Ep 63: Patient, Caregiver, Changemaker

[00:00:18] Ceci Connolly: Welcome back to Her Story. I’m Ceci Connolly, President and CEO of the Alliance of Community Health Plans, one of your very happy co-hosts of the Her Story podcasts and today is a really special, different kind of conversation on her story with our guest and my friend, Stacy Hurt. I want to tell you a tiny bit about stacy and how we got to know each other before we dive into this conversation, if I may because it’s a really neat, unusual pandemic story, believe it or not. Stacy and I first got connected at the start of the pandemic because we have a shared passion around telehealth and in particular patient centered, coordinated, high quality telehealth. And we became co-hosts of a nifty twitter chat, #TeleMedNow. And in that time, most of our relationship was virtual. And finally, a few months back, I was in Pittsburgh speaking at a Magee-Womens conference and I had the chance to finally meet Stacy in person. And so it is really a treat because, often on Her Story, we bring on impressive women with fancy C-suite titles and elected officials, governors, and Senators, and members of Congress. But when I think about female leadership in healthcare, Stacy is one of the very first people that came to my mind because of her amazing voice on behalf of patients and caregivers. And we’re going to get into that today. So Stacy, welcome.

[00:02:03] Stacy Hurt: Thank you Ceci. I’m so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

[00:02:07] Ceci Connolly: Let’s start with a little bit of background Stacy, because I don’t know that you necessarily aspired to be a patient advocate or a caregiver advocate. And yet you shine in those roles and you really have such expertise. Give everyone the backstory on how you became the famous Stacy Hurt of today.

[00:02:36] Stacy Hurt: You’re so sweet. I graduated from Penn State with a business liberal arts degree and my intention was always to go into something in maybe a sales marketing role or human resources. I knew I wanted to work with people. I love people. I wanted to work with people, but in a business setting. I went on to grad school at Pitt and I got my MBA and my Master’s in health administration. And again, it’s aspired to go into hospital administration, health administration, something like that. It ended up that I went into physician practice management, which I loved, and I learned everything about how a physician thinks, and what’s important to a physician and really what drives them in their profession. It was a great job. And I learned everything about a medical practice: billing, coding, revenue cycle management, operations, everything about that. So that was fascinating work. After that, I went into pharmaceutical sales with big pharma. I worked for Merck and I worked for GlaxoSmithKline. And I loved that. I love making relationships with people really deep connections with people, getting to know them on a personal basis. And I got to do that with the staff. I got to do that with the physicians and I loved it. When I was in pharmaceutical sales, I initially aspired to be a manager in pharmaceutical sales. That was the way I wanted to go. I wanted to be on that manager track. But when you were in big pharma and they put you on this manager track, you really have to give up your life to big pharma. I mean, you have to what they say go inside, which means go into the corporate headquarters, do like a three-month stint or whatever in sales training or sales marketing, or whatever. And I said to the manager, I said I don’t want to do that. It’s really important to me. I had endometriosis and I had surgery for that, and I had a very narrow window to have a family. And it just so happened that it coincided with that going inside opportunity. And I said, no, I wanted to have a family. And that was really the first sort of crossroads in my professional career in that I stayed true to what was important to me. And that was having a family. And once you say that, you’re relegated, you’re off the manager track, they sorta like give up on you. You’re done in that sense So I had my first son in 2003. In 2005, we had our second son and our second son was born with a very rare chromosome abnormality in that, today, he’s 16 years old, but he doesn’t walk, talk or care for himself in any way. So he’s basically a 16 year old. He wears a diaper. We need to change his diaper all the time. We have to lift him off the floor. We have two stair lifts in our home that we paid for out of pocket. We have to feed him by mouth. We have to give him medications. He doesn’t sign or gesture or anything. He just, we know what he wants and needs by cries. I was still in pharmaceutical sales at that time. And I took six months off to handle his care. We saw 60 different specialists, stopped counting. It was a nightmare. But I did come back to pharmaceutical sales. I came back part-time job share. And when I came back, we were launching a new product. And the manager said to me, my manager at the time, she said, okay, you’re going to lead the team, for this launch. And I said, I’m part time. Find somebody else. Like I got a ton going on. I don’t…pick somebody else. And she said, Stacy, it’s clear that you’re the leader of this team. And it’s only natural that you would lead the team even part-time. And I was really proud, Ceci, that I led our team to President’s Club the year that I voluntarily exited from the company. So that was a proud leadership moment for me. And it showed that staying true to what was important to me, which is my family and caring for my family, I could still succeed as a leader. So it was a pivotal point in my life. I got things squared away with my son’s care. I mean, in a good fashion, I took a couple of years off. I returned to be the Vice President of Training and Development for a small pharma company in 2011. And I was doing great with that. I loved it. A lot of flexibility. I was flying down to Alabama once a month to train the new reps and everything was going well with that. And then in 2014, I was diagnosed with stage four colorectal cancer and…I worked through it. I kept working at the time and I remember I was in treatment, I was in a treatment week, and I was conducting a webinar for the new reps. I have a port that I had a drug going into my port and I had six drinks around me because my voice goes out. So I had hot tea and water, protein drink, and I had all of these drinks around me as I’m conducting the webinar with poison going into my body, but it was super important to me to maintain my identity as a professional and as a female leader throughout. I didn’t want to be defined as a cancer patient. So all this time that you know, is fighting for my son and advocating for our son, and fighting for equipment, fighting for his nursing services, fighting against insurance companies for what he needed. And then I came into the cancer world and I was in the support groups and everybody was like, how do I get a scan approved? How do I do this? How do I get medication approved? And I spoke up and I said, well, this is how you file an appeal. You say it’s medically necessary. You do a peer to peer appeal. And so I knew from all of my experience professionally working, all of my experience advocating for Emmett and now, fighting cancer, I sort of became this expert in the healthcare space.

