The Mercy Administrative Fellowship, with Meghan Weihmuller

<p>good evening everyone it's rangi Shaw with a fellowship review through the American Journal of healthcare strategy today I am thrilled to be joined by Megan y Muer Megan thank you so much for joining me today hi ver shangi I'm very excited to be here yeah absolutely and for our listeners that don't know Megan and I go way back we actually did undergrad together but I'm not going to steal her Thunder um so Megan why don't you go ahead and tell us a little bit about your career Journey your educational background and what you do now yeah so I'm Megan W mu director of primary care and population Health growth at Mercy right now um I started out at slooh as rangi said um so St Louis University obviously in St Louis um I actually started as a biology major I thought I wanted to be a doctor because I wanted to be in medicine um and that's all I knew about medicine as being a doctor or a nurse um and throughout High School I was actually um my last year of high school I was a certified nursing assistant and thought bedside nursing probably isn't for me so I'll try to be a doctor instead um and I decided I didn't love chemistry I could fight through it but I didn't love it and I ended up just taking an elective class in Health Management and um I think I actually had that class with frangi um it was a great class and that's how I found out about out the whole side of healthcare administration um after that class I transitioned my major to Health Management um and then I ended up joining the four plus1 program at slooh which is essentially your senior year you um get to start taking grad school classes so I stayed at slooh to get my Master's in health administration graduated a year after my bachelor's um and then love St Louis so stayed around for uh my inter an SSM and then I went to a fellowship at Mercy and and now still work at Mercy and and I'm living the St Louis [Music] dream I love that yeah and I and I do remember having that class with you and you know it's so funny we kind of always stayed connected through those class but I'm so glad this is an opportunity for us to reconnect um you know looking back at your graduate internship let's kind of start there could you please tell our listeners um you know what made you choose SSM kind of what was that internship like for you maybe highlight some of the projects that you had the opportunity to partake in yeah so when I was internship searching um at the time actually I started an internship in undergrad at biostl um which is a biotech Venture Capital here in St Louis I was really interested in sort of innovation the startup space and just really figuring out what Healthcare Management is and and what opportunities I had so I was loving that but I wanted to get more opportunity in the actual like healthc care provider Health System space um so I was really looking for that summer in between my first and second year of grad school um to get in into a health system and I applied to SSM among others the reason I ended up choosing SSM was honestly because of the preceptor um during the interview process I just clicked with this person who would be my direct leader and her name's Heather Reigns she's still my mentor to this day um and I just knew um she would be someone who would be an advocate for me and I could learn a lot from her so I joined um SSM and I ended up staying on for the full year she was at the time the administrator of the cardiovascular service line so I learned a lot about Hearts um she actually gave me the opportunity to stand up our uh congestive heart failure program the clinical program at SSM so through that opportunity I had a lot of experience with operations strategy quality and fell in love with all three of those things um which is why I ended up doing a fellowship because I couldn't really decide if I wanted to apply for a job in quality strategy or operations post um postgrad so yep that's my SSM experience and how I ended up at Mercy yeah absolutely um and and that's another connection you and I have so um not during grad school but in undergrad I had the opportunity to be an intern at SSM in quality improvement and you're absolutely right um you know we'll talk about it a little bit later but mentorship is so incredibly important and I'm so glad you had that Mentor in um in Heather um and so now moving right along you know tell us a little bit more about why why Fellowship what you know what that process was like for you from the application all the way through the interview season and you know how you kind of I I know you touched on it a little bit but how you kind of landed at Mercy of all the choices that you have from fellowships across the country yeah yeah that's a great question and it's a question I get asked a lot from our interns pretty much every summer of how did you end up choosing to do a fellowship in this specific Fellowship but um I honestly through at the end of my summer internship I was really thinking before I started my summer internship I'm definitely going to do a fellowship of course I'm going to do a fellowship and then I had my summer internship and Heather gave me such great exposure to so many different things that were not just her realm but she let me explore finance and HR and different things that a typical intern wouldn't um get to experience so many things within a summer so she gave me sort of a mini Fellowship experience where I got to experience so many different things um and so at the end of the summer I was thinking you know I I kind of got the experience that I think a fellowship would give me I don't know that I need to do it but when I started thinking of okay if I don't do a fellowship where will I end up I wasn't really sure because I fell in love with three different things um so that was the reason I really wanted to do a fellowship was to have more time and exposure to those different areas I was interested in to try to nail down what is it that I'm good at and passionate about and how I can best serve our community and patient population so that's how I I ended up in I'm going to explore Fellowship how I ended up at Mercy specific Al was I had a few criteria to nail down um where to apply so I was loving working in a medical group or clinic space