The health industry can collaborate with academia toward a more equitable healthcare system.
In this episode of Bite the Orange, Geoffrey Roche, Senior Vice President for the National Health Care Practice and Workforce Partnerships at Core Education and host of the EdUp HealthUp Podcast, talks about the intersection of healthcare, higher education, and workforce development with strategic partnerships and thorough conversations with industry leaders. In his role at Core Education, Geoffrey partners with healthcare systems and organizations to solve their workforce issues, focusing on DEI and the conversations around the future of work and education. Workforce development impacts every facet of an organization, and Geoffrey believes that building a culture of creativity and belonging through a human-centered approach to care delivery can support equity throughout the system. He also discusses how changing the status quo of the higher education model can improve the healthcare workforce with innovative and entrepreneurial tools.
Tune in to learn more about how partnership, collaboration, and teamwork with academia and between healthcare organizations can change the system as a whole!
FULL EPISODE
BTO_Geoffrey Roche: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
BTO_Geoffrey Roche: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Welcome to Bite the Orange. Through our conversations, we create a roadmap for the future of health with the most impactful leaders in the space. This is your host, Dr. Manny Fombu. Let's make the future of healthcare a reality together.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another episode of Bite the Orange, and today we have a very special guest with a very unique background, and if you've never heard of him, I'm sure you will hear a lot about him today. He has a podcast, he's an advocate in this particular space, and I'll tell you, I'm going to use a very unique story, a very unique background, and I'm very excited, looking forward to welcoming Geoffrey Roche to Bite the Orange today. Welcome, Geoffrey.
Geoffrey Roche:
Manny, thank you for having me.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Geoffrey, without starting up, I don't want to use a title to define you because I'm sure you have a very interesting background, right? So I intentionally did not say Geoffrey Roche from blah blah, blah, so that was intentional. So tell us about yourself, for those that don't know you, the who is Geoffrey Roche, apart from the fact that you are a son of a nurse.
Geoffrey Roche:
That is true. I am a son of a nurse and obviously, not only very proud of my mother, but also very proud of all the wonderful nurses across the globe who, as you provide wonderful care, and obviously, thank you for your work too, as a cardiothoracic surgeon. I actually, so to define who I am, I'm an individual that was fortunate to start my career after college in a healthcare system, actually in the Poconos. Many people know actually, it was Pocono Health System, it's now part of Lehigh Valley Health Network. I served there for just under a decade in a leadership role and had a director-level role and served as a senior advisor to our president and CEO and led everything from business development, public affairs, community health, as well as all of our work with physicians, ironically. And it was really blessed to be in a community healthcare system, learned a lot about innovation, I learned a lot about transformation, and most importantly, learned how you have to read and learn the needs of your community in order to best serve them from a healthcare perspective, and so it did a lot of work around that. Following that experience actually came into academia, always have had a love of academia, but believed strongly that through work I was doing in the region, that I felt we need to do more to bring academia and healthcare together. When you think of the two industries, there's a lot of similarities, but two areas where there are two similar, often is, we move too slow, we don't always take risks, we don't always embrace innovation and transformation, and so a lot of my work coming into academia was really around that. How do you form strategic partnerships? How do you embrace change? How do you bring together an ecosystem that can help solve some of our biggest challenges? And I've been fortunate to work in both spaces and happy to be here with you for this conversation as well.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Which is also quite interested. I know you currently serve as Senior Vice President for the National Health Care Practice and Workforce Partnerships at Core Education. Can you tell us about that organization, please?
Geoffrey Roche:
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, Core is an, essentially, an operating partner to a number of colleges and universities across the country, and in our role as an operating partner, we support colleges and universities on everything from healthcare program strategy to really developing workforce solutions by region, within the regions that they serve. And a lot of my work, as you can imagine, is really around how do you partner with healthcare systems? How do you partner with healthcare organizations to help solve their biggest issues from a workforce perspective? Recruitment, retention, upskilling, career mobility, doing it with an eye on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, and so a lot of my work is spent on that, as well as really engaging at the national level and really global level around the conversations with future of work, the future of education. Because we know that we're probably one of the most interesting times in healthcare as well as higher education, and the reality of it is that we haven't necessarily embraced the things that we should, and some of that is innovation, some of that's transformation, but a lot of that is actually creating a sense of belonging for the workforce and really thrilled to be able to do that work across the country.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Which is quite interesting. I've been working around healthcare innovation for quite some time, and one of the biggest challenges has been, how do you partner with healthcare organizations? I am particularly interested in your background working in community health systems. So what is your ideal target person? Who do you coordinate with at the healthcare system level, right? Because that's a challenge that everyone has. If you're trying to sell a product to a hospital, you probably have a person that you're talking to the hospital. So in this particular role that you have, we look at education, we look at our future of work, who is that key person in the health system that you work with?
