Well, welcome, everybody, to this session, The Promise of Preventive Medicine, Leveraging Capabilities and Partnerships in Business to Generate Impact. This session will explore the role of business and public health and strategies for public health professionals to effectively partner with businesses towards common goals. Trust in science and public health has eroded in recent years, exacerbated by events surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic due to political rhetoric, fake news, and divisive cultural wars. The Edelman Trust Barometer reported a decrease in trust of social media and fake news concerns at an all-time high. However, they report that businesses and NGOs are seen as a more unifying force in society than government and medicine. There is an increasing trend towards implementing business policies that benefit employees, such as wellness programs and health-supporting environments, and also the implementation of corporate policies that benefit society, such as strategies to reduce pollution, provide fair wages, and energy conservation. Businesses are forming coalitions to promote a better, more equitable world with institutions such as Business Fights Poverty and the Corporate Responsibility Initiative at Harvard. We are so excited to have two thoughtful and knowledgeable speakers to discuss the intersection between business and public health. I'd like to start by introducing our two speakers. Dr. Bob Carr is a physician, leader, educator, consultant, executive coach, and board member with extensive experience in healthcare, pharmaceutical, and consumer product businesses. He received his Doctor of Medicine from the University of Miami School of Medicine, his Master's of Public Health and Preventive Medicine Residency from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Hygiene and Public Health. Dr. Carr is the Chief Medical Officer for Kumano, a precision well-being technology company, and an executive performance coach with the J&J Human Performance Institute. He's a past president of the American College of Preventive Medicine. He's also Director of the Executive Master's Program in Health Systems Administration and Associate Professor at Georgetown University, Senior Vice President and Corporate Medical Director at the global healthcare firm GlaxcoSmithKline with a career spanning 25 years, and a flight and preventive medicine specialist with the U.S. Air Force for 12 years. Mr. Bill Novelli is an executive, public relations professional, author, and educator. He's currently Distinguished Professor of the Practice McDonough-Hugh School of Business, Georgetown University, where he teaches in the MBA program and founded the Georgetown Business for Impact Center. He also serves as the Co-Chair of the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care, an organization he co-founded in 2009 to improve advanced illness and end-of-life care in the U.S. He earlier co-founded Porter Novelli, today a global public relations firm. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgetown in 2009, Bill was CEO of AARP from 2001. He co-chaired the Culture and Inclusiveness Action Coalition of the National Academy of Medicine, served on NAM committees on the future of nursing, leading change, advancing health, and dying in America, improving quality, and honoring individual preferences near the end of life. He's also Co-Chair of the Advisory Board of the Medical Consortium on Climate and Health. His latest book is Good Business, The Talk, Fight, Win Way to Change the World. We are also joined today by Dr. Prasad Acharya, who is here to provide the perspective from a new generation of preventive medicine physicians. Dr. Acharya is a preventive medicine physician trained at the California Department of Public Health and attained his MPH from the UC Berkeley. He is passionate about innovations that touch on social and behavioral factors that contribute to health, as well as fostering strategic alliances across stakeholder groups. He has experience bringing innovations and technology use to the local health department, helped form teams for health-related startup challenges, and recently he has worked on early-stage digital health startups to integrate a health equity perspective into business strategy. So you can see we're going to have an amazing time. This session is designed to be a dialogue, and your participation is encouraged and welcomed. Towards that end, we will be posting questions to answer on your mobile devices throughout the presentation. So take out your phone, silence it, and text ACPM 2022 to 22333. Bill, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Linda, I appreciate that. And I'm very, very glad to be here with my colleague, Dr. Bob Carr, and Drs. Lindy Hill and Prasad Acharya, to discuss partnering with business to create greater impact in prevention. Now, I've spent half my career in the private sector and half in social service, including a short stint in government. And much of that has been in health promotion and disease prevention. I go all the way back to the National High Blood Pressure Education Program, which was coordinated by NHLBI. So obesity, seat belt safety, fighting the tobacco wars, climate change, infant survival, family planning, and other initiatives. Now, we all know that our public health and our healthcare systems are not well-designed to promote health and wellness, and neither