Episode 24 : Nurturing Excellence:

Celebrating the Role of Nursing in High-Performing Hospitals

Leah Binder

President and CEO of The Leapfrog Group

SCTS_Leah Binder.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

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Intro/Outro:
Welcome to the Smart Care Team Spotlight presented by care.ai, the smart care facility, platform company, and leader in AI and ambient intelligence for healthcare. Join Molly McCarthy, former CNO of Microsoft, as she interviews the brightest minds in healthcare about the transformational promise of AI and ambient intelligence for care teams.

Molly McCarthy:
Too often, technology makes caregivers' lives harder, not easier. It's time for smart technology to empower care with a more human touch. I'm thrilled to share a little bit more about our guests today, Leah Binder. Leah Binder is president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group, representing employers and other purchasers of healthcare, calling for improved safety and quality in hospitals. She is a regular contributor to Forbes.com and consistently named among Modern Healthcare's annual list of the 100 most influential people in Healthcare. Under her leadership, the Leapfrog Group has grown fourfold in size and launched major new initiatives, including the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade, which assigns letter grades assessing the safety of general hospitals across the country, as well as ratings of ambulatory surgery centers and outpatient surgery, and the Judy Burrows Education Institute. She spearheaded successful initiatives nationally, including partnerships to reduce early elective deliveries, promote better hand hygiene in health settings, reduce infections, improve healthcare transparency, and promote safe use of health technology. Leah has served numerous national boards and councils, including the National Quality Forum, Women of Impact, CMMIs Accountable Action Collaborative, the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions, the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, and AARP's Champion for nursing. Prior to her position at the Leapfrog Group, Leah spent eight years as Vice President at Franklin Community Health Network and award-winning Rural Hospital Network in Farmington, Maine. Prior to that, she served as senior policy advisor at the New York City Mayor's Office. She started her career at the National League for Nursing, where she handled policy and communication for more than six years. Welcome, Leah. It's so great to have you here today.

Leah Binder:
Well, thank you for having me, Molly. It's great to be here.

Molly McCarthy:
And first of all, really appreciate time out of your day to speak with us and our listeners. And I suspect that many of our listeners know Leapfrog as a name and associate that name with quality and healthcare. But I also suspect that very few really know the who, when, how, and why of Leapfrog. So can you take us back to the beginnings of the Leapfrog Group and tell us the story of the inspiration of its founding mission and how the organization has evolved over time?

Leah Binder:
Absolutely, and I will say, I can brag about the founding of Leapfrog, in part because I'm not telling my own exact story. I didn't start at Leapfrog until Leapfrog had been around for about eight years, so I can look back fondly at its origins and brag about them all I want without sounding a little too pompous. But they started with a group of employers. These were large companies, and they were HR executives or like GM, GE, Boeing, Marriott Corporation, some very large companies, all of which you would know the names of. And these executives got together because they were very concerned about safety and quality in healthcare. A report had just come out in the year 2000, or actually the report came out in 1999 called 'To Err Is Human'. It was from the Institute of Medicine, and it suggested that upwards of 100,000 people were dying of preventable medical errors in hospitals, and they were concerned about that. They had very concerned about that because they had spent decades really trying to improve the healthcare their employees were getting, and both from a quality point of view, but also cost effectiveness point of view. And both of those they felt had not been successful.

Leah Binder:
And here they were hearing about yet another issue that was perhaps the most outrageous of all, that people were dying of preventable errors. That was just terrible. So they formed Leapfrog, and that was the nonprofit with a very focused, very simple mission, which was to make public how hospitals are doing on preventing these errors and accidents and encourage their employees to use the information. And they use the information themselves when they contracted for healthcare benefits. So when they would try to pay for the best care and not pay for the worst care and really be more businesslike, in other words, in their approach to their purchase of healthcare. And so a simple idea, really, of public transparency and really driving the ability to be discerning about picking among hospitals. And they started with hospitals. It was very little data at the time, but they went out to hospitals and said and via a survey called the Leapfrog Hospital Survey, they said, could you please provide us with information? And here are the questions, and the questions were about things, as Bob Galvin at the time was a GE, and he said he wanted the Leapfrog survey to ask questions that his mother would want to know about a hospital.