[00:08:56] Ceci Connolly: Absolutely an expert.

[00:08:58] Stacy Hurt: Yeah. So that just grew and I volunteered. While I was in treatment for colorectal cancer, I volunteered across like nine different organizations just lending my, how I could help, lending my service to patients. I did very well. I’m now six years cancer-free. Yay. And got to age 50, which I never thought I’d see. And I’m going to see my son graduated high school this year, which I never thought I’d see. I get a little emotional. But through all of that it came to the end of 2019 where I was on social media and I saw HIMSS was looking for. What they call digital influencers. And I knew HIMSS from working in physician practice management and in pharma. And I said to my husband, they need somebody like me. They need somebody who’s been on both sides, who’s worked in the industry, who’s been a caregiver, who’s been a patient and can tie all that together and give it to the world. And I applied, I said, I won’t get it because these people have like `20,000 followers. I think I had 300 at the time. I said, I’ll never get accepted, but I’m going to apply. And I was accepted and that gave me a platform and it started a whole new career for me as a consultant to do exactly what I said: to tie together industry and patients and caregivers, and represent the patient voice in drug development, health tech user experience, patient experience, patient engagement. And I’ve been very fortunate to have these opportunities to represent those patients and caregivers. So that’s the whole story.

[00:10:42] Ceci Connolly: Well, it’s a remarkable journey. And I think so many people, if they had had even just one of those setbacks, might’ve just wanted to curl up in a ball, to be honest with you. I am curious that journey, and did you have anyone who was a mentor of some sorts? I mean, it’s so unconventional, I imagine it was probably even hard for you to find others to emulate or get advice from.

[00:11:14] Stacy Hurt: Really in the new work that I’m doing, the mentors, I think about, through all of that, I was finding myself and finding my voice, and continually questioning myself, like, is this the right thing to do? Ceci, as you know, you have to say to yourself, do I conform and do I do what they’re asking me to do and telling me to do, or do I trust my gut and go with what’s important to me. So when I became this HIMSS digital influencer, I really questioned myself. Like I’m out there expressing this authentic point of view. And is that going to be questioned by C-suite executives, by directors and managers? And do they think this is a real thing? So do I keep speaking this way or is this disrespectful? And the people that told me to keep going, who I can’t thank enough was Rasu Shreshtha, Jamey Edwards, Gil Bashe, Gaydon Air, Lygeia Ricciardi. And I’m missing people. Michael Rucker. But these are the people that said, keep going, keep speaking, keep talking. We need to hear your voice. You’re right on with everything that you’re saying, where the gaps are, where the needs are, what we need to be looking at. And my husband has been the biggest mentor to me, Drew Hurt, because he’s the one who really championed me and said, Stacy, you’re giving a perspective that 99% of other people don’t have. And it’s a much needed perspective and it’s a different lens. So yeah.

