Rae Woods (00:21):
From Advisory Board, we are bringing you a radio advisory, your weekly download on how to untangle healthcare's most pressing challenges. My name is Rachel Woods. You can call me Ray. In the last few episodes we've done, we spent a lot of time talking about how the healthcare safety net is eroding and how the business environment for, in particular, hospitals and health systems is getting a lot harder. And I want to double click on the academic medical center in this episode, because when it comes to things like federal grant funding, we are seeing organizations lose meaningful dollars when those grants are associated with words like diversity, equity, even women, trauma, race. These are now red flags that not only reduce an organization's ability to get funding, but it can put a target on an organization's back. And that's a huge shift from where we were five, maybe six years ago.

(01:15):
Now, healthcare organizations have always talked about things like health equity, but if I'm honest, there was always more talk than there was pragmatic business-focused approaches to actually addressing gaps in clinical outcomes and gaps in life expectancy. The question becomes, how do we do that in today's environment? And to help answer that question, I've invited two guests from Rush University Medical Center, president and CEO, Dr. Omar Lateef, an SVP for community health equity, Dr. David Ansell, who also authored the book, The Death Gap. David, Omar, welcome to Radio Advisory.

Dr. David Ansell (01:54):
Thank you for having us.

Dr. Omar Lateef (01:56):
Thanks for having us.

Rae Woods (01:58):
I want to ground us in the here and now. We know that the safety net is eroding. If I think about just the last year or so, in 2025, we saw waves of federal grant cancellations. We saw changes and challenges to research funding. We saw new legislation like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that is going to enact a trillion dollars in cuts to federal healthcare over the next decade. And if I think about Rush, about two-thirds of Russia's patient mix are covered by government payers. How are you feeling the impact of these changes today?

Dr. David Ansell (02:34):
Well, we've always felt the impact of the fact that we're on the edge of the west side of Chicago. So I think what we're face today is what we've historically faced. It's a bit of an unknown on how we're going to navigate it, but it's not as if it's a new problem. We have to navigate uncertain waters, and I think it's always been that way.

Dr. Omar Lateef (02:59):
Yeah. I would echo that. I think whatever the challenges that come in healthcare, we have to find solutions. I don't think it helps to sit and say, "Woe is me." I would say that when we look to the future, we should stop looking at it from the eyes of just the provider and the hospital. I think that we have to look collectively and say, "What can we do together to make a better healthcare ecosystem so that these cuts don't impact any one group unfairly?" And I think we have to get the most out of the resources that we have. And I think that these pressures are a call for innovation and discovery, and these pressures are a call for improved efficiency, and these pressures are a warning sign for us that we have to change.

Rae Woods (03:38):
I appreciate you saying you have to deal with the cards that you're given. I do want to check in on the grant funding though. Last year, we saw a lot of hype about specific grant cancellations, especially for words that were not aligned ideologically with this administration. Is that something that is still happening at Rush?

Dr. David Ansell (03:57):
There were some appeals and some that we got back. There were some that were reworded.

Rae Woods (04:02):
Yes.

Dr. David Ansell (04:02):
But fundamentally, I would say there's a reasonable amount of stability. It actually opened up opportunities to think about what we were doing differently and we're still proceeding with that kind of work.

Rae Woods (04:17):
Wait, wait, say more about this.

Dr. David Ansell (04:19):
Well, we never got it in the first place.

Rae Woods (04:22):
Okay.

Dr. David Ansell (04:22):
So it's like having your wedding canceled before you got married, and so you never got the gifts. So what did you lose out on? So we've always have been about how do we achieve better outcomes? And one of the outcomes that we're focused on is how can we play a role in partnership with others to reduce or eliminate the life expectancy gap in Chicago. And the number one contributor to that is cardiovascular disease and the number one cause of that is high blood pressure. So we launched this project called Live Healthy Chicago, which is a citywide project to teach people about hypertension and reduce the gap in high blood pressure control in different neighborhoods. It was a very competitive process. And then as we were five months into it, having negotiated the federal contract, it got pulled literally on a Friday afternoon. HHS just decided it wasn't in the interest of the federal government.

