hit on. And thank you so much for being with us. Thank you for joining us. Oh, really, my privilege. Thank you so much for, for having me. I appreciate it. All right. Thank you to all our listeners. It’s been a fascinating show. Thank you to Tracy. Once again, this is the Overruled podcast, brought to you by the Scott Vicknair Law firm. Until next time, thanks for listening and we’ll see you soon. Y’all take care. Scott Vicknair, injury attorneys. We fight for the win. Information is for illustrative purposes only and does not constitute tax, investment, or legal advice. Always consult with a qualified investment, legal, or tax professional before taking any action.