Leah Binder:
So that's what they did. There was some evidence behind it, so they still had some really top experts in patient safety to advise them. But even so, at the time, there just wasn't much that they could use. That was really great measures of safety that they could really call on. Anyway, so fast forward, and today we do the same thing. We really have that same fundamental value, which is we should be transparent about how hospitals are doing on safety. We should publicly report that information, and people should use it to make decisions and to communicate with the hospitals that they work with or the communities that they live in. They should be communicating with hospitals and saying, we expect you to do better on safety, and we will reward you when you do. And that's the same with employers to do the same thing that when you do better on quality and safety, employers should reward that with their purchasing. So that's still fundamental to what we do. We have a lot more tools in our toolkit and a lot more people involved, but it is really fundamentally the same principle, and it's working.

Molly McCarthy:
That's wonderful. I know early in my career, around the start of Leapfrog, I was actually back in DC working for A1 and I, you know, worked on a consulting group with really looking at root cause analysis, and patient safety was really becoming such a highlighted item, really, as you mentioned, really to provide that transparency to consumers to, as you mentioned, GE GE's, uh, executives mom, what they would want to know about healthcare. So, so important to provide that transparency. So kudos to to, you know, being part of that evolution. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk a little bit about looking at healthcare providers and obviously starting my career as a nurse. And you've worked in healthcare for quite some time, National League for Nursing. So, our healthcare providers take an oath to do no harm. And every one of our caregivers really choose this profession to heal those in need, obviously with compassion, empathy, and even with the best intentions, quality and safety have room for improvement. What's the current state of quality and safety across our hospitals, and where have we made progress, and where do you think we have more to do?

Leah Binder:
So I think the current state is certainly not what we would all want. It certainly is not the healthcare system that I think anyone who chose a career in healthcare wants. I mean, we all, everybody who's involved in healthcare in any way wants the United States to have the very best healthcare in human history. That's basically what we want. And we don't have that. But we do have progress, and I believe progress is something to celebrate. So I do think there are really bright spots and those are worth celebrating and also learning from, because I think we can build very quickly, we can scale some of those successes. So the success that I would see that, that I see every day actually is in patient safety. Now, patient safety is an example of where there's a lot to complain about. So, the statistics on patient safety are quite disturbing. There was a recent report from the office of the Inspector General. It's sort of independent body that looks at how the Department of Health and Human Services is doing, and they looked at a random set of records of Medicare beneficiaries who had been admitted to the hospital, and they found that 1 in 4 of them were harmed at some point during their stay.

Leah Binder:
That's a very high rate of harm. 25% is a very high rate. Anybody in any other industry that would never be even in the realm of tolerable. So it is very high. And we know also now with good estimates in peer-reviewed journals, that it's about 250,000 people die every year from these preventable errors. So that's also a very high number that would make it the third leading cause of death. So we have a long way to go, I always have to preface with that, this is a major problem. It should be considered a top national priority to address it. For every single person in healthcare, this should be a top priority. That's it. We have seen real progress in especially in the past decade with hospital-acquired infections. There was a spike in them, they went up during the pandemic. That was a major problem, which we reported on and discussed at length at the time. However, that's coming down really rapidly. We also have seen a reduction in the patient safety indicators, so-called, that are measured by CMS, the federal government, and the ones that are most publicly reported. We are seeing real reductions of falls, pressure ulcers, injuries such as that. We're seeing very significant reductions in those as well.