Rae Woods (05:21):
Got it.

Dr. David Ansell (05:21):
But what we did is went back to our other partners in Chicago, the health department, the other academics, the safety net institutions, the federally qualified health centers and the health department and some of the insurance companies and said, "Are you still in?" And they all said yes, so we're moving ahead with the project.

Rae Woods (05:39):
Not funded by federal government anymore, instead through these partnerships at the local level with health plans, et cetera.

Dr. David Ansell (05:46):
Because it was always a good idea to close the gap in hypertension control no matter where you are. And I think it resonated with people that this is a good project for the city and the region to be involved with.

Rae Woods (06:00):
Which is exactly what Omar was just saying. You've got to do what you can with the cards that you've been given. That sounds like what you all have done, which is a option that I am seeing some of your peers take. The other option is because the language might now be considered a red flag, we are seeing hospitals, health systems, health plans practice a little bit of self-censorship when it comes to things like diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Now, Rush has been a leader in the health equity space. David, you were one of the first leaders in health equity in the country, a pioneer in this space. My question for you is, has the external environment changed the way that you think about or talk about your mission at Rush?

Dr. Omar Lateef (06:50):
I think the external environment is irrelevant to the challenges that are affecting people every day. The reality is right now is an issue of science. There are people that have different outcomes based on where they live. Based on nothing more than their zip code is the most powerful predictor of a person's health. If you're from the inner city, depending on where you are in the inner city, you can live 20 years less like in Chicago. So if you're born around Michigan Avenue, as David wrote in one of his books and you're born just a couple subway stops west, you'll live 20 years less.

Rae Woods (07:24):
Yes.

Dr. Omar Lateef (07:24):
There is nothing controversial about the language that a person uses to describe that phenomena. That is science and that's epidemiology. I have never met anybody right, left in this role or that role that can dispute the concept of a death gap, be it in rural America, be it in urban America. The fact is, in the greatest country in the world, we believe that all people deserve the right to be healthy. There's a call to action in healthcare so that when I see a person that has cancer and it's breast cancer, they should have the right treatment for their breast cancer at the right time. If I see a person that has heart failure, they should have the right treatment for their heart failure at the right time. It doesn't matter what color they are, where they're from, what age they are, what sex they are, it should be the best care for them in the greatest country in the world. That's the goal that we have. Our belief is that all people deserve the right to be healthy, and there's no reason we have to change how we talk about it.

Rae Woods (08:21):
So I think it's safe to say that you're not backing down. In fact, your goal is pretty explicit to cut that death gap in half by 2030.

Dr. Omar Lateef (08:31):
Well, it used to be in half, and then we had a hard time explaining why we would just be okay with half. So the team came back and said, "We're just going to get rid of the death gap."

Rae Woods (08:39):
Okay. So we're not just maintaining our goal, you're doubling down.

Dr. Omar Lateef (08:43):
Yes. But I want to be clear, this isn't some aggressive statement. This is very simple science.

Dr. David Ansell (08:52):
We are in for health outcomes. We've always been focused on outcomes and how do we get there? Some of what's been called DEI has always felt a little bit performative versus focusing on the outcomes. And I got to say, I've been a doctor in Chicago for almost 50 years and it was really struck to me as we accepted unacceptable outcomes. It was easy for us to continue down the path that we were on, which was to eliminate these life expectancy gaps. Along the way, we realized that it was up to us to help other people understand.