Geoffrey Roche:
So normally you would automatically think it would be your chief human resources officer and folks like that, but the reality of it is that there's so much occurring in this space that healthcare systems have also realized that workforce development is something that impacts every facet of the organization. And we all know that workforce impacts quality, workforce impacts patient safety, workforce impacts every aspect of a healthcare system. And so today you're seeing more and more of the CEO be engaged, you're seeing the chief strategy officers be engaged, you're seeing the foundation leaders be engaged because they're trying to think innovatively, which is a good thing, about how you fund pipelines and pathways, and it's more involved than ever, and actually, you've also started to see even the chief diversity officers really lean in from the perspective of, how do we make sure that as we really develop the future workforce, we do it with diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging at the forefront, because we know we've got to transform our workforce with that in mind.
Emmanuel Fombu:
And that, I think, plays a massive role on how we engage with patients, right? I think having a diverse workforce ... to how when you have your patients engage with the health system, what those outcomes relate to, and how the outcomes are in general. So what are some of the challenges that you have encountered working with health systems, especially on a community level or the rural level?
Geoffrey Roche:
Yeah, it was very interesting, particularly when I served in my role at Pocono Health System and now Lehigh Valley Hospital, Pocono, because we were the type of region that had a lot of rural aspects. In fact, we were classified by the centers of Medicare and Medicaid as a rural community for majority of my tenure there, and then we actually moved into what was considered a modern, urbanized area. Interesting terms, but government terms by the lease. But what was interesting, though, for people that have been to the Poconos is there's not a lot of urban aspects about the Poconos, it's without question a resort community, a lot more rural aspects to it than people would imagine. But I'll tell you, one of the things I was proud of during my time there is we had a very strong ambulatory care strategy, and one of the things we did was we looked across the region and thought of almost in that 30-30-30 model where you want to have access to care within 30 minutes or less wherever you live. And so we were fortunate to really think strategically and with community input, to build larger community health centers throughout the community in a way that would support them where they live and not the expectation that they would have to necessarily come to the hospital. And so that work was intentional, was very much focused around primary care, very much focused around bringing specialists to that medical home type of setting. And that's a lot of the work that I've seen across Pennsylvania as well. I've been fortunate throughout my healthcare career and even now in the work that I do to also lean very heavily in into the issues of health equity. And a lot of that work started actually when I was at Pocono Health System, and the reason was, is we had a lot of disparities in our community in ways that people didn't realize. And so when we peel that onion back, it became an, important and intentional that we had to do more work around that. And so I was fortunate to lead and help really transform a care model around that served our homeless population, that had better care intervention for individuals in our community that were from the Latino population, particularly thinking about how did you leverage primary care? I was fortunate to work on a model where we integrated behavioral health and primary care very early on as compared to a lot of other healthcare systems, and I'm very fond of the work that we collectively did there to really address what were our biggest community health needs.
Emmanuel Fombu:
I think you have a particularly unique view, especially on the health system side and academia side, right, pretty curious. Instead of talking up about this, one of individual projects that you did, I'm sure you have a vision, what healthcare in an ideal setting from your, from where you sit, what would that look like? And so just give us like the story of what in the ideal world with diversity, inclusion, included you have, your chief learning officers, your chief nursing officers, and everyone engaged in the vision that you have, are you trying to accomplish, what does that world look like in 2030?