[00:13:07] Ceci Connolly: Frequently on this podcast, we’re also interested, it is Her Story and it’s about female leadership in healthcare. And so I’m curious in your experience, have there been times when you felt that being a woman was a particular disadvantage or challenge or maybe an asset? How, if and in any way, has your gender affected your trajectory?

[00:13:35] Stacy Hurt: Going back to big pharma., It was a boys club. It was, I’m just going to tell it like it is, it was a boys club. And like I said, it was very difficult for me to stay true to what was important to me and I suffered for it. Like I said, I wanted to be on that manager track and I was taken right off because I wanted my family to be first. My family is always first in everything that I do. It’s the most important thing to me. Like I said, I had endometriosis. I wasn’t supposed to have a family. So you better believe that it is going to be my top priority always and that anything career-wise will come second to my family. I always had to fight in big pharma for what was important to me. I remember when I was in my job as VP of Training and Development, this was a good story. So it was a privately held company, was a family owned company and one of our managers, he had come from Pfizer and he was, I think, a regional director for Pfizer, and now was working for us. And he had like a side hustle business and he used our company email list to promote his business. And he said these emails about his side hustle using our email list. And I’ve always led with integrity. That’s very important to me. And ethics are very important to me. And I felt in my gut, this was wrong. I knew this was wrong. So I made the decision to go to our CEO, our president, and I said, hey, so and so is using our list to send out. I said, I don’t think that’s right. And then the president told him to stop doing that. And I was in a meeting with the manager who used the list and he said, right to me, he said, somebody told Henry that I use the list to promote my business. And I said, no, not somebody, John. Me. I did. I said that was wrong. You shouldn’t have done that. And it was a tough moment for me to stand up to this man who was this big wig with Pfizer. And I sort of was coming in at a lesser role. But to tell him that what he did wasn’t right. And I was really proud of myself for doing that, and again, trusting my gut instinct to know right from wrong. And to call him out on it and to hold him accountable for it. I mean, it was a really vindicating moment for me.

So

[00:16:15] Ceci Connolly: So one of my favorite questions that we like to ask on the Her Story podcast is, do you view yourself as an accidental or an intentional leader?

[00:16:28] Stacy Hurt: I would say I have evolved from an accidental leader to an intentional leader. So when we go back and we look at that story about when I was asked to be the leader of the launch team, I did not want that role at all. I didn’t want it And I didn’t see myself as a leader. It was really surprising to me that the manager said, Stacy, everybody thinks you’re a leader. And I never saw myself that way. I really didn’t. I was so busy caring for my son and navigating all of his needs that leadership was the last thing on my mind. So I would say then I was an accidental leader. But then in the work that I’m doing now, I’ve definitely emerged into an intentional leader. And I do see the role that I play. And I do understand the impact of my work on others. And it’s so important to me to be speaking up for patients and caregivers, patients who are too sick or too ill to speak for themselves, or don’t know how to speak medical language in that manner, that I can speak for them. Or caregivers who are invisible, who don’t feel like they matter in the process. So I know that I’m a leader for them and I take that super seriously. So, I would say it was definitely an evolution from accidental to intentional. And now that I am a leader for so many people, they lift me up and they energize me and inspire me to keep telling their stories. And I’m not stopping We’re only going up from here.

[00:18:12] Ceci Connolly: And it strikes me that one of the terrific tools in your toolbox is the use of digital technology and the modern platforms. And you mentioned that HIMSS story and you didn’t have many followers at all. So let’s tell everybody how many Twitter followers you have and your handle. Maybe we’ll get some more today.