is the rest of American society. Only about 3 to 8% of total health spending is on prevention. We are a short-sighted nation. We've cut back on public health, we've reduced the prevention of the Affordable Care Act, we are not responding well to COVID, and problems like obesity and climate and gun violence are growing worse. Dr. Inan Parikh, in his book, Prevention First, Policymaking for a Healthier America, says that prevention just is not seen as urgent. Congress doesn't focus on it. Politicians and pundits rail against a nanny state, infringing on individual liberties like cigarettes and guns, and we are a live-in-the-moment, pop-a-pill society. And there are powerful forces selling against prevention, soft drinks, tobacco, fast food, and so on. Supermarkets are arranged to promote snacks. Restaurants compete on volume portions. And our school lunches are less healthy than they ought to be. But we do keep a sense of warped humor. Several years ago, a Navy officer told me that they had a problem keeping non-commissioned officers who gained too much weight in the service. I said, well, what's your solution? And he said, we make them taller. He said, you'd be surprised how many of these guys come in at 5'10", and now they're 6'2", at least on paper. And my favorite grim joke was a tobacco industry executive telling me how they were going to take care of kids smoking. So no need to worry. So where's the good news in all this? I think we have opportunities to build more prevention partnerships with business. And there are several reasons. One, the continuing trend toward rising health care costs puts pressure on corporate profits. And as America continues to age, workers are increasingly becoming caregivers to parents and others. This is another cost issue. We can work more with companies to drive overall and employee health care costs down. Second, and you know far more about this than I do, changes in health care, like the shift to value-based care, more home-based care, and incentivizing providers to keep patients healthy, would seem attractive to companies striving to improve employee health and control costs. But the biggest change, the biggest change, is the corporate sector itself. In today's business model, companies are increasingly trying to balance the needs of all of their stakeholders, not just shareholders. This is often called stakeholder capitalism. In my book that Linda mentioned, Good Business, the Talk, Fight, Win Way to Change the World, I call it doing well by doing good. Now why is the business landscape changing this way? First, it seems clear that capitalism is not working so well. Socioeconomic inequality is growing. The rich are getting richer, and the rest of the country is just getting by. And other aspects of society are not doing so well either. Trust in institutions is declining worldwide, including in government, the media, universities, nonprofits, and religious groups. And yet trust in corporations is ticking up, while at the same time, people have higher expectations of business. Now Porto Novelli, one of my alma maters, conducts what they call a Purpose Premium Index, and according to their 2021 survey, 75% of Americans say it is no longer acceptable for companies just to make money. It must also impact society, including communities and the environment. Employees, especially recent graduates like the MBAs I work with, and often younger workers, increasingly want purpose as well as a paycheck. 86% of investors say companies should work for the benefit of all stakeholders and not just shareholders. And there's a strong correlation between corporate purpose and corporate reputation. Now this is an opportunity to create more partnerships with business on prevention. I want to give you four quick examples from our Business for Impact Center at Georgetown. We work with companies and nonprofits and government and others to tackle major social problems. First, we lead a coalition of major food and beverage companies, Nestle, Unilever, General Mills, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, and others, as well as nonprofits, academics, and government. We are not always in agreement, but we're working together to combat obesity. The American College of Preventive Medicine, represented by Dr. Michael Croupane, is part of this alliance. The VF Corporation, which handles the manufacturing for its brands, including the North Face, Timberland, and Vans, supports upwards of a million contract workers, mostly women, across the world, whom they do not directly employ. Now one key reason for doing this is that consumers, especially younger buyers, want to know that the workers who make their apparel and their footwear are being treated fairly. It's good business, as well as the right thing to do. AB InBev, the largest beer company, invested a billion dollars over 10 years to shift social norms, influence consumer behavior, and change business practices worldwide to reduce harmful drinking. Their management knows that this is critical to their license to operate across the globe. We provided recommendations to make that program stronger. And a final example, we are working with British Petroleum, yes, a major fossil fuel company. BP's stated purpose is to reimagine energy and reinvent the company to help the world reach net zero and improve people's lives. They need a high morale workforce that, as they put it, can power themselves