um rather than a hospital although I thought I would really want to work in an academic Medical Center in in a hospital um I really liked how specifically in a clinic space you're seeing you're like the entry door of a um you know a health system and I mean of course the Ed is also the entry point but um I was thinking of it more of like a Whole Health preventative care primary care clinics right so um I liked the clinic space um and then I also wanted to stay in St Louis so those were two criteria I needed the fellowships needed to have one or the other for me to apply to them and mercy just happened to have both um I applied to a few that had both um but I think I ended up um I only applied to five fellowships so other people you know applied to 10 plus I because I had those criteria nailed down to only five um at all five of them I had final rounds and then two of them I was offered so um I had a decision to make which was very fortunate um to of a position to be in not everyone has a decision um but I think I had made the right decision the right the decision ended up just coming down to um again the interview process and which people in the organization I met did I feel like they had a lot to teach me and I they would really be advocates for me not only that year or two yearlong Fellowship but throughout my career so that's why I ended up with Mercy again sort of picking a a place where I saw a good fit um from a people standpoint yeah absolutely um and you highlighted such important things but I want to give kudos for for not only getting interviews at all the organizations that you applied to but then also getting multiple offers I think that is something people don't realize is actually very rare in the fellowship world so I think it's incredible that you had that opportunity um and so now tell her listeners specifically the mercy Fellowship is it one year twoyear Project based rotation based and then also did you have a co-fellows about Mercy's Fellowship that you want to highlight yeah so that's a a very interesting question because when I came into Mercy it looked very different than what it looks like now um so when I came into Mercy it was a one-year program um just one fellow and that was for Mercy Clinic East communities is what it was called at the time and essentially that was the clinics within Greater St Louis area um so basically Eastern Missouri we had several clinics um and they were part of a medical group and they had one fellow um that they would hire every year um so that was when I joined Mercy see summer of 2022 so a little over two years ago um and I at that time it was structured in three sections so the first section was shadowing and it was about 2 months of shadowing experience two to three months and then you would have a chunk of several months of project experience based on the shadowing so you do the shadowing experience and then you sort of pick like three places you really liked that you want to do Project work so you do Project work with those three areas you're interested in no-brainer mind work operations quality and strategy um and then the last leg of the fellowship um which ends up depending and time wise can be three to six months is an interum manager position so um an area typically where you might be doing a project work um or exposed to in some way you transition into an open um leadership role and historically that's been a practice manager role um so typically more operations focused um I was probably going to um transition into an oper or a practice manager operations role um but I had a situation where I was doing some projects in operation strategy and quality um and in December we had a manager of operations role that opened up that role opened up um and I was asked to apply to it because I was working with um one of the the hiring leaders for it at the time on a project she um interviewed um different people for it but I ended up getting offer the position so I moved into that right around the time I would have moved into an interim manager role um so I actually ended my fellowship at about seven or eight months um and the role was manager of operations for strategy and quality and it was a split FTE position and guess what it included both strategy operations and um Quality so you know I ended up doing this Fellowship to figure out where I wanted to be and all three of them was an option didn't even know um yeah so that's a little tangent but that was my my fellowship experience which is very much not traditional um and then at the end of that experience when I was sort of in that transitioned role we were working on um bringing in the next year's fellow and sort of revamping and redefining what is this and it more structure and so it had one more year that it was a similar structure um fellowship and then this last year we actually transitioned and mercy is a system that's across five different states and so it's pretty large it's one of the top five I think largest um nonprofit Health Systems in the country so um very large health system and we found out that we all had in our different regions had different Fellowship programs everyone had a fellow um some people had fellows some people had residents some people had you know they call them slightly different things um and their programs are all slightly different so we decided to come together as a system and make a cohesive early careerist program so we now have the um rotational Leadership Academy the rla program and our first cohort of rlas started um this last summer so summer of 2024 it's a 2-year program that I worked with our human resources department to help build um along with some other previous fellows as well um this program is specifically actually catered towards undergrads um so you end your undergraduate and then we look for highly talented undergrads um to go into this program and the thought is we teach them the mha program so they're they're doing like a mercy master's program um and then we're also going to start a um it's called ala program and it's administrative leaderships uh Leadership Academy and then that will be for graduate students so it will be a one-year program that is for graduate students we haven't had our first cohort of of that program start yet I believe they will be starting next summer