Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1092388
116 THOUGHT LEADERSHIP our physicians and nurse practitioners, they spend a lot of their time — 20 percent, 30 percent, sometimes 40 percent of their time — acting as data entry clerks. I would like to eliminate that and give them the joy of practicing medicine and taking care of patients, which is why we went into this field in the first place. Q: What do you consider your greatest talent or skill outside of the C-suite? EE: My greatest accomplishment is being a father. I'm a fa- ther of three kids, and I take pride in raising my kids. They are going to be good members of society and have empa- thy for people. That's my biggest accomplishment. Besides that, because I come from an aerospace engineering back- ground, I feel like I'm very analytical, and also to that point, very detail-oriented. I want to apply all the safety rules and techniques we have in other industries, especially in the aerospace industry, to medicine. I feel that's the dimension I bring to medicine as a person who was outside the system before and became a doctor and knows the opportunities in medicine, how we can embed technology to not only make the safety and quality of our patient care superb, but also be able to give the gift of time back to the physicians and nurse practitioners so they enjoy what they're doing. Q: How do you revitalize yourself? EE: I'm a voracious reader. I read things that are not health- care over the weekends and the evenings. I read a lot of books. I read a lot of newspapers. I subscribe to the Wash- ington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. I read things that are not related to healthcare because I think it helps me gain a better perspective for healthcare and be able to look at other areas where you can apply things to healthcare. That's one of the ways I release stress. The second way is I take time off with my family. They're my sanctuary when I go home. I don't discuss business. I create space for me and my family to have vacations. I think if you don't do that, you burn out as a leader. At the end, you get so enmeshed in your work that you become unproductive. I totally believe in recharging. I believe in working really hard, but also recharging really hard as well. Q: What's one piece of advice you remember most clearly? EE: I was [recently] thinking about my journey to becoming a courageous leader. It is still continuing, was not swift, and it definitely was not smooth. I want people to know that the journey to become a courageous leader is definitely trod- den with a lot of obstacles, a lot of setbacks. Each of these setbacks were important for me because they made me gain wisdom, resilience and empathy. They nurtured me in a way that I could turn them into success. As a leader, you're going to have setbacks. The higher you move up, the more possibility for setbacks. I've learned from that to be resilient, and not let them get me down, and be able to swiftly move on to something that I can use that as a rallying call. I think it's very important for people to understand that leadership path is not smooth and swift. Use the setbacks as rallying strength. [Sir] Winston Churchill had a good say- ing. He said, "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts." Q: What do you consider your greatest achievement at Novant Health so far? EE: I work with tremendous people that are as smart or smarter than me and that I can trust. Our team's biggest achievement, I think, is being able to pivot towards artifi- cial intelligence. I feel AI in healthcare is going to be the fourth industrial revolution. It's going to [bring] a tremen- dous amount of value to our patients, our physicians, our nurse practitioners, our physician assistants. We started this journey about six months ago. We are so far ahead of a lot of other systems. A process I designed to help move us to success is what I call AFECT. The first part is alignment. Alignment is both internal and external. For AI, we've been able to align our clinical leaders, administrative leaders, as well as digital products services leaders on the same goal: How we're going to put patient in the middle of AI and design our AI around the patient. Next comes focus. We were able to fo- cus down to two projects that everybody could agree that we knew would be great wins. One of them is around using AI to reduce readmission in heart failure patients. The other is going to be pneumonia readmission prevention using AI. Now we are at the stage of execution and we are starting to execute ["E"] on those projects. Then the two [other steps that are part of AFECT], we hav- en't reached those yet. I'm hoping that we'll reach them in the next couple of months. Once we execute, guess what? "C" comes with celebration. We want that to celebrate with our team. The team shares in the joys and the tribu- lations we went through to get to this project and seeing its fruition and seeing how much of a difference it makes in patients' lives. The last one is "T," and I call it transfor- mation because once you go through that AFECT, you've transformed the organization. n "I hate to say this, but I almost feel like a lot of our physicians and nurse practitioners, they spend a lot of their time — 20 percent, 30 percent, sometimes 40 percent of their time — acting as data entry clerks. I would like to eliminate that and give them the joy of practicing medicine and taking care of patients, which is why we went into this field in the first place. " — Eric Eskioglu, MD, Executive Vice President and CMO, Novant Health