(09:30):
For many people, the words health means individual health and equity is the down payment on your house. So we began to think about explaining ourselves. What we mean is that every family and every individual in this country has the innate or deserves the dignity to have a safe place to live, access to healthcare, the ability to work when they can at a job, or some degree of safety net if they can't, such that people have a chance to live a healthy life. Yes, there is racism and yes, there's sexism, and yes, there's rural urban gaps, but this is about how do we look at the opportunities we have to actually improve and narrow gaps? And that's the work we're involved with by trying to take the lowest life expectancy neighborhood in Chicago, West Garfield Park. And then what can we do in partnership with others to really address those social and structural underpinnings that lead to poor health, including access to health and healthcare?

Rae Woods (10:38):
I appreciate the use of simple English here. I know I'm feeling like there's a bit of a battle of acronyms right now, but at the end of the day, this is not just a language problem. Plenty of well-meaning efforts that really run at the moral issue behind some of these gaps lack the business strategy, especially the business strategy to be able to sustain and scale some of this work. So how do you approach this goal of reducing gaps in care, but translate it into something that is a practical business challenge, not just a moral play?

Dr. Omar Lateef (11:13):
At Rush, we believe that we're going to take care of our community. Our community happens to be in one of the most violent areas in the United States of America with one of the most significant death gaps. So we set out on a strategy to reverse that. And your question I, it's really great, how do you do that without going bankrupt? It's far more lucrative in America to talk about health inequities and disparities than it is to try to solve them. So you can pick a disease and win a grant, get funded, write papers, and present it all over the country, and become very well known by showing that that disease has a different outcome based on either the color of your skin or your socioeconomic status. But if you want to reverse it, you have to improve access, go into the neighborhoods where those outcomes are terrible, where there's a low payer mix, and build a clinic, build the access to healthcare, and provide the highest level of services, which by math in our current healthcare ecosystem, does not generate any revenue. You lose money.

(12:14):
So if I know that there's a three or four times higher mortality in Black women with breast cancer than in white women today in America, I know that to reverse that, I have to get into certain neighborhoods and put mammography studios and clinics. And I also know that the reimbursement for that doesn't cover the cost. So actions have to speak louder than words.

(12:35):
We decided a long time ago that the time for doing more studies about this has probably passed, and the times for talking about this is no longer there. We have to now shift into a period of action. And so we can't do this alone. So we're going to crowdsource the other hospitals and the other businesses, and we're going to have a shared goal, and we're going to leverage resources from all those. And we formed a group called West Side United. This group, West Side United, has gone on to be focused in multiple magazines and win all kinds of awards, but the concept was so simple. Take people that are invested in our neighborhoods and have them invest in our neighborhoods. So it turns out as a hospital, we do a lot of laundry linen. We clean our own sheets. And then we stopped cleaning our own sheets and we would outsource this. And to do that outsourcing, you do an RFP, a bunch of companies would come and say, "We'll pick up all your sheets, we'll clean them and give them back to you." And we learned in doing that, that our sheets were being laundered in another state. It was economical and we were getting the service that we need.

Rae Woods (13:37):
Very common practice for many hospitals.

Dr. Omar Lateef (13:39):
It turns out that David, many others got together and realized that if we could convince a group of people to start a business and we could fund that business, we could make a commercial laundry facility in our own neighborhood. So we went into one of the most challenging neighborhoods in the United States of America, helped facilitate an opening of a commercial laundry linen facility, and then gave them our laundry to clean. So we organized building a loan with our board, with different members of the community, we raised money, we provided resources, some knowledge, and then after they got a loan, we gave them our laundry, and they used the money that we're paying them for the laundry to pay back the loan.

(14:20):
Turns out it was economical for Rush. It saved us almost a million dollars a year. And the only caveat that that facility has is to work there, you have to live locally. Like you have to be from that neighborhood and you get a job, you get a retirement plan, you get full benefits when you work there, and it gave over 150 jobs to people in that neighborhood. So that improved the wealth, which will improve health of that part of the community, and it helped rush. So I don't think that these are purely moral victories.

Rae Woods (14:53):
No, they're definitely not.

Dr. Omar Lateef (14:55):
We have to be innovative in how we solve these problems.