Geoffrey Roche:
Yeah, it's a really loaded question, but what I'll say, because it's a really important one, is I attended a conference a couple of months ago in Denver, Colorado, and it was a real eye-opener for me, and the whole idea of the conference was focused on the future of work, but in the lens of the culture of creativity and the culture of belonging. And what was important about it was that at the core of this work, we as a society haven't really thought about, and particularly in healthcare, despite the fact that healthcare is about supporting other humans and taking care of patients and taking care of one another, we haven't necessarily done it with a human-centered approach in every aspect and fabric of healthcare. And when we realize the creativity that so many of our healthcare professionals bring, from our doctors to our nurses, to our medical assistants, to our central sterile technicians, to our housekeeping, environmental services professionals, etc, if we truly create a sense of belonging where an individual feels they can be who they are without prejudice or judgment or whatever the case may be, and they feel that there's career mobility, they feel that there's mentorship, we can really change the future of work. It's a lot of work to do, you can't just say, I have a chief diversity officer, and expect that to change the trajectory of the organization. You've got to literally weave that work and integrate that work into every fabric of the organization. We have to be honest about the fact that so much of a lot of healthcare was actually built at a time that was very much focused just on supporting white patients, white male patients. We have to be honest about that. I know people critique that, but it's the sheer fact and reality. And so when we think about that, we've got to think of a healthcare system that is truly supporting the equity and equitable needs across every population. And we also have to think about it from the workforce perspective, and I'm confident if we do, we can really change it, and we can really embrace it. And if we would do that and really allow creativity to play a role, and think of the arts, think of arts and culture, if we can bring more of that into healthcare, I think we would have a much more human-focused, human-centered approach that would be very mindful of individuals, but also mindful of how we can really collaborate and work together towards a more equitable healthcare system.
Emmanuel Fombu:
And I really like that approach, I do agree. I think this talks on the higher education kind of level, right? If you educate people from those diverse communities to understand about what the future of healthcare holds and what role they could play in that workforce, I think you get more people engaged in the system. I think the more people you have engaged in the system, the more people are aware of what's happening, right? Because not only working there, we go back to their communities, they could actually share what they've learned about what's happening, and they could encourage more people to come in. So it makes a diverse workforce, which I think will lead to better outcomes and get more people engaged in the health system overall. With that being said, I know you're very passionate about this and you recently also launched a podcast called, I believe it's called EdUp Health. So tell us what led to you actually leading to that podcast and what you're driving there? Because I'm a big supporter of that, clearly, I have a podcast, you have one as well, so it makes, it takes some time, commitment, and clearly some passion and vision to make something happen. So tell us about your podcast.
Geoffrey Roche:
Yeah, yeah. Obviously, the EdUp Network had a long-standing, very successful, in fact, the creators just recently launched, or actually just launched their book that they have actually used basically throughout all their interviews of college presidents and university presidents, used the insights and wrote a book. And Joe Sallustio and Elvin Freytes have done a phenomenal job with the EdUp Network. And in the work that I've done with them, I've actually served as a guest co-host on their podcast a number of times, and they had encouraged me to really think about the opportunity to do one on my own. And ... enough, as I started to really think about it, I noticed that there weren't a lot of podcasts, if any, frankly, that were really delving into the intersection and the ecosystem of healthcare, higher education, and workforce development. And I really had this idea that hopefully through viewing it from an ecosystem and an intersectionality perspective, we could really engage a diverse set of leaders and voices that could really shed some light on things that we should be thinking about and the culture of work and the future of work. In the future of education, the reality of it is that if all of the ecosystem would work more closely together and would work better, we could actually achieve some solutions, but the reality of it is that oftentimes we're still working in these silos. And so the idea was if we brought it together, would we see much more results and much more success?
Emmanuel Fombu:
And just to add to that piece, I think is very important work, and just to add, if anyone's listening and you are an executive for a startup company or wherever you are, remember, people go to higher education to graduate, to get jobs, right? Is it necessary to go to health systems, right? So you definitely reach out to Geoffrey. I'm sure he has some great partners and students that you've come along the way that could also benefit within the ecosystem so we don't work in silos. So this is something we're trying to do to bridge that gap, right? As necessarily, academia stays with academia, but let's learn from people that had a prior education. How do they come back in the workforce and actually help improve what healthcare looks like in general? So for your podcast, and we're trying to go to make that mission happen, what is your ideal guest and what are some other interesting people you're looking forward to talking to and who you've spoken to.