Leah Binder:
So I think in hospitals we are definitely seeing progress. And I mean by like 20 or 30% in some cases even higher than that 50%, I think, for central line infections. So, really, really significant reductions in. Some very high profile and deadly, in many cases, deadly events. So that's good news. And I think what makes that the kind of news that I want to focus on in my own work, and I think everybody should look at, is because it's a success, it's progress. And we need to ask ourselves, how did that progress come about? What did we do as a country because we did something as a country to see that kind of change nationally. And I think there's a variety of things we did. But I will say one thing that's different in the past decade when we saw this progress that's different from other decades where we have continually not seen progress, is transparency. We have been publicly reporting those measures since the Affordable Care Act since 2009. I certainly want to take some credit for Leapfrog, which I think has put patient safety and transparency on the map, especially in the last decade when we launched the hospital safety grade. So I think we've seen but so we take part of the credit for that.

Leah Binder:
But really, having that data available publicly reported has made a difference. It's not just the difference, by the way, for the public, I'm not sure if everyone in the country says, oh, I have to figure out what CMS says about this hospital before I go there. I actually don't think that's necessarily happening all the time. Some people do, but not it's not happening all the time. The biggest thing that's happening is that hospital leaders themselves and clinicians are aware of this data. They see it, they recognize it. They challenge themselves to do better on it when it's there, when it's in front of you when it's public, it just has a galvanizing effect. You really want to see it change. You want to be better than your competitors in those met. You want to. It's galvanizing. So I think that's been a big difference, along with all of the tools and efforts that have been really put out there from not only from a little bit from Leapfrog, but a lot from CMS and many other really great organizations that are out there really helping hospitals especially get better. So I think combined with that push from transparency, we've seen real progress, and now we need to grow it.

Molly McCarthy:
So many great examples. I love that you really focus on the progress that we've made, because I think that's really key. And especially over the past ten years with hospital-acquired infections, falls, pressure ulcers, central line infections, I know those are all, you know, never they should be never happen events. And really attributing that to transparency and awareness. I always like to say you can't really change what you don't measure. And so measuring that and providing that back to the hospital leadership is key. And to your point, I am a consumer. We're all consumers. I don't necessarily go every time and look up the safety scores, although I am probably a little bit more in tune than others. But to your point, it's information back to the leaders of where they are and where they need to go, which is fantastic. And they need that in order to have the CQI in that improvement. So, thank you for sharing that.

Leah Binder:
It's also information back to everyone who works there.

Molly McCarthy:
Right.

Leah Binder:
It's the leaders. Yeah, And the board. But it's also the person who's serving the meals to the patients. The inpatient unit, from dietary, everybody gets involved. And that's especially true when they get a good grade. So what we find is when we give an A to a hospital, they will often celebrate it throughout the entire hospital. But where pins that say we got an A for patient safety, it's just very visible. And it's a recognition of their achievement when they get this and when they don't get it, they know about that too. That can be really, I'm sure, upsetting. But it's also goading. It says, no, we got to do better. We got to do better. Everybody gets involved. And I think that's, um, you just can't substitute that level of all team engagement.

Molly McCarthy:
Yeah. Thank you for pointing that out. I think that's really crucial. You know, it's not just those at the top, but it's very much everyone across that value line, value chain who provides care, whether they're delivering a medication or taking a patient from the floor to a procedure. It's really critical and it is a team approach.

Leah Binder:
Yeah.

Molly McCarthy:
So we've talked a little bit about the trends that you've seen and the current state and the improvement. What characteristics do you see as common to the top-performing health systems as it relates to quality, safety and patient experience?