Rae Woods (14:57):
And that local focus, dare I say, relieves you of some of the federal pressures that are happening because you're focused on the funding through community-based organizations, local partnerships, et cetera. But I would actually say that that example of a linen service is more than just reducing the death gap in your business goal. It's about being an anchor institution. David, can you explain what being an anchor institution means?

Dr. David Ansell (15:32):
Equity itself can seem ethereal, but something that's good for people and good for business is very practical. And this is just one of many examples of work we've done. Being an anchor institution, what that means is you're economically tied to a community or a neighborhood. And in terms of rural areas or even underserved urban areas or in Chicago, we're the largest private employer on the west side of Chicago. When Omar talk about West Side United, there are five hospitals. Combined, we'd be the largest corporation in the state of Illinois. What we've learned over the last 15, 20 years is that it's not just healthcare alone, it's those underlying conditions. Omar talked about place. It's the conditions where you live, work, play, and pray that really impact health the most. And to be an anchor institution is to invest in improving those conditions.

Rae Woods (16:33):
Which practically means being an employer. It practically means looking at local businesses, women-owned businesses, black-owned businesses first when you're thinking about outsourcing, when you're thinking about where you buy your supplies, et cetera.

Dr. David Ansell (16:46):
Right. But even more generically than that is what are your catchment areas and are you hiring locally from those areas? So we know we're in our community health needs assessment what our neighborhoods are, and we made a goal to hire qualified candidates from those neighborhoods because we know that that's going to help families grow economically and that's going to be good for us as a self-insured place. So that's when hire locally, purchase locally, and then create new businesses off of supply chain, invest locally. How do we invest in local businesses that will advance the lives of neighborhoods such that health outcomes will improve over time? It's a long game. This is long-term thinking. And let me just talk about the laundry linen for just an example.

Rae Woods (17:37):
Yeah. I'd love to get into it a little bit more.

Dr. David Ansell (17:39):
So one is we wanted to do it and we got a partner, a company related to a board member that was willing to capitalize this and borrow the money and do this. And all we had to do is give our dirty laundry. One of the principles that we took on in the very beginning is that we're not doing charity work here. Whatever we do has to be good for our business.

Rae Woods (18:00):
Yeah. This is inside of the desk. This isn't charity work.

Dr. David Ansell (18:03):
That was an agreement we had. But the idea that this could be done locally had not been considered. In fact, there has not been a laundry linen in Chicago in the half century, 50 years.

Rae Woods (18:17):
So prior to you investing in this laundry linen service, you had no choice but to outsource out of state because there wasn't an option.

Dr. David Ansell (18:26):
Exactly. And I want to be clear, what we invested was our dirty laundry. And one of the things that I learned from this was we were the first in, Lurie Children's came in right behind us. What we did was de-risk it for others. And now they're opening another site. They're going to be at capacity this year. And when people talk about what it means for them, these are folks from the neighborhood, the turnover is almost zero and they not only are getting money, not only getting healthcare, they can be home for their kids and their family. So I think it's transformative. It's not a complicated idea, but these are the kinds of investments that we're thinking of making into the neighborhoods.

Rae Woods (19:12):
To be clear, the impact that you're having is not just at many layers in the local community on the social determinants of health, but you, for being a leader here, being a first mover here, are also having a positive impact on the other providers in Chicago.

Dr. David Ansell (19:31):
It was an interesting phenomenon that I had never considered. West Garfield Park had the highest homicide rate, higher overdose rates, open drug markets and things like that. Why would you ever stop there? Well, that mindset also says, why would you move your business there at the same time? So we de-risked it.