so they can help power the world. We're working with them on employee health and well-being. Now the common thread here is that there are opportunities to do more with business to improve population health, employee health and well-being are competitive advantages. Now are you skeptical? I won't ask you to raise your hand. Are you skeptical? Fossil fuel, beer companies, are corporations really engaged in authentic social and environmental change that we can build upon? Now clearly not all companies get it or even want to, but many are stepping up to do well by doing good. So let's take advantage of these opportunities. Today's problems are way too tough to be solved by any one sector. We need everyone at the table to hammer out solutions for a more equitable and just society. So no permanent enemies, only permanent values and principles. And that's what I mean by talk and fight to win. The tools of preventive medicine and population health that you have mastered can drive this forward. ACPM is in the forefront of making a difference in vaccine access, promoting health funding, opioid control, health resources, collaborating with nursing, participating in the medical society consortium on climate and health, tobacco control and other areas. Let's do more with corporations which in turn can influence individuals, families, communities and populations. Now here's a specific next step. The business group on health has a focus on what employers are doing on prevention and well-being. They see opportunities to engage with ACPM and they would welcome this. There's opportunity here and I would be pleased to help. Thank you very much. Thank you, Bill. That was very powerful, the examples and just, you know, how you've made your career trajectory unfold. I was particularly struck by some of the conversations we had where you talked about your early experiences at Unilever and taking those skill sets and adapting them, transmuting them, transforming them into the work you're doing today in social influence and social impact. I think that's just an inspiring message for all of us. It's an inspiring message for me as I'm charting my course in preventive medicine and I feel in the field of preventive medicine in general. So it's, it's, it's, I'm very grateful that you're here. So I wanted to share a few words about why we named this session, the promise of preventive medicine. So promise is a really interesting word and it has two meanings. There's the level of promise where like I'm making a promise or keeping a promise and that deals a lot with trust and we'll move on in this session and talk more about trust. How do we foster trust? How do we develop it? How does trust relate to partnerships? Then also there's the idea of a promise as in a promising future. How do we have a hopeful vision and sell people on that vision? How do we make a bold commitment around that vision? And it's these two forms of promise that we're trying to bring together in this session. We all know it's almost cliche to say that we're living in times of massive change. There's global unrest, climate change, people's work lives are upside down, business, how people work is changing, the field of preventive medicine is changing, public health is changing, the perceptions of public health. And as Bill highlighted, business is changing. We're moving from a sense, at least in some parts of business, from a very shareholder-focused, almost primarily focused on shareholder value and wealth, to a more attuned stakeholder approach. So there are some opportunities here in this change. And so my question is, how do we take advantage of this change in the field of preventive medicine? Where do we find allies and partners? What skills do we need to develop? How do we need to be looking at how our training programs work in this new world? What's in the preventive medicine toolbox that needs updating? What skills do we have that are more applicable to social impact than the tools that people in business are using? And how do we create that bridge to business to make our tools available to them? So those are the questions I'm thinking about. And one thing I wanted to share is the idea that in the midst of all this change, there's one thing that doesn't change very much, and that's our values in preventive medicine, our commitment to population health. What brings us all together in this room, that's relatively unchanging in my view. But how we bring that out into the world and how we engage new partners and find new opportunities to make change, that's what this session is all about. So what we'll be doing next is we'll hand it over to Bob Carr, who has spent his career trying to navigate these two worlds, bridging preventive medicine and business. And particularly, how to bring those values that we're talking about, the values of preventive medicine, and align them with broader organizational value, like how an organization derives value to drive impact. So let's welcome Bob Carr to the stage. Thanks, Linda, Bill, and Prasad for that really thoughtful insights and actually some calls to action and provocative thinking. So what I hope, and I'm so happy to be with you all and my family again in live, is to help share, maybe through my own journey, some opportunities for us to build those bridges, to create opportunities to leverage what we have, as well as what business has, to not just support business, but