Leah Binder:
I would say the first thing I notice about the highest performing hospitals when we look at the data when I go to visit the highest performing hospitals, the number one characteristic I will see that is at least striking to me, is that the CEO or top leadership will be unsatisfied with their own performance. I can't tell you how many CEOs of truly, outstandingly safe hospitals. I mean, now nobody's perfectly safe. There's no hospital in this country that's perfectly safe, but ones that have shown continuous excellence. The CEO will say, well, you know, I don't know. I worry about this, I feel like we don't do enough with that or we don't have people trained the way they should be and something else, or our hand hygiene. And I still wonder if people are truly washing their hands, and I want it monitored. They always have something else that they think needs to be done. They're never satisfied. They're always worried about safety, they're always worried about the patients. And it strikes me every time because I don't always see that with hospitals I visit that aren't doing so well sometimes. That will be a long story from CEO of how all the great things they're doing, which is important here, by the way. I do respect and like to hear that, but it also it is very different from other kinds of hospitals where they're that just are never satisfied that they've got to do better and better and better and better.

Leah Binder:
And that's I think that's needed for safety, because safety is a 24\7 ongoing enterprise, and you got to be worried about the patient 24/7. That's got to be your keeping you up at night in order to maintain safety. You can't just say, oh we got our central line infection down. We got that rate down to zero, pop-open the champagne and we're done. Because if you stop what you were doing to prevent those infections, then the very next day they'll be back, and your patients are at risk. So you can't see it that way. It's not a series of like one-offs. Patient safety is an ongoing way of life in a hospital, and it means that you have to worry, worry, worry about your patients all the time. Are we doing everything we can to make them safe? And when you see that from the top, from the CEO, that's when you recognize an excellent hospital that's really standing out for its performance. And I would say the other thing that I've observed in hospitals that are particularly high performing is a real respect for nursing. Most of what a hospital does is provide nursing care. Those are usually the most numerous of all the professionals working there. And everything that happens when you're a patient, nurses are just 90% of your day is nurses.

Leah Binder:
You depend on nurses, you depend on their expertise enormously. You look to them for their also their concern. And when you're scared in the middle of the night, it's the nurse that you want to talk to, and it's the nurse who has that expertise and education to really help you in the way you need to be helped as a patient. It's just they're very important. And when nursing and nursing perspectives and nursing leadership are respected within a hospital, that's when you feel like the patients are better protected because it is the nurses who are really closest to the patient in an ongoing way, and they're the ones also with that expertise. I saw a really interesting presentation by a collaborative in Michigan that came out of the Michigan Hospital Association, and they actually worked with us to go through Leapfrog data to find highest-performing hospitals. And they found, among many interesting insights, one of the top insights was that where in hospitals that where nursing protocols are respected by everyone, whether it's the chief of surgery or the dietary staff, everybody respects the nursing protocols and adheres to them, that those were the hospitals that were just much at the top of the quality spectrum. So I think that nursing is something to look at.

Molly McCarthy:
Well, I know our listeners are going to love that. The one other thing that I was just thinking about why we were talking and you were mentioning some of the common top-performing health systems with leadership who are unsatisfied and really always worried about their patients. And then to the respect for nurses, one of the things that I saw in the shift, probably around the time Leapfrog started, was just the involvement of patients and their families in terms of asking questions. And I think historically, like I think about, if I take my father to an appointment, he might not grill them as much as I do. But how have you seen, like, the patient engagement change over time to I'm just curious.

Leah Binder:
Significantly, that's a very good point. That has really changed, especially over the past decade. And one of the things you see now are, most hospitals, at least, that I've encountered, have patient and family advisory councils, and some of them have a variety of them throughout. We have many more standards now related to engagement with patients or patient perspectives. We have, for example, on our survey, we have a standard around patient consent and how that should work and engagement of patients when there's a root cause analysis done. Are the patients and families of engaged in that, things like that. And that's really consistent with I think, where a lot of hospitals are going, is really bringing patients into the really the center of how everything is done, which is where they belong, and everything should be about the patient because that's why the patient is there, because the delivery system is delivering care to them. But we haven't thought of them as part of the team. And you're right, that has been a really major trend. And CMS also drove that trend, that was part of their efforts in the Affordable Care Act, that a lot of supports for hospitals in moving and shifting toward having more engagement of patients in their overall operations, and also measuring whether that was working with the H-Caps surveys, which are the patient experience surveys that are CMS requires hospitals publicly to report on their results. That also had an impact, and so I think I think we've definitely seen that shift.