um right now in our rla cohort we have six or seven um rlas with us so the the program is bigger than one there's a there's a cohort and I've gotten an opportunity to work with them a few different times and meet with them and they seem like they're just awesome and and living the mercy dream um they're going to all of our leadership meetings but also getting involved in really exciting Project work I keep like hopping on a call to talk a project and there's an rla like telling me all about the project I'm like I'm so happy you're part of this it's great you're getting aw exposure so um I would say yeah my fellowship experience isn't the same as what it is now but I think it's only gotten better yeah absolutely and how incredible that you were a part of building this new cohort not only for undergrads but also grad students um you know one of the things that people kind of pursue a fellowship for is mentorship so in your experience during your fellowship what was mentorship like did you have one preceptor that you considered a mentor did you have multiple preceptors um and and you know what what is your takeaway when it comes to mentorship and your fellowship yeah I think there's so many different types of mentorship and so and different seasons of your career are they important I think it's always important to have someone who's a mentor in some way but um you also don't need necessarily seven men mentors at a time so it depends when you for me at least has depended um when I seek at formal mentorship versus informal mentorship so um I had mentioned before Heather who is my internship preceptor that was a I wouldn't say it was a formal but it was a easy mentorship where he was my boss so okay I look up to you because you're my boss and then when I moved on in my career she still was you know a authority figure for me so someone who I could still reach out to um I actually uh brought her over to Mercy with me so she's now a leader at Mercy and um I I get to see her and talk to her at work still which is awesome but um I would say she's always been a mentor for me no matter where I've been and I think she probably will continue to be throughout my career however I've also had mentors throughout my fellow ship um who were more like peer mentors um or alumni mentors you could say of someone who just went through the fellowship program the year before um and that is also helpful because it's someone who is around your age has had very similar life experience in the sense of they also just finished grad school they also have only worked for a little bit um they know similar people in the organization so they can help you navigate those types of relationship ships um that has been very helpful for me to continue it was kind of natural when I went into my fellowship because I was only a single fellow there was one fellow um my year me and then the year before me there was only one fellow so um I just got mentored by him and then there was one fellow the year below me so I mentored her and um so on and so forth then when I think I've been looking for uh change in my career or career growth um that's been another time that I've s like SE out someone um not necessarily in a formal way but in a sense of hey you're in a role that I would like to be in someday how did you get there what steps do you would you recommend I take um so I've done that a few different times in the last two years and not even in a I want your job but you're doing something that's interesting and seems fulfilling and how did you get there and how would you recommend I figure out what it is that I think is interesting and fulfilling and the next step to get to that point for for myself um and that can be internal or external so I've done that internally um but also like AC has a formal mentorship program where they PA you with people who are in positions that you think you want to be in and the next five years or so um so I've done one of those as well so yeah I've probably had six or seven mentors in the last few years no that's absolutely incredible and I completely agree I think diversity of thought is so important you want to make sure of course you want to have internal mentors in your organization but it's just as important to keep an open mind and learn from people outside so you can kind of get out of your bubble so I completely understand that um you know and it's speaking of kind of building a career for yourself and kind of moving forward you've done incredible um you know from going uh from that ops manager position I understand you know you were a manager of strategic growth and then now most recently you're a director um in primary care and population health so tell us about you know your current role tell us um kind of the journey from manager to director so early on in your career yeah four ye four roles in two years I didn't see it coming but but it happened so um I sort of talked about the fellowship to the ops manager role um and then I had this role that is kind of unique I was kind of the catchall person for Mercy Clinic East communities where I did strategy I did quality I also had our regional float poool reporting to me which was the operations part of it so um I did a little bit of everything which I loved because that's what being a fellow is and I loved that so it was essentially let me continue doing this um in a more like defined way of you actually have a job description and you can't just follow anyone around anymore you actually have responsibilities so um I I moved to that role in I think around January um we had a very large um system restructure in end of March early April is time frame um May yeah I think it was April so um about four months into my position we had this restructure of course my position that is not a fulltime of anything is the one that gets cut because she's not even a full FTE on any of these teams um actually that the our quality team in that realm actually fully got removed and then the strategy team um just moved over somewhere else but they ended end up making um my FTE that was there move to primary care so we transitioned into performance divisions which were um operations performance division which is essentially our day-to-day operations for Hospital and Clinics um and everyone who fall that's the biggest