Dr. Omar Lateef (19:50):
What David just described is an actual street, and it's a street that had historically pretty broken down buildings. And when you take those buildings down and you put a brand new facility up, it becomes safe. And it's not just the neighborhood that you're changing. If you look across the country and you look at vision statements, they're all very similar between different healthcare institutions. And when you think about it, it's really the action over words. We all want to improve the health of our community. We want to improve the health of society. We want to advance education and we want to advance research. For us, our vision statement is that we believe that all people deserve the right to be healthy, and we're going to extend that care to everybody. And so anything that we do at Rush, any program that we have, we put at the heart of it, the lens at which we look through it through an equity eyes, a mission. We look at it and say, "Is this going to improve the health of our community?" That's not controversial. It's healthcare. We're trying to reverse those different outcomes and make sure that the people that we serve get the best quality care.

(20:49):
So for us as an institution, if that's the lens at which we look at and approach all the care that we provide, it's going to be our true north, and that makes it much easier to make decisions on where we invest in the future.

Rae Woods (21:02):
Yes. So when you say it's your true north, when you say it's part of everything and anything that you do, you really mean it. It's a part of your capital planning process, it's the way that you look at data, it's the way that you hire. I want to give our audience a sense of just how far you're going when you mean anything and everything.

(22:33):
I want to allow you to kind of rattle off some of the things that you're doing to reduce gaps and improve outcomes by looking at the social structural side, but also in the way that you're thinking about delivering good medicine.

Dr. David Ansell (22:47):
When we started this strategy, we named at the time that our goal was to be a catalyst to reduce inequities or gaps among our communities, our organization, our people, meaning our employees, and our patients. So one of the first things we did was ... This was our treasury department. We had the life expectancy gap across the El tracks, the so called death gap that's become universally used as a metaphor for the problem, but we put our employees and layered their retirement savings, it's on the same El tracks. And one of the important things about doing that, it brings it home and makes it personal. It's not an abstract idea. It's Hank the transporter or Evelyn, the guest relations person. What we found that if you lived in The Loop with the highest life expectancy, now almost 90 years old, almost no one was taking money out of their pensions and almost everyone was putting the full amount away and getting the full match. But you lived in West Garfield Park, almost one out of five of our employees was not only not putting away money for retirement, but taking out money for an emergency. So we had to do pension reform. So every time we went to Omar to ask, "Hey, we found this," he would say, "Let's fix it."

Rae Woods (24:05):
I love this example that when you say it is at the heart of what you do, when you say that it is a business strategy, it is not only how you show up and think about investing in the community. It's not just how you think about being that leading institution to bring other healthcare institutions along the way. It's also thinking about how you are reducing gaps for your own employees, and you didn't just mention doctors.

Dr. David Ansell (24:28):
Right. We realized we had gaps. It was something that we look at as a data point of who's making the local living wage so we can say, "How well are we doing with our own employees?" And that gets an engaged employees is why our medical students come here as well. But one other big thing that was really important to do, both at the employee level and at the patient level is this de-aggregation of data. You've got to look at who's thriving and who's not thriving by the various variables you have. It could be by employee class, it could be by gender, could be other things by patients, by race, ethnicity, geography, by insurance status, because if we understand who's doing really well, maybe we can model those programs for those who are not doing really well.

(25:12):
And that led to some of our technology innovations. It made us to think that maybe the standard way we're delivering care to people who live in The Loop has to be different in West Garfield Park. Imagine West Garfield Park, this lowest life expectancy neighborhood in Chicago, if it were a county in the United States, it'd be the lowest life expectancy county in the United States. And The Loop would be the highest life expectancy country in the world. Should we be delivering care the same way? Well, not every size fits all. We've really got to tailor how we deliver care. And we said to ourself, if we design care based on those folks who live in Garfield Park, maybe the solutions we'll come up with will be better for everyone. And that's led us to really rethink about how we do common disease treatments like hypertension and diabetes.

Rae Woods (26:08):
Omar, I want to throw the mic to you. What are some of your favorite examples of the work that you've done or are doing next?