maybe become a part of a new industrial preventive medicine complex, as opposed to the health complex, that actually is investing upstream, is creating new roles for us and people with our skill sets. So maybe some of the things I'll share can give you some ideas and provoke some thoughts about your own journeys. I feel strongly that as preventive medicine residents, I mean physicians, I was a resident once, we bring a lot to business, okay? And I think you've heard some of the challenges that businesses are facing, but you also heard how businesses reinvent themselves based on the concept of creating value. That's an important theme here. Do we reinvent ourselves often? Medicine is pretty slack in reinventing, and we're very tradition-based, and so the question I would start to say is, how can we be more agile? They talk about agile thinking, agile management in business. So maybe part of what we can kind of assimilate from business and interactions is this agility of thinking, and agility of results, and agility of relationships. I think we also bring our lens, values of preventive medicine that Prasad mentioned, as well as the lens of experience in looking at population, but also connecting it to the N of one, right? So you're looking up here, but they all are attached to a human. In this, I think my first engagement was with business, and maybe people wouldn't see this as a business, was the military. It is a business, it's a federal business, but how many people have either been in a uniformed or non-uniformed service in our nation, right? Well, thank you for your service, and most of the public health corps and all of the services are in a large organization that's complex, has a mission, but in that I found that I was not necessarily the center of that organization. Like if I was in a health system, the line function is a medical function. I'm a support function, so to actually affect change in that support function, I had to navigate the culture, the squadron, the base. As an F-15 flight surgeon, my goal was to promote well-being, mental well-being, making sure pilots with their planes are not damaging others, and also remaining healthy. Taking care of their acute and chronic diseases, yes, that's medical, but also understanding the culture of how that squadron, the inter-team dynamics, and the base impact health, kind of what we call social determinants of health now, but that's the factors that help you understand how health impacts performance. In that business, performance is readiness, and the quality of that readiness. I also didn't know at the time, but through that process, I was acquiring leadership skills, which I think organizations that focus on complex mechanisms are building not just technical leadership as perhaps we do in medicine, but actually enterprise leadership skills. Going across domains, engaging on strategy, executing matrixed kind of processes to deliver the service and values of that business or organization. That level of engagement and understanding how you build that leadership allows you then to navigate more effectively and understand where you can apply our lens, our value, our competencies in preventive medicine. My next foray into business was as I got my preventive medicine residency, I was thrown into HIV. It was the 80s, just happened, and the Air Force as well as the other DOD elements were testing everyone from zero to two million overnight. That level of surveillance and monitoring and understanding the trajectory of the HIV epidemic that was beginning led me to be recruited by a life sciences company to actually help them build the research capability for vaccines and medicines at the time. I was enabled quickly because of military leadership and understanding a complex organization to begin to apply skills such as population health, the competencies, understanding the various stakeholders that shape belief systems in people, the people who will ultimately use your vaccine or use your pharmaceutical product. That led to a lot of career pivots. I have had a lot of reengineering of myself in the 25 years that I was with the final company was GlaxoSmithKline, but it was five other companies throughout the 25 years. I was able to pivot into diagnostics, vaccine development, population health, employee health, philanthropy and community investment, as well as medical benefit design and management, which you think, wow, that's the beauty of preventive medicine. All of our epidemiology, population health skills, understanding policy and organizations is what goes into process design and process management. All of that helped me create a very interesting career in that area. I think just taking each step along the way, one of the big learnings that I challenge all of us to continue to do is don't stay in our medical lane. If I went to meetings just wearing my medical hat, I would be perfect when the medical question arises. My credibility as a leader within that organization is limited to a medical space. When I heard things like EBITDA or things like net present value and I didn't understand, I would go to the CFO and say, what are you talking about? He would explain, she would explain, and then I would do some self-learning because I wanted to show up understanding enough about the organization's mission, how it creates value, the business model, that I could opine and have a thoughtful, not just discussion, but a