Molly McCarthy:
Yeah. And I think just that curiosity and questioning, I think from patients really as a partner rather than, you know, a threat to what's the institution or the team that's providing the care, I think is really important. Just that mindset shift.

Leah Binder:
Absolutely.

Molly McCarthy:
So you may have noticed that I opened our podcast today with the statement that too often technology has made caregivers' lives harder, not easier. And I've been in tech for a long time, so I feel okay saying that. But from your view, has healthcare technology made patients safer or in any way at greater risk? And this is kind of a two-part question. So I'll let you answer that and then I'll go on to the next part.

Leah Binder:
Yes, and yes. I guess I'd have to say one of the founding principles that Leapfrog, incorporated into that overall overarching transparency mission is that we need hospitals and health systems to adopt technology in a way that improves safety, and we actually want them to adopt the technology. We are very pro technology because that improves our world. We kind of see that in other industries, and we want it to happen in healthcare. And, you know, we know healthcare tends to be behind on technology. I always joke that it's the last place you can sell a fax machine to anyone. And my son, who's 20, he said, mom, they asked me to fax over something to the doctor's office and I said, okay, just do that then. And he said, well, I don't even know what a fax is. He didn't know what it was in his 20. You know, the rest of the world is not using fax machines, but healthcare is. So anyway, we want to use it to the greatest benefit of patients. And we started Leapfrog with one of our founding, we call them Leaps was around computerized prescriber order entry CPOE. So that's the systems that even back in 2000 were available. It was used by about 1% of hospitals, but it was available.

Leah Binder:
They would check orders, medication orders and check against the patient record to make sure that the patient you know wasn't allergic or the variety of other reasons that a medication order could be dangerous to the patient. Those would alert to the physician so that the order would not go through or that the prescriber could order something else. So that was available and very important. And the studies at the time back in 2000 suggested that it will really did reduce medication errors by like 40%. It was very significant improvement, but it really wasn't again, until the Affordable Care Act actually, after that, when the stimulus money after the economic crisis of 2008, we had stimulus money thrown into the economy, and a huge amount of that was used to help hospitals invest in electronic medical records, and with that, CPOE. So then all of a sudden, we saw almost every hospital had CPOE, and we did something else with that. So we realized that it wasn't going to be enough. Just to ask, do you have CPOE? We also want to know, does it actually work to the benefit of your patients? Because you can't assume that it's automatically works when you turn it on. And it turns out we were right about that. We had, um, developers who include David Bates, David Klassen; these are world-renowned experts in patient safety and technology who developed a test that hospitals take as part of their completion of the Leapfrog Hospital Survey every year. They take this test, and we give them a set of dummy orders for a set of dummy patients, and they administer the orders, and then they report back on what happens in their cpoe system when they make these orders. And the all of the orders are almost all of them will would result in harm to the patient, very significant harm in some cases death to the patient like very these are not kind of nuanced orders. These are orders that would definitely harm the patient if they were administered. So they should alert. And there are a few that we throw in there that shouldn't alert, that actually are frivolous problems, that should not alert because you don't want to have too many alerts or you have alert fatigue. And that's also dangerous, right? So we actually test for that. But this for the most part is just really bad or really dangerous orders. And can they are they alerting to them. So the thing that we found is that in about half the time not really. These systems are not alerting properly today.