Geoffrey Roche:
The ideal guest is actually a pretty interesting question because we've been fortunate to have individuals that serve in nursing leadership roles. We've had college president actually Paul LeBlanc, Dr. Paul LeBlanc, the president of Southern New Hampshire University. He was part of a recent episode talking about his book, which ironically addresses some of the issues of healthcare, higher education, and workforce development, and he has a call to action and a pretty significant way in his book. But we've also had individuals that have digital health startups related to some of these areas. We've had chief learning officers from healthcare systems as well as other organizations. We've had workforce leaders, we've had CEOs of training companies, and again, it's really about the ecosystem and really celebrating that from the perspective that, if we really work together, we can achieve so much more in this space, and so it's been a wonderful conversation thus far. I've been really encouraged not just by, we're just, we just recorded our 23rd episode, and I've been really encouraged by not just the dialogue, but the heart that everyone brings to this work and the desires that they bring to really partner and collaborate towards a much more equitable workforce future.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Which is also quite interesting, and I'd like to learn, I mean, you've been in this space for some time. Have you seen the curriculum at, for Higher Education actually change over the years to adapt to this future workforce? I know you work a lot with academic leaders. Have you seen some of that change take place?
Geoffrey Roche:
I have, and I'll tell you, one of my most fondest moments of my career was actually when I was at Pocono Health System. We worked with East Stroudsburg University and redid parts of their nursing curriculum, and it was a very good process. Oftentimes people think, oh, you're not going to get the academics to change it, but the reality of it is when you work hand in hand, and in this case, it was our chief nursing officer, our CEO, who was also a nurse, and other members of the team, it was working together as a nurse to a nurse to update curriculum to make it more fitting with what we needed from a workforce perspective. I think that's where this comes down to, is you have to be able to bring like-minded people into a room and really think about the opportunity that you have. Now, I'll tell you, I think academia, like healthcare, is in constant transformation, and so the reality of it is today there's more willingness to think about curriculum and changing of academic programs than there ever was before, because you have to. And the reality of it is, here's how I look at it, just like healthcare is facing this with startups, so is higher ed. Either you change your model, or there's going to be an innovative startup that's going to come and take over that model. That's what we're seeing in healthcare, we're going to continue to see that in higher ed as well.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Which is quite interesting. I remember a couple of years ago, I had some first-year medical students and second-year medical students and nursing students reach out to me, even some of the people who live in college and they're interested in the idea of like digital health, for example, and they hear the term digital health, and they reach out, and they go, hey, I'm very curious about digital health, is there something I could do around digital health? Or I heard about mental health, or I heard about this app, that things I could do to engage with it. So I think there's a hunger for more recent knowledge, right, about things that are happening in today's world that people are directly involved in today. So I think we might not necessarily academia to move overnight, or our healthcare system to change overnight, but I think that a lot of things happening today that through partnerships that you actually encourage, I think we could have this kind of close collaboration to take place. And so if someone was listening right now, Geoffrey, and they wanted to reach out to you for those kind of partnerships, what would you encourage? What kind of partnerships do you think are the low-hanging fruits that you like to bring in that? For example, you can actually connect with some of the partners right now.
Geoffrey Roche:
Yeah, yeah, I would definitely encourage anyone to reach out to me. Certainly, very active on LinkedIn and happy to engage and talk through any type of way of partnering. Look, when we look at the healthcare workforce, we've got to be thinking very intentionally about our K through 12 system. We've got to really get individuals that are much younger to be thinking about a healthcare career, whether it's clinical or non-clinical, they have to have a better sense of what it looks like. But there's a lot of work that healthcare systems need to do, and I will also say, having being somebody who advises a number of digital health startups, now is the time in healthcare and higher education where we have to be willing to embrace the powerful work of entrepreneurship. In all of these spaces, we have to be willing and able to be thoughtful around, if we haven't, if we can't do it, or if we've tried and it hasn't worked, let's think of a new way, and that may mean partnering with a startup. And I think in this space there's so much opportunity, and I think if we do it with equity in mind, we've got an awesome moment to really do something very different here. And that's the thing that I'm encouraged by particularly, is, is the future generations of our workforce, the younger generations of our workforce. That's who really encourages me when I think about these issues, because the future of work can't be viewed in the lens that it has been for so long. The current work models are not what the future workforce wants and desires, and so we have to really create that sense of belonging that really embraces the future as well as embraces those that are still in the workforce today. We've got to do it for everybody.