contribution to discussions about budget, about finance, about commercial operations, about manufacturing. Then I can actually apply my competencies more effectively and they see the value. Actually, we bring great value. I can share when we get to the interactive session, and you may ask for examples, some really tangible ways that these competencies can not just save company money, but can redirect investment to actually create the next vaccine or to actually create an education program that benefits individuals and vulnerable populations. It's really important that you go in with an ability to understand whatever organization you're in, the business model or the organization's mission model. And then like messenger RNA, like a vaccine that we're using today, kind of embed that gene of health and promotion and population in every process of the organization so that when procurement procures, when facilities manages the buildings and the cafeterias, when benefits creates a new plan design or engages with a health insurer, when leaders are developed, that bit of health, health behavior, positive well-being, mental well-being is incorporated in that process and you don't have to do it all. It's kind of being done now by your little messenger RNA genome segments. Apologize for the metaphor, but I think it's kind of a good way to think of it, right? So again, I think understanding the business or the organization's kind of model and how they create value, whether you're non-profit or for-profit, allows you then to add your own value to that proposition. And that is this really important area, though, that I think that we don't necessarily get socialized on, and that is the area of influencing. I think this is one of the running themes that if I could really improve our collective brand and capability, it would be around how can we influence. I had a conversation with my son, who's a physician, and he was upset that the value-based medicine is driving his reimbursement based on not just having delivered the recommendation, but having actually outcome changes, right? And I explained that in most of society, you don't get bonused or benefited if you don't sell or if the service isn't bought. Not just tell someone about the issues, right? So this ability to create influence, and how do we do that? And I think Bill's background in Porter Novelli, he was really a champion of public health through artful communication of complex public health messages. And we heard in the session this morning a lot of ways and challenges of communicating, right? Not just communicating one way, but having it received and activated so that people act on that, right? That's the issue. And so what our purchase is, what our information, our product that we deliver when someone purchases it, they actually make a change in an individual behavior, they change a policy, they change a benefit plan design, they change coverage, access. So all of those are really great things for us to think about in terms of how we can add value. And finally, I know we're going to go into more depth about examples. I just leave you with my new chapter, which is really about taking all of those areas of preventive medicine, population health, big data management, and moving it into digital health. And using appropriate proven evidence-based algorithms and machine learning to actually target more effectively, democratize access, reduce the cost through scaling of some of the things we're wanting to do. Because if you think about the population pyramid, where a lot of money and investment is going is in the sick. Most of the people are healthy or pretty healthy. And if we can keep them healthy, we reduce those movements up. The value creation of attacking a billion people versus 100,000 is obvious commercially. So there is a potential. We just have to create the value proposition and work with businesses to drive down investment into our space more so than in the treatment spaces in which they are. So again, I think just thinking about how we can collectively increase our brand, our awareness, and then infiltrate businesses through alliances, partnerships, collaborations, and maybe employment. So many of the roles I had in my life, and even today, were not roles that were there. I actually saw a need. I convinced the organization that this is what you need, and I created a role. So it's something of our own self-advocacy to actually activate, when we see needs in society, how we can help solve them, either by bringing in collective competencies and complementary markets and skills, or doing something with our own. So I do think that developing that compelling value proposition of how our values and our collective competencies in preventive medicine can really have a greater impact, not in just what we do, but in how society is impacted, and learning from business this reinvention or reengineering of how we operate or what our new goals are, and who we're willing to connect with and engage and partner, I think is critical. And I do think that our capabilities are as equally important to business as the capabilities that business, such as influencing that consumer mindset, you know, Tide, and Procter & Gamble can get you to buy Tide over the other things, and why? Because they just know what are the compelling messages and beliefs in the consumer. So how do we build that competency within our own behavior modification