Dr. Angood, MD, FRCS (C), FACS, MCCM, FAAPL(Hon), has provided senior executive leadership for all sizes and types of healthcare organizations. Since 2011, he has been a chief executive officer and president of the American Association for Physician Leadership; the only professional organization solely focused on leadership education and management training for the physician workforce. The organization has members in more than 45 countries.
Previously, he was the first chief patient safety officer and a vice president for The Joint Commission where he oversaw the National Patient Safety Goals and other enterprise-wide, international patient safety initiatives. He also completed a two-year engagement with the National Quality Forum and National Priorities Partnership as Senior Advisor for Patient Safety before assuming the role of Chief Medical Officer with the Patient Safety Organization of GE Healthcare.
During these engagements, he continued intermittent work with the World Health Organization (WHO) Patient Safety initiative after helping lead the early development of the WHO Collaborating Center for Patient Safety Solutions.
Earlier in his career, after initially practicing with hospitals of the McGill University system, he was subsequently recruited to surgery faculty and hospital administrative positions at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, and Washington University in St. Louis. He completed his formal academic career as a Full Professor of Surgery, Anesthesia, and Emergency Medicine. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (Canada), the American College of Surgeons and the American College of Critical Care Medicine, which also recognized him as a Master of Critical Care Medicine.
He has a history of active involvement with numerous professional organizations and served as president of the Society of Critical Care Medicine. His research interests have addressed leading-edge problems; he has authored nearly 200 publications and is a well-recognized international speaker on the host of issues related to physician leadership. He is also a Fellow of the Explorers Club in New York City.
He received his medical degree from the University of Manitoba in Canada and completed his general surgery training at McGill University in Montreal and fellowship training in trauma surgery and critical care medicine at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Hospital in Florida.
Follow American Association for Physician Leadership on LinkedIn.
This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.
TRANSCRIPT
Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Association Leadership Radio. Now here’s your host.
Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here another episode of Association Leadership Radio and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have Peter Angood with the American Association for Physician Leadership. Welcome, Peter.
Dr. Peter Angood: Welcome as well. Thank you so much for the opportunity to be with you.
Lee Kantor: I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about the appeal. How are you serving folks?
Dr. Peter Angood: Sure. Well, we’re in health care, obviously. American Association for Physician Leadership is almost 50 years old. And what we predominantly focus upon is basically professional development, leadership, education management, training for the physician workforce and for a large number of the places where physicians work, whether it’s in private practice settings or inside of hospitals and health delivery systems.
Lee Kantor: Now, what was the genesis of the idea? What started the association?
Dr. Peter Angood: Yeah. Many, many years ago, there was a recognition that physicians really don’t have any skill set in a formal development way as it relates to management or leadership. And so the originating CEO of the organization really focused in on mid-career physicians who wanted to do administrative roles inside of hospitals. And so they had a focus on physician executives for the first good number of years with the association’s development.
Lee Kantor: So now it’s something that was lacking, like in medical school or in their own kind of as they were kind of growing their career. This was information and skills that weren’t kind of talked about, or they just were assumed that the physician had them.
Dr. Peter Angood: It’s interesting, You know, to this day, there still is a paucity in the medical schools and the specialty training environments for leadership, education management, skill set development, all those sorts of things. So it’s a it’s a vacuum for physicians. Now to your question as well, though, the medical profession is viewed very positively by general society. Physicians are often viewed as leaders just by the nature of being a physician and in the medical profession. So historically, there’s been this presumption that physicians just know how to lead and how to manage things, and that’s an erroneous presumption.
Lee Kantor: Right? So they’re placed in a position of authority and respect, and then people just assume that they know what they’re doing. And so without an organization like yours to kind of give them the skills, I mean, that could be kind of dangerous in some ways.
Dr. Peter Angood: Well, not dangerous in the clinical care sense, right?
Lee Kantor: Not in that case. But just to assume that a person has those skills just because they have the credential is not optimal for anybody, I don’t think.
Dr. Peter Angood: Yeah. You know, it’s like pick any professional sport as an analogy. Just because you’re a good professional athlete doesn’t mean you know how to coach the team or run the professional team’s business enterprise. Right? You can be a great player, but not necessarily a good leader or a good businessperson. Same in medicine.
Lee Kantor: So when you were getting involved with the organization, was that something that you were hungry for more information and you you recognize that gap as well?
Dr. Peter Angood: You know, it’s interesting. I, I am a physician. I trained as a surgeon, practice for many, many years. And then I found myself thinking more about systems development and creating larger scale change. Before this job, I was very fortunate to be able to participate in a couple of high profile national and international organizations. But what I recognized in that was there is a gap between those influential organizations that sort of determine the trends in health care and a gap to the front line of care. So I was interested in working in that gap zone, if you will, and this particular organization does exactly that. We are an influence group and a thought leader inside of organized health care, and we stayed very much tuned in to what’s going on in the industry. And we create some influence, but we also directly influence physicians and the organizations where they work on the front line. So it’s a very gratifying type of role for me, and it’s a very pivotal and important organization for the industry because we really serve as that bridge for physicians to acquire those management and leadership skills.
