Becker's Hospital Review

46 WOMEN'S LEADERSHIP Houston Methodist's Dr. Roberta Schwartz on innovating out of the staffing crisis By Lauren Jensik R oberta Schwartz, PhD, executive vice president and chief innovation officer for Houston Methodist, has been taking meetings with nursing executives, a group she said she hadn't spent very much time with before the staffing crisis. "Appropriately staffing every area of the organization is re- ally hard," she told Becker's Jan. 18. "When our chief strategy officer is asked, 'How do we fix this?' he goes, 'Roberta will have to innovate us out of it.' And while there's some truth in that, we do take that job very seriously." While capacity issues continue to be a priority for Dr. Schwartz, she and Houston Methodist's leadership team are working to fill the gaps staffing problems have created throughout the pandemic. "We're talking about nurse scribes and teleprecepting," she said. "We have Amazon working with us on rounding our nursing floors and getting voice commands for our nurs- es. We're working on getting Alexa hooked up to our nurse call so that between the alarms and Alexa, we can possibly conduct rounds from a more stationary area and reduce the amount of times nurses have to walk in a room to get patients everything they need, and they can monitor them from more centralized areas. We're talking about all kinds of things that if you had asked me a year ago, I would've said, 'at's not going to be on the top of my agenda.'" ough the current COVID-19 surge and omicron variant has created challenges for the health system, Dr. Schwartz said there has been a notable difference from previous surg- es thanks to predictive analytics. "I'm amazed at how far we've come," she said. "e sophis- tication of even the dataset that we have on a longitudinal set of COVID patients is something that will start to build into predictive analytics, like which types of drugs will help which types of patients, which types of patients we need to do something about much faster, [which types] will truly benefit from [extracorporeal membrane oxygenation], as well as watching our transplant group get much more so- phisticated about which recovering patients will benefit from a transplant, is pretty amazing to me." In 2021, Dr. Schwartz shared with Becker's that her top pri- ority was to disrupt every area of Houston Methodist with digital technology. As for how that's going, she said, "Doing it, I feel like the person who paints the Brooklyn Bridge. You start at one side, you get to the other side, and by the time you're done, you get to start the whole process again because there will be new technologies that will come out that will allow me to disrupt my disruptions." n Want proxy battle success? Target female CEOs, report says By Georgina Gonzalez I nvestors are more likely to support activist campaigns if they target organizations with female CEOs as opposed to those with male CEOs, The Wall Street Journal reported Feb. 5. The findings are based on a new study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, conducted between 2017 and 2021. It in- volved asking about 500 investors to complete online surveys de- scribing a scenario in which an activist investor sent them a letter asking for help to get them elected onto a company's board in which the study participant was a shareholder. In some scenarios, the company CEO was a woman, while in others it was a man. When the company had a female CEO, 82.5 percent of investors said they'd vote to support the activist investor, whereas when the company had a male CEO, only 62.5 percent of investors said they'd vote the same way. "It can be difficult to detect those stereotypical influences when you ask people to make a subjective judgment," Amanda Cowen, a co-author of the study, told the Journal. "But it becomes more visible when you're asking them to make a choice — for example, in the proxy voting context." n It's lonely at the top for female leaders By Alia Paavola W omen, especially women of color, are less likely to feel included and taken seriously as they enter leadership roles, a February survey from the Society for Human Re- source Management found. For the report, the HR association surveyed 1,094 HR professionals, 1,017 individual contributors and 1,038 managers. Four findings from the survey: 1. Female managers are less likely to feel included in key networks at their organizations than male managers. Specifically, 65 per- cent of white female managers and 57 percent of female manag- ers of color say they feel included in key networks, compared to 68 percent of male managers of color and 73 percent of white male managers. 2. Only 56 percent of female managers of color reported they feel like they can talk about their personal life with others at work, com- pared to 70 percent of white female managers, 72 percent of male managers of color and 79 percent of white male managers. 3. As women move from individual contributors to managers, they are more likely to believe women in their organization have fewer opportunities for career growth than men. 4. Only 61 percent of women reported their supervisor encourages them to grow their career, compared to 71 percent of men. n

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