Leah Binder:
We've seen lots of improvement, but we still don't see most hospitals getting to even like 80% of the orders, they're not getting there. So we're still a problem, and our advice to hospitals has always been and continues to be: You have to double-check and triple-check. It's not enough. Just because you have a CPOE system doesn't mean that's the end of it. It's got to be checked again and checked again and checked again before it actually gets to the patient because we can see that it's not always there and it needs to improve, but it's not always there. So technology yes, it definitely improved. We did see improvement with CPOE and we're seeing it more over time. So it is got to be better then a scribbled prescription on her pad. God knows how that ever worked in a hospital. It's just scary to think about it, you know? But nonetheless, they are not always doing the whole job. And there's lots of things that aren't safe. And if they're not administered correctly, if not watched, if they're not, these systems are not really fine-tuned over time and checked over time. Then they can actually backfire and not be safe at all. So yes, to both of your questions. Yeah.

Molly McCarthy:
And I think that's so important. Just and I actually even use CPOE in 1995 locally I worked at Inova and I remember it coming into play versus the handwritten orders. But it goes to the point where, you know, it's not just the technology. It's really it's important for the nurse, for that care provider, whoever it is could be, you know, perhaps even that person who might be inputting orders. But it's really important to have that critical thinking piece that nurses can utilize in that human aspect of it. You know, that won't ever go away into question, I think is really important. So the second part of my question is moving ahead and thinking about the technologies that are available today. So for example, next-generation solutions like artificial intelligence, and ambient monitoring, I've done a lot of work in the virtual nursing area, but how can they work to ensure that quality and safety can paradoxically improve in an era where there's a lot of ongoing shortages of caregivers, people leaving the profession due to many different reasons and challenges, but using technology to do more with less providers, I guess.

Leah Binder:
Yeah, I I'll step back a little bit from the question because I'm not as I don't live my day-to-day life in a delivery system. I live in front of tons of data looking at how we're doing, but I don't necessarily see it close up. I like to visit hospitals and see it, but I don't always see it right. But what I would say that we're concerned about with AI and just all the advanced technology that we're seeing really rapidly grow in hospitals is that there are many ways to deploy this technology badly and not do it well, or do it in a way that is not helpful to the patient or harmful even to the patient. Now, the example I just used, or how decisions work within CPOE doesn't always work the way people think it will, and can lead to some complacency because you think the system is going to check for that. And if nobody else does, you can, you know, that's a danger. So I think that's the case in, you know, maybe exponentially with AI, we know that AI has makes mistakes, but it looks like it's not making mistakes and it has hallucinations, but you can't tell they're hallucinations unless you dig in. You know, the most famous example are footnotes that they'll give to some research and they make up studies. Just make them up out of thin air. They don't exist. So you got to get someone to double-check their references.

Leah Binder:
So that is directly dangerous to patients. If the AI is giving advice or decision support or whatever support and it's incorrect but looks correct, which it will look correct because it always comes out of AI, it looks really pretty impressive. So that's a danger. And if there's too much reliance and there's not a system set up to double-check it, that's a problem. So that's one worry. And then the other thing that we're excited about, on the other hand, is that it can be used for some really positive things. I mean, it can be used, for example, to automatically check through ongoing patient records as they're happening, as the patient's in the bed, they can check through EHRs and trigger when there appears to be some issue that could lead to a problem. I mean, that's exciting. We think that's that could potentially be a game changer for patient safety. The other thing that we think is exciting is an ability to synthesize a patient record itself quickly. I would imagine that it must be frustrating for all providers when you have a very long EHR, let's say, and you've got to figure out right now what's happening with that patient because you're talking to them and you want to know right now what was their last blood pressure reading or something you want to know now. And definitely AI is going to be able to help with that.

Leah Binder:
So I think that's exciting. I think that it'll help. I think anyway, make the day-to-day experience of a provider better, but it also will help the patient. So I think that's an exciting use of it. So I guess I don't know what that's going to mean in terms of being able to manage around a shortage in the workforce. I'm not sure how that's going to play out. I don't know, I've seen actually, I should say I have seen one example that I didn't like, which was using AI to handle call. And the example they showed me was a pediatrician's office where a mom calls in the middle of the night. A three-year-old swallowed a dime and what do I do? And the call is answered by basically a bot that's AI. And the AI says this two-page explanation of the clinical issues and risks, and something like that misses a key thing, which is make sure that it wasn't actually a battery instead of a dime, because it's a battery. They get under the ER and all that. So I missed a clinical indicator that was important, but I think even more so, it just was as somebody who's been a mom calling in the middle of the night to the pediatrician's office, I don't want to talk to a bot, and I don't want two pages of clinical gibberish. So that was not a good example.