or intentional change models, and really help collectively the societal norms shift and nudge in the direction we want? And I do think, though, that this partnering with business is not only appropriate, but will be successful, and I will give my all to help keep connecting ACPM through the Prevention Alliance that we have, as well as through just thinking outside the box of what's next. And we have residency directors, we have schools of public health who are constantly looking at monetizing their assets. I mean, you don't think that they're businesses? They're businesses. And I'm on a board of a university, and I'm on the Commercialization and Translation Committee that looks at all the assets in the School of Public Health and sees where can we monetize to really create value? Yes, to create value for good, but also to create value so the university can have more funds to do its own mission, right? So again, everyone's doing this, it's just that we're not doing it necessarily in a strategic and aligned way always. So again, I think that's another area of strategic alignment, strategic execution. We can learn from business how they successfully do it. Because unlike a lot of the groups that we work with, if they don't get it right, they fail. Public health organizations, if they fail, they're still funded often by the government to an extent. So I think the learnings are great in that space. So on that I will end, and I know we're going to get into a nice interactive session. And I just want to thank you and hopefully give us your information and give us your ideas as we proceed to the next part of this journey today. Thank you. So we really wanted to make this session as interactive as possible. So that was all to set the stage. Now what we're going to do is we're going to move through some polling questions that we came up with to get a sense of where the audience is at, where are all of you when listening to this and in response to some of the questions we came up with. After we do that, we'll have the panel respond to the reactions from the audience. And then we'll go to audience questions. There are two mics in the aisles right there. And so let's get started with our first question, which is a word cloud. So if you're connected with a text message, here's the question. When you think about business and preventive medicine, what's the one word that comes to your mind? So we'll take a few moments to get some responses. And while that's happening, I'll just talk to us on the panel. So I see opportunity, health, wellness. I'm actually looking for some negative words. I saw skepticism, conflict, ethics, doubtful. There's a good one, public sellouts. Public sellouts. So let's use that as a launching off point. So we have the big ones are pretty positive. They're fairly positive, health, opportunity, value. But looking in the background, there's lots of different ways of describing doubt. So how do you respond to that, Bob? Well, I think I would actually start with a negative because often I try to find if there's a belief out there that's a barrier, then we have to really begin a strategy to mitigate that barrier. Then I go to the opportunity and say, go where the energy is. So if we know that there are businesses in our community that are already thinking like this, but don't know who we are, don't really understand, that's where you want to go first. You want to go to an organization that is kind of kindred in their mission, but maybe doesn't know our brand or doesn't know the full benefit we could provide. And then connect with them. And we can talk about later really strategies for really engagement and connecting. But to me, that's how I would approach it because I don't want to start off surmounting obstacles and obstacles and obstacles. So I'm going to go where the energy is and have some quick wins, and then use those opportunity and quick wins with business to show others how it can be done. That would be my approach. I don't know. Others? A giant beer company. One moment, okay. Go ahead. I mentioned AB of the giant beer company and how we at Georgetown were working with them on responsible drinking. Now this beer company has these brand managers all over the world incentivized to sell beer. Okay, so you might be skeptical as to whether they really care about responsible drinking. And the answer is they do. Their senior management cares deeply about it. And one of the things they had the courage to do, I will say courage, is to bring in a number of public health people to advise them. And they had arguments galore with these public health people. And I talked to the general counsel of AB one day and he said, this particular public health expert is driving me nuts. And I said, good. And what they were doing basically was trying to figure out how to put together this beer company with the idea of responsible drinking. And it was culture change, but it was working. And it's the kind of thing that I think conflict can lead to. Thanks, Bill. Linda, when you see this image, what really strikes you? Well, I was struck by the word unprepared. And as a residency faculty and program director, I'm always thinking about what can I do to train the next generation of preventive medicine docs. But I'm also thinking that unprepared is also our existing PrEVMED docs and that we want as so many of us have done multiple careers within preventive medicine that even