Dr. Omar Lateef (26:15):
I think overwhelmingly, my favorite example was the one we spoke about earlier, the laundry linen. I think there's three other examples that I could say there is symbolic of the general work that we do, which is by investing in the community, you can change the outcomes of the community. One is to crowdsource other partners and build a collaborative to open the Sankofa Wellness Center, which will have a federally qualified health center in it. Parts of programs that are going to spin out of rush like Westside United, as well as a YMCA. That YMCA will have a basketball court. That basketball court is in West Garfield Park. It provides a safe place for people to go. I am very confident that that basketball court will save more lives than any ECMO circuit or liver transplant program that we have at Rush.

Rae Woods (26:57):
Wow.

Dr. Omar Lateef (26:58):
And I think it will just be time that shows that that's going to work. Sankofa translated from Guyanese to English means it is not taboo to go back and capture what is left behind. This is a shining jewel in a neighborhood that has been historically divested in. And I think if you look at one part of the map at a laundry linen, you go up a couple blocks and you look at Sankofa and then you move another couple blocks, the third example I would give you is a vendor that we worked with that we had to get our supplies and our supply chain. And as many of your listeners know, we don't buy directly from the manufacturer. We buy from a party that stores those supplies in one area. When we put an RFP for one of those suppliers, one of the edicts that we put in there was that it'd be great if their warehouse was in our zip code.

(27:41):
And it turned out that one of the companies that wanted our contract decided to build a warehouse in our zip code. And now you see three points on a neighborhood in this area that are semi-circling the hospital and you have this brand new facility that was offering local jobs and providing all the equipment that we have. You have say the Sankofa Wellness Center and you have Fillmore Laundry Linen. You have three shining examples of where our investments have resulted in improving the community and improving the financial outcomes at Rush itself. So I don't think these are just simple moral wins. I think this is a different way of thinking of investing in your community to drive better outcomes for community, for people, for business, and for your health center.

Rae Woods (28:24):
And I hope it's clear to our listeners why Rush was the organization to have this conversation with. You are a really unique, special organization that has gone to the next level to make these kinds of structural strategic investments, but you're also special because you're an academic medical center. And I have to admit, folks might have a specific image of what an AMC is. They think of AMCs as being the organization with the best technology, the most cutting edge, the home of the newest research, the most niche medical care. Why is it especially important for AMCs to invest in this kind of structural change that will be the thing that protects the safety net?

Dr. David Ansell (29:05):
Well, quality and safety and attention to detail around clinical processes has been at the core of what we've done for years, but we understood that it was necessary, but not sufficient to close life expectancy gaps. So this has not only become our calling card taking action to do this, but it's becoming the center of our academic work. And the next generation of trainees that we're training to think about this intersectionality between communities, hospitals, clinics, public health, and health outcomes. And we do think that this is central to our focus as an academic medical center. There are tight margins out there. We can all agree that healthcare is not only way too expensive and out of reach for a lot of people, but the health outcomes in this country are not where they need to be, who are the worst of the developed countries in terms of life expectancy and effects It's all classes, races, and geographies. And it should be the province of academic medical centers to tackle this very problem. And that's what we're doing. We run a business, got to be pragmatic and practical, but we don't shy away from solving the big problems in our world. And this is probably one of the biggest problems in our world.

Dr. Omar Lateef (30:21):
Academic medical centers are seen as an example by many people. What we do and how we do it, if that somehow motivates anyone else, the same way we learn from all these other institutions doing cutting edge work in the spaces that we're focused on. Others can learn from us and we can continue to learn from them. And so the one thing I would say is we judge academic medical centers in all these goofy ways and all these magazines that say, you're good here, you're ranked here or you win this award or that award. And you wake up one day and you realize, well, what difference does it make if you win this award of offering the best care in this niche if only 5% of your patient population can get it?

(31:01):
So I think that as an academic medical center, we have to use our actions and not our words and show that what matters is not winning this award, but making sure that the care is available to all the people who need it. That is the award and that is what we have to strive for as an academic medical center. And that is the hope we have for every other academic medical center.