Molly McCarthy:
Now, I think I appreciate that and I appreciate your perspective. I think, you know, different from maybe someone who's in the hospital every day, but really important from that patient safety perspective and just even your, I think, comment around the ongoing analysis retrospective, instead of looking at patient trends, root cause analysis, a week after an event happens, you know, we're sifting through the data as that patient's decline. Maybe their temperature is going up, their heart rate's going up. They're becoming septic and making that alert then and there rather than a significant decline coding etc. and a poor outcome. So appreciate that perspective. I could sit here and talk to you for so much longer, but I want to be mindful of everyone's time and want to wrap up with just one question, one piece of advice. I always like to ask our guests, but so our listeners are primarily Chief Nursing Officers, CNIOs, and respective teams within healthcare systems. And obviously, you bring a really unique perspective, understanding priorities and opportunities across large employers, payers, government, and providers. I guess if you could just share a parting gift of wisdom with our listeners. So what would be your single most important practical piece of advice for them as it relates to their responsibility of being the front line for patient safety?

Leah Binder:
I would say lean into transparency. That works on a political level, but it also works on a personal level. But it isn't human nature, so you have to be deliberate about it. So on a political level, is the one thing that both parties are maybe the one, maybe there's other things. But really, one thing that both parties agree on here in Washington is that we should have more transparency in healthcare. And there's all kinds of ways they define that, but basically they want more transparency. And that's been the movement on both sides of the aisle. And that's where it's going, the transparency is the name of the game. Their employers are also under enormous pressure to make everything they know public about how hospitals and health systems are doing. There are lots of risks if they don't nowadays, so it's really a big deal to them as well. It is also a big deal, though, if you are a clinician or working in a hospital because it is, you want to build trust. And one of the things I think we've we're losing in all segments of our society, unfortunately, but healthcare included, is that personal trust among people.

Leah Binder:
And you want patients to trust you, and patients really do want to trust you. And the best way to build trust is by being as honest and open as possible. And that starts with transparency and lean into it on every way. You're a hospital administrator. The one thing we report to Leapfrog, I mean, I'm going to say that because that's how you're transparent. It's not a doesn't cost you anything. Just do it because it's do anything you can to show that you're not hiding anything, that you're public, even if everything's not perfect, even when you have to tell a patient something that is uncomfortable, telling them, being honest about it will build trust, and trust is what is going to carry the day for all of us. It carries the day for every single one of us. It will get us away from this burnout problem and all the problems we're seeing for people who are frustrated and feeling like they're not fulfilling their life purpose. Transparency is a way past that. It's just uncomfortable and hard. But please do it. It will help.

Molly McCarthy:
Well, thank you. Leah Binder, CEO of Leapfrog. Transparency and trust are key for safety for our patients. Appreciate your time today and look forward to hopefully meeting you in person soon. Thank you.

Leah Binder:
Thank you Molly. It's great to be here.

Intro/Outro:
Thanks for listening to the Smart Care Team Spotlight for best practices in AI and Ambient Intelligence, and ways your organization can help lead the era of smart care teams. Visit us at virtualnursing.com. And for information on the leading smart care facility platform, visit care.ai

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Leah Binder President and CEO of The Leapfrog Group

"When nursing and nursing perspectives and nursing leadership are respected within a hospital, that's when you feel like the patients are better protected because it is the nurses who are really closest to the patient in an ongoing way, and they're the ones also with that expertise." - Leah Binder