Lee Kantor: Now is the learning that’s taking place. Is this part of their like continuing education learning, or is this kind of voluntary for that physician to say, you know what, I’m going to raise my hand and I want to get better at this?
Dr. Peter Angood: It’s a little bit of both. It’s a little bit of both. You know, physicians, like most professions, have continuing education requirements to maintain licensure. And there’s a certain number of hours per year that are required. And so oftentimes the physicians who are interested in leadership and management skills will look for our organization’s programs and products to get some of that continuing education at the same time as developing a new skill set. The other side of it is that some organizations, whether it’s a private practice or it’s a hospital or a delivery system, will sponsor their physicians into our programs as part of the needs of the organization to better develop physician leadership and management skills overall.
Lee Kantor: Now, was the pandemic that level of disruption, was that something that brought this need for leadership that much more obvious and it was more urgent to solve?
Dr. Peter Angood: Know, that’s a great question. And I think there was an increasing recognition inside the industry before the pandemic that physician leadership really creates positive change in the industry. And it’s a debatable survey. But if you look at, for example, US News and World Reports annual rankings of medical systems, they always have an honor roll the top 18 or 20 systems in the country. The vast majority of those places are led by physicians. Similarly, when physicians are in CEO roles, oftentimes those those systems will perform 25 to 30% better on a variety of quality metrics. So there was recognition that physician leadership and key role is important for organizational performance. What the pandemic helped everyone to better appreciate was that as the pandemic came into play, as the public health, as the clinical delivery systems and as a governmental agencies all looked, holy smokes, how are we going to manage this pandemic? What did they do? They looked towards physician leadership at the highest level of government, all the way down into a whole variety of medical practice settings hospitals, hospital delivery systems. Overall, a lot of the emergency response teams inside those delivery systems were led by physicians. Obviously, coupled up with a variety of other clinical disciplines and non clinical administrators as well. But more often than not, the physicians were the leads.
Lee Kantor: Now, when it comes to your education, did any of that change because of the pandemic?
Dr. Peter Angood: I think what we did as an association, we’ve got a wide array of information resources, a wide array of educational topics, all of its competency based. What we recognize is that we needed to expand the range of topics in order to help different individuals and different organizations get through the pandemic. And these are translatable skills and knowledge into other development areas of the industry. But the other thing that occurred for us, the pandemic was good for us in a sense, is it really helped us refine better how to deliver all of our offerings in an online virtual setting and to get really good at it. And the satisfaction scores that we get on our feedback tools is very high. For all that remote online learning strategies and the consumption of our information resources.
Lee Kantor: Now part of your association is kind of connecting physicians, I guess, together so they can learn from each other and mentoring the next generation of leaders. How has that changed in this virtual world? Has that expanded? Because now you can make connections everywhere rather than kind of face to face.
Dr. Peter Angood: Yeah, No, that’s a great question. And part of what we’ve done as an association has been to take on the challenge of building out our own technical infrastructure to help support this learning and networking. Yes, we could have gone to a variety of learning management systems and account management systems and a variety of other off the shelf things. But we chose to go with a custom built system and with the specific intent that our participants would not only be able to more simply and easily consume the education, consume the information, but they would able to be able to network amongst their peers, both within their organizations, but also outside of their organizations and all around the country. And, you know, we’re an international organization. We’ve got members in 45 to 50 different countries at any one time. So that online networking and learning has really been facilitated as we leverage that online delivery platform.
Lee Kantor: Can you share a story because you were talking so much about the individual physician. Is there a story that comes to mind where you’ve seen somebody take kind of the next step in their maybe not necessarily the career, but just maybe in their worldview of how to be a better physician leader?
Dr. Peter Angood: Yeah. Let me let me do it this way. You know, because physicians don’t have that leadership and management skill training through their early stages of not only their medical education, but even their careers, oftentimes in hospitals or health systems. What occurs is you’re a wonderful doc staff like you, patients like you, your outcomes are good. Hey, congratulations. You’re a chief medical officer for us, and we want you to go take these courses with APL. Well, that freshly appointed CMO is kind of got that deer in the headlights look like. Holy smokes. Now what am I going to do in this job? So they quickly scramble to take on a variety of our courses and information. We do have this curriculum strategy where we’ll take them all the way through to a credential called the Certified Physician Executive. That’s about 170 hours of coursework. But the pivotal piece in there is a three and one half day capstone weekend, which really drives home how do they refine and own their own leadership style. It’s a it’s a capstone where they have to do a project. But to a person, as they finish out that capstone, it’s a transformative three and a half days for them. They feel confident, they feel enlightened, They feel like they can really take on any challenges. And many of those participants then go on, let’s say it’s the CMO role. They will go on to become chief operating officers, they will become CEOs, or they may even shift into other sectors of the industry and develop up leadership roles excuse me, inside of the financial services sector or inside of a device company. So so the benefits of this type of an approach is, as I say, really transformative for these individuals. And ultimately the organizations where they work benefit as well. And that’s a repeatable story. It just happens all the time.