our second or third job we're thinking about how can we fit into this. And so I see this as an opportunity for ACPM to be a leader from both a CME angle as well as a GME angle. I think that one of the early ways that I had that access was in the residency program where I had exposure during the rotational years to organizations that I would have never been connected with. And that exposure kind of prompted me to seek other exposures that were maybe not in the residency year, but afterwards. So I think having a broader set of exposures during training to projects, it doesn't have to even be a full rotation, but bringing in a business issue that maybe the residents could be a part of helping like a project, that creates then kind of an understanding of that business. It adds competencies and it also creates an awareness in the business of oh wow, you're really doing well. I mean I had over 60 residents at GSK over the 20 years working on everything from pharmacovigilance to health promotion to circadian rhythm changes and factory workers in 24 hour shifts. I mean there is so much stuff that needs to be done in an organization, especially health related life sciences organizations that we could add to. And they're just great opportunities for residents. So I would really encourage us to be open to finding those where the energy is organizations that will help us expose and train our next generation and build our pipeline. Thank you. One thing that strikes me is I think about how we're talking about business when, this is something actually Bob brought up in some of our preparatory conversations, when a lot of times we can also just think of organizations. Like the way that we think about business differently, I liked Bob how you mentioned about the residency program being a business. It's an organization that has funding issues and that needs to make the budget work out. And how do we do that? Similarly like health departments and collaborating with startups that are doing something in a certain lane. Like are there opportunities there that we're not tapping into? And because we have this idea of this really sharp split between what we do and what's done in business. And are there people who share certain areas of alignment that can really create opportunity? I see opportunity is the biggest word here. And so to me when I see opportunity what I think about is less about how somebody goes into a corporation and then manages that corporation to be more focused on health. But how can we find partnerships with other organizations if they happen to be primarily focused on profit generation or not to really drive for social welfare? So yeah, that's really thought provoking. I'm really struck by how there's just all these different, a lot of the skepticism is in these very kind of background images. It's split up into very small words. Whereas opportunity is very upfront. And I think there's almost a metaphor in that. That our skepticism can often be kind of in the background. I think that leads to what you all talked about, about trust. And another area to think about is is there trust? If not, what's the gap? How do we close the gap? Can we close it with everyone? Or do we close it with the organizations that we feel more comfortable with so that those become models for others, right? So best practice happens and then you can share best practices. So I think going with the concept of where is trust today, and then how do we expand the consensus of trust through relationship building, through experiences, through shared values, shared work. I think those are the areas that I would love to hear from the organization about trust. And I think we have a question if we don't, right? Next poll, yeah. Yeah, let's segue to the next question. So feel free to text your responses. People trust businesses less than government. Do you believe that's true or false? This guy's ready for the test. So it seems like we're really landing on false here. We'll give a little, a few more moments to see if true can make a comeback. I don't think it's happening. Okay, so Bill, what do you make of this? Well, they heard me. Without question, you know, John McCain said that trust in government now is down to a few friends and blood relatives. So that's where America's trust is in its own government. And as I said in my remarks, trust in business is ticking up. But at the same time, people are trying to hold business accountable. And I think that's a very positive trend. One thought that in business and in society, gravitas, renown, you know, celebrity status, look at all of the influencers, you know, on the social media platforms, you know, they're building trust through a variety of wants and needs being met. And the question is, how can we assess that from above and say, wow, so what are the learnings that we can bring in to create greater trust about our messaging, greater trust about, even within our profession and within our sister professions in medicine? How do we build that so we're unified? Because a lot of the trust is when the bandwidth gets overwhelmed and I don't know who to believe, so I go to my neighbor or I go to my family member and I trust their health decision making over what the physician or what the health educator from NIH on the TV is telling me, right? So again, I think we could learn more about trust and maybe that is an area that as a college as well as training, you