So we're at the Eastern Market on a beautiful day, right?
I couldn't have picked a nicer one. Gosh, we got so lucky.
And we've got great memories of coming here as a kid.
I do. I do.
We moved to the Detroit area in 1975
and my family would come down to the Eastern market.
Oftentimes Saturdays we would come early with either,
come on flower Day or we come on regular days.
And I just remember the energy.
It was just a great experience for my family.
And it's been wonderful over the years to bring my kids here.
We love to go to the farmers market
because we love to see what they're growing Local.
Yeah, you're part of the community.
And so I think it's changed.
Our relationship with the market has changed because the types of things
that we buy and purchase versus going to the funnel cake stand
we're doing right now as an adult, it's we buy these beautiful vegetables
and take them home and sort of create something new and different with them.
So that's been a wonderful experience for us.
There's still a place for funnel cake sometimes, I think, right? Yes.
Let's keep walking.
Dr. Chu You really have an interesting background
that that led you to where you are today.
You're a physician and also one of our leaders.
Yeah, well, I always wanted to be a physician.
And coming out of high school, I was fortunate to get into a
pre-med integrated medical program at the University of Michigan.
And as a part of that, your first couple of years, it really blended
liberal arts, plus your medical school experience
and during that time, I had an opportunity really early on to see patients
being taken care of in primary care settings in rural Michigan.
And so during that time, I think I really developed a love
for the doctor patient relationship and wanting to interact
with people on a real individual relational level.
It just evolved that I decided to go into obstetrics and gynecology
and coming out of residency
I decided to start a private practice with one other person.
So we opened an office in Northern Oakland
County and also in Macomb County and delivered babies.
So I deliver babies for about 16 years.
Not too far from actually where I grew up.
So I ended up delivering friends of mine from high school and people that I knew.
And through that journey I also discovered that
I was really interested in public policy and women's health.
And so I got very involved in organized medicine and advocacy around
health policy,
and that led me down a path towards more leadership opportunities
of leadership at the hospital that I was at, leadership in the county
and the state medical society, and now with the American Medical Association.
And that I think Journey also showed me what the impact could be
of being a physician leader in a health care system.
And when a job opened up at Henry Ford,
I started interviewing for a few positions at Henry Ford
and ended up in my first leadership role at Henry Ford at West Bloomfield Hospital.
And that has been a great experience for me.
And then four years ago, I had the opportunity to come work at
at the corporate level.
And and I think really drive a bigger impact throughout the health system.
I love gardening.
So for me, part of why I love the farmer's market, too, is
I love getting my hands dirty.
And so to actually see produce and have the end product,
even though sometimes my tomatoes look terrible or my face looks really bad.
Yeah, I can come here and I can get inspired
by what I might plant next season, but that's part of that letting go, right?
Just enjoying the experience and, you know, not being too worried about what
the outcome is, about the journey.
I can't even imagine the amount of lessons you've learned along the way from,
you know, growing up to medical school to getting your business degree
to working with patients and now in more of a administrative setting.
What are some of the
lessons that you've learned along the way that have really stuck with you?
I would say through the pandemic, one thing
that really resonated with me was the importance of trust
and the importance of maintaining that trust throughout a crisis
so that people would follow also, so that people would have some reassurance.
And I don't think I fully appreciated the connection between
trust and communication, a world that you live in
and that a lot of us probably don't think about nearly as much.
The importance of how without an effective strategy around
communication, trust can quickly erode, or the way that we communicate to
people can also have them lose confidence and lose trust in our organizations.
If you're not good at storytelling, if you're not good at communicating
to talk to the organization
or a broader audience in a way that resonates with them,
that's one thing I've definitely learned over time that communication is really key
and that really drives trust and trust in the community.
I want to ask you a question of,
you know, you've been with Henry Ford now for how many years?
Eight years.
Is there anything that surprised you about the organization
or the people that you work with?
I think I've been pleasantly surprised that there's such a consistency
towards the mission with every team member that I meet,
the people that I've met from environmental service
to medical systems to nurses, to doctors,
everybody is really consistent
about wanting to show up and do the best that they can do.
And that's a really important thing for me.