[00:18:34] Stacy Hurt: Okay, that’d be great if you’d like to follow me on it, stacy_hurt on Twitter and I don’t know, 5,000 and some, I don’t know. I’m just, I grind for every single follower, so I appreciate every single follower and I hope that I can give them value as they follow me. So…

[00:18:51] Ceci Connolly: I think so. And please folks follow the two of us on Twitter. We really like to engage in dialogue there with people. So let’s talk a little bit about how you use that tool in particular to now be an intentional leader in healthcare.

[00:19:08] Stacy Hurt: Well, I think what’s important, as I said, some of these aspects and characteristics that have formed my new career as a patient engagement consultant are authenticity, sincerity, transparency, and trust. So I always say, when people meet me at a conference, which we haven’t done much the past two years, but I always say, and you met me in person, I am that person that you see on Twitter. I am exactly that person, I don’t pretend to be anything. I’m not here to be anything. And back to the purpose of Her Story, I went to a conference recently last fall, and there were women walking around who were C-suite executives and vice presidents. And the thing is, I could have been one of them if my life wasn’t the way that it was. But the nice thing is that, by virtue of the work that I’ve done, that I can be among them. And a powerful tool which lets me into that community is social media and what I represent. And so to your question, what’s so important about Twitter and, pick your, LinkedIn, Facebook, et cetera, is that they build community and that they enable people who are challenged by disease or disability or caregiving for a family member that we can all still be part of a community that’s talking about those relevant issues that are shaping healthcare. And that something like Twitter really makes a level playing field that I can access prominent physicians like Andrew Watson, and Rasu Shreshtha, and John White to be, engaging with them person to person, like we’re talking in the same room that we can have these conversations on Twitter. And that’s what I love about it, the access, the accessibility and that previously, I would have only seen them at a conference that I can’t go to because I have nobody to care for my son, but that I can be with them virtually. And so I’ve made tons of relationships. I kid my friends, close friends that I have here at home, I say, I don’t really have a lot of real friends, but I have a ton of virtual friends that are super important to me. And caregiving is very isolating and very alienating. And so my virtual community is so important to me. It’s such an important part of my life. And to know that I can contribute my expertise and my experience and my knowledge, like I said, to shaping the future of healthcare technologies, it’s super important to me.

[00:22:01] Ceci Connolly: You know though, as one of your followers, I see that you’re so active and I think you ticked off so many of those incredible characteristics in terms of integrity, and transparency, and authenticity. But there had to be times when it is exhausting to kind of have so much of you out there. And I think that that is a challenge for leaders and women leaders, sort of this sense of, you’re on and everyone’s kind of looking to you to see what you’re going to say and how you’re going to react and behave. And how do you recharge or how do you keep that up?

[00:22:43] Stacy Hurt: I definitely have boundaries and that’s something that’s an area of improvement for Stacy in 2022, is boundaries. It’s really tough for me because I’m so energized by engaging. I love being on Twitter and I love, people pride me on my responsiveness and I’m like, but I love that. I get great satisfaction from that. But, I do try to put my phone down and step away. How do I recharge? I try to get a massage every once and again. It’s tough during COVID because I am immunosuppressed. My son is immunosuppressed and I have to be super cautious and careful, but I enjoy a good massage. Everybody knows I enjoy a good glass of wine.

[00:23:29] Ceci Connolly: Here here.

[00:23:31] Stacy Hurt: Yes cheers. A good cup of coffee. But Ceci, I think for me, it’s really important to live in that moment. And when I do sit down on the couch, feel the couch beneath me and just be in that present moment because somebody like me, even non-COVID, non pandemic, I can’t get up and travel to Europe. I can’t go to Hawaii because of Emmett. I mean, Emmett can’t travel to those places. That’s just not in the cards for him. And it’s not like my husband and I can get away. We have nobody to watch our son. So, I use meditation a lot. I do yoga. I exercise. And like I said, I try to be present in my moment of relaxation, even if that’s just sitting down on the couch for a minute and putting my phone down and taking deep breaths. Those are the ways that I recharge, really simple.

[00:24:27] Ceci Connolly: Yeah. And so this incredible journey that you’re still on, and you talked about your evolution into this leadership role lessons learned that you might offer?