most people are in operations um performance division then we have um primary care and population Health which is primary care operation plus um primary care strategy um and we have some it Care Management in that realm virtual Primary Care um Managed Care Contracting um so several different things as well but Mo mostly like things you would consider a primary care bubble and then we have our service line strategy um primary or uh performance division service line strategy is essentially brand standards and strategy across service line so we have cardiovascular GI and surgery neuro um Ortho and Women's and Children's um so across those service lines through the whole system of Mercy um they you know streamline strategies and brand standards quality whatnot um but they work really closely with those operations performance division folks and then primary care their strategy is embedded in the performance division instead of it being a separate um piece so I was one of the primary care strategy folks I I ended up in that role of manager of strategic growth which actually ended up working out really well um my fellowship preceptor he um worked in primary care he is the regional vice president of primary care operations I ended up sort of leaving his team to go to my next role and then I just sort of ended up right back at his team so he was like yeah you tried to leave me for four months and then you came right back so um it was good I've already worked with those that team really closely um so I knew everyone and ultimately I did find out in my fellowship that like I like operations and quality but I love strategy so I was really excited to spend full time doing strategy Primary Care is also something I'm really passionate about um I really like you know the public health and like Community wellness and preventative care side of things and Primary Care is the closest I can get to that really in a health system um so that was really exciting for me I got to do Primary Care strategy for um a little over a year I was in that role um throughout that year I started um sort of mentoring um other folks um who were on my team in other regions so um different regions had some turnover or they were filling those positions and as new folks came on to the team I would mentor and train them um which was great I I really loved working with folks from the different regions and not just learning about St Louis but understanding oh like things are a little different different in Fort Smith Arkansas you wouldn't you wouldn't it but things are different there um so I got to meet a lot of cool people through doing that um and then I got exposed to some higher level like what we call Ministry wide but systemwide projects um so a lot of cool reach projects I was given during that year which I'm really fortunate for um and in doing that a uh promotion opportunity came and and I got to transition um about two months ago at this point it was in um July transitioned into director of primary care and population Health growth so still working on the same team but now is a systemwide responsibility and I get to support the growth the managers of strategic growth which we call growth managers um throughout the uh system of Mercy which has been awesome I've been doing a lot of travel um I have been going to all different places Oklahoma um I was in Kansas last week so I get to go um to meet everyone and and meet the teams there and see the different initiatives that are happening so it's been really fun and I'm really looking forward to to continuing yeah thank you so much and what an incredible journey so kind of my next question is you know um I admire your path so much um as a peer I think you've done incredible things and I know our listeners will feel the same especially those early careerists um so what advice do you want to give um people who want to kind of emulate your path or want to do a fellowship so essentially what I'm asking is if you could go back and redo it or looking back what are some things you want the new generation of uh fellows and early careers to know yeah yeah well thank you first but um you know I don't think I'm all knowing and I don't know that I have the best like advice because who knows how I got here right I sort of just stumbled upon and found my way um I would say the thing for me that I think is like the biggest piece of advice is figure out what you love and what drives you um for example like right now what I'm doing I love it and you know people say that if you don't close your computer at 5:00 p.m.</p> <p>like that leads to burnout but I see myself like I'm right now it's you know before this uh we started um recording this it was 8:00 pm my time and I've been like click clacking away on the project and I was like oh my gosh like it's hm and it wasn't because uh my boss is like going to fire me if I am not working super hard No in fact probably the opposite she's going to be like why were you emailing me this late at night um but I just really love what I'm doing right now and I think that's something that I would say you you need to chase after because I didn't always feel that way in the last two years I've been in four roles and there's been times I was like this is Dreadful like what am I doing with my life like I'm working really hard and what what impact am I making but I feel like I love what I'm doing and I'm making an impact right like my job I just got allocated a lot of capital to build 43 new clinics in the next three years and to open 43 new clinics in the next three years I'm like this is awesome we got to get going like we have money people trust us but also we got that money from our system because they know that there's a community need I was able to show there's this much deficit of patients who can't be cared for because we're in a healthare desert in rural Midwest so um we're bringing more Primary Care to the folks of the Midwest and and part of the South and the Aging Community there and we're bringing them this primary care services that they need so that's something that I can spend like days and hours just talking about and working on and I'm really passionate about um so I'd say try to find something you're passionate about that can drive you and you know if they stop paying you are you still going to