Emmanuel Fombu:
And as we wrap up, I'll make a bold statement and see if you agree with me on this. I believe strongly that the future of work, the future of healthcare, and the health future of healthcare as workforce would not be what it is today, right? I don't think it will be driven by doctors or by nurses, I think we'll have a lot more allied health professionals, whether it's about nutrition, whether it's about, around people that are coaches, mental health coaches that support caregivers, right, so I think we need more supportive kind of services around healthcare. And so as I think as we go through the future workforce, you don't have to necessarily think I need to love biology or chemistry or organic chemistry or love physics or love math, right, or I need to be a scientist to get in. I think art will play a role, I think music will play a role, right? I think there are several roles to that might not have that direct influence, direct impact on healthcare, that in the future healthcare will be relevant. And so I think this is something that we have to think about reimagining the workforce and reimagining healthcare in general. Is that something that you think would be possible?
Geoffrey Roche:
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly with you. And I think to your exact point, we know the future of healthcare is going to all be about care at home and various different care models. We know the future of healthcare is going to also have a very different care model in our hospitals, particularly hospitals, in my opinion, that aren't already looking at changing their care models are behind the times, but we know that's still going to take some time in healthcare. But yeah, I think the workforce is going to be very different. We also know that the future of work will include, in healthcare as well as in other industries, particularly in areas that don't have to be licensed, we know there's going to be a change where it's not just about a four-year college degree. It could be stackable credentials, it could be badges, and that's a good thing because that actually creates more equity in the workforce and actually creates more equity in the educational system, too. And now is the time to really be leaning in intentionally into this work because we're up for some significant change, we're starting to see it, we're encouraged by it, but there's a lot more work that has to happen. And part of that is really to be intentional around how do you partner, how do you collaborate and how do you knock down the silos? Because today is not a time for silos, it's really about collaboration, teamwork, and achieving the work together.
Emmanuel Fombu:
So anyone, if you're listening to this podcast, I think what Geoffrey had just said is basically opening up that the future of healthcare and its workforce is open to everyone, right? So where they have family members, or you are encouraged yourself to look at new career path, or you want to engage in creating what that new future workforce looks like, you definitely have to follow Geoffrey Roche and EdUp Health ... We'll have Geoffrey's contact information right below this podcast when we post it. So once again, thanks a lot, Geoffrey, for coming on the show. I would love to have you again in the near future to see how things are going.
Geoffrey Roche:
Absolutely, thank you for having me, and thank you for all the work that you do.
Emmanuel Fombu:
All right, thank you very much.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Thank you for listening to Bite the Orange. If you want to change healthcare with us, please contact us at info@EmmanuelFombu.com, or you can visit us at EmmanuelFombu.com or BiteTheOrange.com. If you liked this episode and want more information about us, you can also visit us at EmmanuelFombu.com.
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About Geoffrey Roche:
Geoffrey M. Roche, MPA, is an accomplished healthcare and higher education executive with steadfast commitment and passion for healthcare innovation, future-focused strategy, transformation, cultural change, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and workforce impact. His professional career includes over 15 years in hospital administration and higher education leadership as a strategic advisor to the President and CEO and department director of various departments, including Business Development and Strategic Planning, Government Affairs, Community Health, and Public Relations. Roche is an Adjunct Instructor of Health Administration in the MBA/MHA Program at Moravian University and a Corporate Faculty member in Population Health for Harrisburg University.
Roche earned his Master of Science degree in Management and Leadership: Public Administration at East Stroudsburg University and his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science at Moravian University.
Things You’ll Learn:
To best serve a community from a healthcare perspective, one has to read and learn about their needs.
Core Education is an operating partner supporting colleges and universities from their healthcare program strategy to developing workforce solutions within their regions.
Despite healthcare being about supporting and caring for other humans, it hasn’t taken a human-centered approach in every aspect of its practice.
Today there's more willingness to think about changing academic programs than ever.
The future of healthcare will include various care models extensively instead of centering on hospital-centered care models.