[00:24:41] Stacy Hurt: Number one, trust your gut. Trust your gut. I mean, I guess I should qualify that if saying, if you have a good gut instinct. I’m really blessed and fortunate. We’re all products of our upbringing, right? And I was very blessed and fortunate to have two wonderful parents and a stable home environment that set me up for success. I’m very lucky in that way. As you and I talked so much about social determinants of health, our underserved communities, and the challenges of patients and caregivers that aren’t set up in that way. And how do we serve those people? So I was very fortunate in that way. My father told me you can do anything you set your mind to. And in second grade at Catholic school, I stood up and the pastor asked everybody what they wanted to be when they grew up. And I said, I want to be the first woman president of the United States. And he and the teacher sent me to the corner for the rest of the day for being smart. And I stood in the corner all day and cried. And I’ll never forget. It was the most important moment of my life apart from getting married and my son’s diagnosis and my diagnosis. I’ll never forget that. And that’s what fueled me to always stand up for what was right and to always stick to my guns and to prove people wrong. And I’ve made a life out of proving people wrong. And like I said, it’s not stopping anytime soon. I just feel like there’s so much work to be done on behalf of those who need heard and need seen and need represented.

[00:26:29] Ceci Connolly: Yeah, boy what an incredible story of determination too, and not being told that you can’t achieve something. Obviously you’ve got a lot of exciting opportunities ahead. But for many of our listeners, what advice would you offer in particular to women in healthcare, in the health field, maybe unconventional positions such as yourself or emerging roles in healthcare. Let’s put it that way. Let’s hope that this is going to become a more conventional path for women in healthcare. But what kind of tips or advice would you offer?

[00:27:14] Stacy Hurt: I would say number one, and I keep things very simple. Number one is finding a problem to solve. So identifying a problem and I live by a personal mantra: don’t identify a problem without at least one potential solution. So if you identify a need or identify an area of improvement, come to the table with at least one possible solution and how you can be part of that solution. I’m a really big person on accountability and responsibility. I’m never going to ask somebody to do something I wouldn’t do myself. That’s for sure. Or that I have done myself. And so if I have done it, then I’m going to then, you’re such a great mentor to me as well. I should’ve put you on that list, but if you’ve done it, show somebody else how to do it and share with them your experience. So that’s number one, is solving a problem. Number two of course goes hand in hand with that in demonstrating value. So, if you’re going to put yourself forward for a position or something, show at least three ways. I’m a big person of three things.

[00:28:24] Ceci Connolly: Power of threes,

[00:28:25] Stacy Hurt: Power of three. Three ways that you can add value to that situation through skill sets or qualities that you uniquely offer. We still got to follow the money. I mean, it comes down to that. So how am I going to add value and help you make money through what I’m going to provide for you? So those are sort of like the nuts and bolts. And then in the spirit of which, the third thing would be to stand up for yourself and just not be afraid to speak up for yourself/ if you feel something’s wrong, it probably is. And we’ve talked lot about professional, but I’ve had to make a lot of treatment decisions. I’ve had to stand up for my son and go against the system for my son and really go out on a ledge for him for what I thought was right. I was treated here in Pittsburgh and I had to disagree with the Chairman of Hillman Cancer Center for a treatment that he wanted to put me on. But he based it on data and I based it on what was right for me in my life and what I could handle. It turns out we both ended up being right. I just think that it’s so important for women to stand up for ourselves. I really do. And no matter what situation that is. And just because it’s never been done before, doesn’t mean it can’t be done. And again, going back to my previous two, show them ways it can be done. Set it up for people in a way they can’t say no. Show them the way. Accountability, responsibility, transparency, and trust. For sure.

[00:30:10] Ceci Connolly: Well, we have packed a lot into this conversation here today. And again, cancer survivor, incredible caregiver, digital influencer, accomplished executive in healthcare, now sort of charting this incredibly exciting new path around patient advocacy and engagement, which is really so important in healthcare today. I just want to say a big thank you to Stacy Hurt for this conversation and all that you do.

[00:30:43] Stacy Hurt: Ceci, thank you so much. And thank you for championing my work always. I treasure our friendship.