So You Want To Be a Healthcare Executive? Dr. Natasha Lewry-Beauvais, CEO & Managing Physician – Northern Virginia Family & Associates

On this episode of So You Want To Be A Healthcare Executive?, Kenneth Rates chats with special guest Dr. Natasha Beauvais about the benefits of concierge medicine and the transformative power of adult cognitive science in the workplace. Dr. Beauvais explores how she has shifted her practice culture through a focus on cognitive development for herself and her staff, allowing the entire organization to grow. She also discusses her hopes for a more fulfilling, empowered workplace culture in healthcare.

Event Highlights:

• “[My interviewer] looked at me and said, ‘So what you need is…’ The idea that this employer would be looking at me—a tiny employee in a very big system—and thinking about what I needed just knocked my socks off. So when I’m thinking about hiring people now, whether that’s a nurse or a person who works in billing or a physician, we’re really trying to learn what people need to be successful.”
• “Education by itself does not necessarily lend itself toward a higher level of complexity. I may have been through medical school and learned how to very adeptly adjust someone’s blood pressure with medications I’m using, but that may not mean I have a very complex level of understanding about how I make decisions. What was beautiful about this adult cognitive development process was that people work better together when we continue to develop.”
• “People are looking for job satisfaction and the satisfaction they find from becoming better. This way of working really provides a ladder towards improvement—self-improvement, process improvement, interactive improvement—to find a deeper level of satisfaction in our jobs. What I hope and expect is that people are going to be attracted to this way of working because it in and of itself is a type of benefit. It’s a very lasting, personally motivating, and personally gratifying benefit.”
• “I went into the cognitive development pilot program thinking I was going to learn how to become a better communicator. And what I left with was a bigger insight from my peers about really understanding what may separate me from my audience. We talked about race, we talked about differences in education, we talked about different ways that we had been raised and how that changed our orientation. What was really surprising was the types of conversations that came out of it from a very quiet form of safety that was created.”
• “People are really here because they love caring for others. So unleashing their abilities to create a better type of outreach or clinical follow-up gives people a huge amount of satisfaction. It gives them a huge amount of autonomy in reaching out and creating better care for people.”
• “It’s hard for anyone in any environment to be really truly satisfied with the work that they do. And I think in the healthcare crisis that’s currently happening. Twenty percent of nurses and physicians and respiratory therapists and techs would like to leave healthcare because it’s been so stressful in the last two years. We could create a better way of doing things. We could work on creating a system that is healthier for all the people that work in it and therefore much more sustainable.”
• “When we provide a work environment where people feel valued and where people are asked to push themselves into something they didn’t realize they could do before they walked in the door, then we’re creating something that is very self-sustaining.”
• “The growth itself is not really the thing I’m the most driven by. It’s creating a process that is really doing what all doctors and all healthcare providers want to do: they want to provide good care, they want to have empowered staff. What I really hope is that we begin to do things in a different way, and we begin to teach that to others to help the healthcare system become a healthier overall system.”
• “We can really learn something new and exciting at every age. And by availing ourselves of that, we maintain some excitement and energy in our lives, our work, and our approach to the world. And that’s a wonderful way to live.”