That's wonderful.
Yeah, you have a really unique
perspective and I'm interested where you see the future of health care going.
I think the biggest thing is having
hyper focus on what an individual person wants.
And in health care we are good at
probably delivering services that are generalizable to people.
That's our emergency departments, our hospitals.
The way that we're structured
historically has been trying to deliver volumes of services
that are not highly specialized in terms of what the individual needs.
So I don't mean specialized services
like transplant services, I mean specialized services for what
that that particular persona of that individual needs.
So I think health care, like every other industry, right?
You go on Amazon, it has cultivated exactly what I need or want.
I go to my Netflix and it tells me exactly what I want.
We're still not great at doing that with health care.
We have such variability
in what our patients individually need from a 22 year old
who's completely healthy to a 92 year old who's got a ton of other health issues.
So there's a tremendous amount of variety and variability,
notwithstanding race and ethnicity and location and zip code.
That's where we're heading to get there is hard because we have
a lot of things that we need to consider take into consideration,
whether they're regulatory or whether they're clinical practice, because we know
that clinical practice does better when there's standards, and standards
sometimes means that there's less ability for us to be flexible.
So I think that balance between high reliability and standards and flexibility
are the challenge that we have in terms of the future of health care.
I think everybody likes to hear that, right?
We want to feel like we matter and that our journey is unique and important
and it is.
And for us to do that in a way that delivers exceptional care
for every single person in exactly what they need.
That's the challenge that we have, but that's what we have to do.
Okay, that makes sense.
What are you most proud of at Henry Ford Health?
You know, I think the organization because it's very diverse.
I feel like my voice matters.
I feel like the voices of the other leaders that I'm with
are really rich in terms of their experience.
And I think that's important.
I also really love the fact that Henry Ford, that we deeply involved
in the community.
So I'm really proud about what we did with COVID.
We really showed up.
We really partnered with the community, whether it was mobile vans that are doing
vaccinations or doing what we did at Ford Field to really service the area.
I was also really,
really proud of how we thought about the diversity of the population,
and we tried to help people with their vaccine hesitancy.
We had a lot of educational sessions and webinars
knowing that we needed to meet again our patients where they were at in
terms of their fear around things
like the vaccine or their fear around what was happening with COVID.
So I'm really proud of how this organization that was one example,
but has consistently partnered with the community in multiple ways.
And that's really why I came to Henry Ford.
That's a great answer.
Think about that young woman who was growing up in Rochester
who knew she wanted to be a physician but probably couldn't have predicted.
Right. The rest of of what her life would be.
What would
you say to two women in our organization in terms
of being the best you can be or making the best of the situation you're in?
Is there any advice you would give?
It makes me think of so as a OBGYN I spend a lot of time seeing a postpartum
mom who's completely stressed out, who's exhausted,
who brings in their child and then hasn't slept at all for days.
So some of the advice that I'll often give to them is, are you asking for help?
They'll say, Oh, yeah, I asked my husband for help to change the diapers.
And I'll say, Well, tell me about that.
And they'll say, Well, I'll have my husband change the diaper.
But then he doesn't do it right.
And the diapers on the wrong way and there's some leakage.
So then I'm like, I'll just do the diaper myself.
I said, Well, there's your problem is that if you don't like the way your husband's
doing the diaper, you can't complain about the fact that you're tired.
So I think one of the advice that I would give to women, again,
probably going back to the perfect thing, is you really should always ask for help.
The other thing is when people try to help you,
you can't criticize the way that they're helping you
because they're trying to help you.
And so I think for a lot of women, some of that is just giving up
the responsibility, but also giving up the autonomy
of having everything done exactly the way they want it done,
and accepting the fact that somebody is trying to help you.
That's I mean, you're like speaking to my soul right now.
I think I need to take some of this advice.
Dr. Betty Chu, our senior vice president, our assistant chief clinical officer,
and our chief quality officer,
thank you so much for your time and thanks for the advice.
Thank you.
The usual things that fall in the bucket of quality.
So defining strategy for quality for the organization
was real because it was like
if you were to open your mouth, it would have gone in your mouth.
Look what I saw it like barreling towards me.
It was like my chin.