Lee Kantor: Yeah, it must be so rewarding to see that kind of transformation.
Dr. Peter Angood: Oh, absolutely. You know, and I’ve been with this organization ten years, and every time I go and hang out at our capstone events and watch these 65, 70 different people get transformed over the weekend, it’s just so enriching. And it really gives us pride as an organization, gives me personal pride, and our staff love it, you know, and we get lifelong learners and lifelong alumni because of that experience.
Lee Kantor: Now, is there any advice you can give other association leaders when it comes to working in an industry that is just evolving so rapidly and has changed dramatically, I’m sure, in your lifetime, how do you kind of stay ahead or at least up with kind of what’s happening? Because your industry is just and it seems like almost constantly in a chaotic place?
Dr. Peter Angood: You know, it’s been said by many who are not even in health care, but many of us inside of health care as an industry, health care is arguably the most complex industry that there is up there. It’s complex because of the rapidly changing information related to clinical delivery, but it’s also exceedingly complex in terms of how that clinical decision making is delivered. And then the financial structures, the insurance structures, the organizational structures that help to support all of that and support the processes of delivery. And if any of your listeners think of their own personal experiences, they’ll reflect that not all the time. Is it a perfect experience when they go to see their doctor or go to their local hospital? And so we are continually trying to make those changes. So for us as an association, yeah, we have to be paying attention to what’s going on at the policy world, need to know what’s going on in the financial side of it and the payment side of it. We need to pay attention to what’s going on in terms of leadership and management practices and how are those are evolving. And we need to keep an eye on the clinical delivery side of things as well. We’re not obviously in this day and age, we’re paying attention to workforce wellness, we’re paying attention to work life balance. And really, how is it that people are individually evolving in their professions, but how are they collectively as individual professions? I meant to say disciplines inside the profession. Are they evolving? So there’s a lot of moving parts in there. There’s a lot of moving parts. And so the onus on us as an association, on me, as an individual is to really stay up to that as well. Then overlay that on a rapidly evolving association industry world, right? We’re all busily trying to figure out digital delivery. We’re all trying to figure out membership satisfaction, We’re all trying to figure out how do we grow our community and engage our community and how do we collaborate and partner. So it’s just fascinating, but very enjoyable.
Lee Kantor: Yeah, I mean, if you like that three dimensional chess, you’ll you’ll you’re in the right spot because there is a lot of moving parts and to layer even more complexity in your situation. You’re dealing with a global membership. So every country has different kind of needs and ways of doing business, so it makes it even that much more complex.
Dr. Peter Angood: Yes, absolutely. So as a leader or a manager in the association, you’re got to be recognized. So you’ve got to be comfortable with a certain degree of ambiguity at times. So you’re kind of reading the tea leaves or is everything going. A lot of uncertainty at times. But then you really got to be able to figure out how best to set the priorities of the association and then how to implement on those priorities so that you’re satisfying what your constituency wants. And the trick I’m sure many of your other participants and listeners recognize in the association world, it’s that balance, right, of listening to your members and doing what they want, but also taking your members to where they need to be as an association. And that’s that’s the trickier part. How do you participate in predicting the future and then being on the leading edge of doing all of that?
Lee Kantor: Right. And I find that the associations that are thriving are kind of the role models for the the people that are most important to them. They have to have a true north that everybody kind of believes in the why behind things.
Dr. Peter Angood: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And for us, there’s two true north, actually. And one is at the end of the day, altruistically, we’re really trying to help create positive change in health care. And we’re privileged that we have the platform of physician leadership. The second, though, is because society looks at the medical professional profession and trusts it with high levels of respect. As you say, we consider at some level all physicians are leaders. And so how do we help those physicians embrace their responsibility of leadership?
Lee Kantor: Right. Well, it’s a big, big challenge. And congratulations on all the success. If somebody wants to connect with you, learn more about your association or maybe just kind of pick your brain. When it comes to leading an association, what is the website? What is the coordinates to get a hold of you or somebody on your team?
Dr. Peter Angood: Sure. Happy to have any further interaction with your listeners. And our website is physician leaders. All one word dot org so w w w physician leaders dot org. And then my email address I’m happy to speak with people is first initial last name. So pang0d. Physician leaders dot org.
Lee Kantor: Well, Peter, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.
Dr. Peter Angood: Thank you. It’s a pleasure talking with you. And it’s a great broadcast that you got going here. I look forward to listening further on as I now know more about you guys. Thank you.
Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Association Leadership Radio.