show up for work most people are not um yeah I probably would at least for a little you know sure maybe not the rest of my life but at least for a little while I probably would so um yeah that's the goal I think yeah no incredible advice I think um you know not everyone is lucky to find a job that they absolutely love but it seems like you've done it and so that makes me super happy for you um you know and usually this is where I end the uh interview with my guests but because I know you um I want to highlight the fact that despite being so busy and accomplishing so much you're also the founder of your own company so I'm gonna give you a moment tell tell me a little bit more about that tell our listeners you know where that came about um and what you're company uh pedite I believe is all about yeah yeah so I founded a company pedite um during my first year of grad school um the company is essentially bridging communication gaps in Pediatric Healthcare so we noticed and not only like my company but we were told um through we were actually part of this um it's called Med launch and it's at slooh they had a incubator program program for um students to basically build a startup program specifically in like biom medicine bio technology that realm so um I found that out through the mha program someone came to speak about it and I was like that sounds awesome like I'm interested in strategy Innovation like healthcare Tech I don't really know what's into find like founding a company but this sounds awesome um so I went to like a meeting where we were talking through and we the med launch had a problem Bank where essentially from um Community Health Care providers could submit problems of this is currently a problem in healthcare and we don't have a solution for it and the med lunch teams would pick something from the problem bank and pitch a company that solves that problem so one of the problems in the problem Bank was you know communication barriers in um pediatric healthare because a 5-year-old getting diagnosed with chronic kidney disease and being told they have to go to the doctor every other week and they can't eat or drink certain things and they can't do certain types of exercise and they have to have a certain procedure done they don't understand what that all means they just know my life is different than my friends and I can't play with my friends all the time and I can't always eat what they can eat and I feel sick a lot and why like and the doctor might tell them something but that doesn't really mean anything to them because they don't have that V vocabulary to understand so we did a lot of um different uh let's see what is it called informational interviews where we we spoke to um not pediatric patients themselves but parents of pediatric patient or um people who are now adults who previously were pediatric patients and what uh understood what the barriers were and and what the true problem is and how we could potentially address it so that's what we did for the first year so it's just let's try and nail down this problem and and figure out a potential solution where we came up with we're going to write children's books that read just like typical children's books like Dr Seuss but there's going to be a character in that book that has a chronic Healthcare condition and our first book was about chronic kidney disease we actually made a Trilogy um the first book is just sort of a general about you know this this kid Andrew with chronic kidney disease then second book talks more about like the care team and then you talk more about like actual um interventions and whatnot so goes a little bit deeper in each book and it allows kids to read the book like it's just any other children's book but then they can relate of oh I'm like Andrew or my sister is like Andrew so um we thought it was a really great not only for kids who might have a chronic condition but also kids who might be related or friends with someone with a chronic condition to sort of understand um yeah my team is based it's a four people team so we run pretty lean but um it was at the time three other slooh students um and one right now is a journalist and um she's actually a healthcare journalist which is awesome uh she was working for Beckers and now she's working for Newsweek and then we have um two Med students right now so they weren't in med school at the time but they're both in med school now um which is really great because they get they get introduced to doctors all the time right I get introduced to doctors Lexi who didn't have a healthcare major but now is working in healthcare media has Healthcare connections so we get to talk to people all the time and just ask them like what is your perception of this and how can we make it better um yeah so our first product is is out on Amazon we're we're working on making some others it's sort of a passion project for all of us obviously it's not our full-time gig but um I'm really proud of us are still sticking with it since 2020 when we uh when we first started so it's been about four years and yeah we're really we're really excited to see what comes from it yeah absolutely and thank you for taking the time to share I knew that was something I wanted to highlight because I've always seen the updates for it um just being in your network um and I know our viewers will love to you know hear this added piece of like you can do all things Healthcare you can do a fellowship and you can still manage to have a side gig and and do a passion project yeah yeah exactly and it's all about balance right like I made the comment of like oh I was click clacking wa until 8:00 pm like that's not me every night like that can be sometimes but then there are all the times it's like oh it's four o'clock and I got to go because I have a team meeting with my other job at five um so yeah it's all about balance absolutely no it is absolutely about balance and you know kind of with that Megan um I got all my questions and I know that the listeners who will listen to this episode will find so much value in it and so always good to reconnect with you but thank you for taking the time I know it's almost 900m there so I appreciate you um taking the time to speak with me and share your journey tonight yeah thank you so much I really appreciate it</p>