Dr. David Ansell (31:24):
And if I could give just a very specific example of back to the life expectancy gaps. Working with this company called Nuna to develop this behavioral change app and remote hypertension treatment has been amazingly effective at improving blood pressures for people on Medicaid. And our Live Healthy Chicago project, which is a big academic project across the region, really everyone is disseminating this Nuna and other clinical innovations across the ecosystem to improve hypertension care and reduce the life expectancy gap from heart disease.

Rae Woods (31:58):
Incredible.

Dr. David Ansell (31:59):
We think in five years we're going to show that we've been actually able to do it. That's the role of academic medicine to bring it all together. Students, people writing papers.

Dr. Omar Lateef (32:10):
We're talking about partnering with the venture capital group. A technology company that's trying to figure out how to use an app. The app is the most powerful patient adherence tool we've ever seen. We roll that app out called Nuna. They came, worked with us. We hit the west side of Chicago, the most challenging population arguably that anyone can find. And we found the most successful turnaround in hypertension more than any medicine we've ever used.

Dr. David Ansell (32:35):
And the early data on cost as well. And we said to the company, "Work with us on our Medicaid patients first." And we see the dial moving, partnership, partnership, partnership. We're a small academic health system. We don't go anything alone. And I can say we've gone farther than I think either Omar and I might've imagined when we started working together 20 years ago.

Rae Woods (32:59):
And you're still going. And Omar just said moments ago that you do want others to learn from the work that you have done. So in our final moments here, I want you to speak directly to your colleagues and your peers across the country. What's the one thing that you want them to do next, knowing that the external environment is what it is, the work is what it is, and that we do have to get this right together?

Dr. Omar Lateef (33:25):
I think what I would say is I've never met anybody that went into healthcare that doesn't want to make an impact and make a difference. And I think that my partners and certainly in academic medicine and in healthcare all across this country all come to work with the goal of improving outcomes. My concern and my point would be we have to do it together. We have to be less fragmented. Let's partner together, learn from one another, do best practices that we've seen worked all over this country and not be so competitive with one another, but rather try to get through partnership better outcomes for all people.

Dr. David Ansell (33:55):
Omar and I both have similar backgrounds. We both trained at the top two public hospitals in the country. I was number one, Cook County. He was number two at Bellevue. But I think that experience of working in the safety net sector for both of us really solidified why we went into medicine, that health itself is a human right and we never veer from this. but how do you make that good for business? It's really easy to operate out of fear. I think Omar and I share that we've always operated out of a larger vision for what could be, and I think it's led to our success. You have to be somewhat fearless. Our last CEO, a mentor for both of us, Larry Goodman said once, "The problem is not about thinking big, it's not thinking big enough." I think that's where we've had some success is by really trying to think bigger in moments where one might get tighter or more narrow.

Rae Woods (34:51):
Well, David, Omar, thank you for all the work that you have done, you will continue to do, and thank you for sharing your story on Radio Advisory.

Dr. David Ansell (34:58):
Thank you.

Dr. Omar Lateef (34:58):
Thanks for having us.

Rae Woods (35:06):
Here's my bottom line from today's conversation. There is a path forward for pursuing health equity, for reducing gaps in outcomes, for reducing the death gap, regardless of what is happening in the external environment. I want you to take some of these lessons to heart on what it means to be an anchor institution, what it means to bring others along, meaning your community, your staff, other healthcare organizations, even those frenemies. There's so much that we can learn from Rush, and I've put some links in the show notes so that you can learn more. Because remember, as always, we are here to help.

(36:11):
New episodes drop every Tuesday. If you like Radio Advisory, please share it with your networks. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave a rating and a review. Radio Advisory is a production of Advisory Board. This episode was produced by me, Rae Woods, as well as Abby Burns, Chloe Bakst, and Atticus Raasch. The episode was edited by Katy Anderson with technical support provided by Dan Tayag, Chris Phelps, and Joe Shrum. Additional support was provided by Leanne Elston and Erin Collins. We'll see you next week.