know, make sure that we turn out leaders who are trusting and who continually build credibility and gravitas and influencing capacity so that our message and the actions that we want to happen, happen. So Linda, when we talked about this session early on in our very first call, this was something that came up. So seeing this poll and seeing the question, what's your reaction? Well, I think one of the things that we want to do as educators is make sure that our trainees, whether they be CME or a champion, that it's a two-way street and this is, as you said, this is what highlights that, that while we're hoping to train them to bring their skills to the table, what they need to be humbled to recognize is that business is doing some things right, that there's a lot that they can learn. So I see part of what we need to do with this information and when we're gonna deploy residents or mid-career people into some kind of business situation, that if they're not prepped, you said that when you go to a team meeting, you want to be sure that you understand what everybody's talking about so that they also trust you to be part of the team. And so as we try to do this education, however we do it, that is part of it. Yeah, yeah, thanks, Linda. Yeah, the thoughts that come to, so this to me, just this question, I feel like we could have a whole session on this. You know, I think about monopoly power in the United States. I think about the influence of money in politics. I think about skepticism of political leaders, like polarization and how much that influences, just how doubt and distrust is such a currency of our times to kind of move towards certain political aims. And so I don't know, that's kind of going in a different direction, but I think it's just, it's easier to point the finger somewhere and blame than it is to work together and come up with solutions. And I think that's a lot of what we're trying to do here is figure out how do we become part of the solution? How do we develop the capacities, capabilities to actually be moving towards that hopeful vision that we're talking about? So let's crowdsource. What is the biggest challenge or barrier for us to build greater trust with the public and stakeholders, whether they're policymakers, insurers, patients, hospital, health systems? What is the biggest barrier we'd like to hear? part of the next strategic pillars for the college, Donna. So, yeah. Knowing who we are, visibility. Visibility is coming up twice. Isolation. Awareness, presumably that's awareness of our field. Disinformation. More disinformation. So, we've been seeing visibility, exposure, awareness, knowing who we are, politics. So, let's go in this direction. Linda, what about these challenges to build trust in the field of preventive medicine with the public? Like, looking at these responses, considering just your experience in the field, how to face these challenges. Well, I'd be really interested to hear what the audience has to say about this, what they were thinking when they put this together. Because, as public health professionals, we represent multiple agencies, and we represent public health departments, which is the government, but we also represent academia. And, I mean, certainly we could talk about the issues of credibility in academia being another institution that suffers some issues of trust with the public. My husband was a molecular biologist, maybe once a molecular biologist, you always are, but, he tells the story of having gone from academia to biotech and back, and is really distressed, for example, by the problems that academia has, where you can't reproduce at least half of the data that's coming out of academic papers. And noticed that, when he went to biotech, that there was a different level, a different standard of quality. So, I think that as we're looking for, you know, how do we overcome some of the barriers for preventive medicine, public health, and science, to build trust that, again, we can go back to, what are lessons learned from business? What do they do that allows them to have reproducible results that the public trusts? Yeah, yeah, I think that's great. I think, if you're thinking about trust as a critical factor in selling our service, or selling our product, or making the consumer, the policymaker, buy what we have to create value, these are great points that begin to have an objective for each one. Meaning, okay, if it is an issue of awareness, there's a set of strategies we can collectively come together to raise that awareness. And it's not always from us to others. I think that's what business gets right, in that consumer insight mastery. They don't push the message they wanna push. Like Febreze, I don't know how many of you think that the message that they push in Febreze is about nice smell, it's not. That's what the company thought they would be pushing. But what the consumers told them back as they used it was that it was a sense of achievement by smelling. So they began to push the message of achievement and sales took off, right? So again, we have to bi-directionally understand our consumers, whether they're policymakers, patients, insurers, employers, and really shift our own belief as well as their beliefs so that the message lands appropriately, right? It's that right timing of trigger change theory in terms of behavioral change. Get the right time, the right message for the right issue with the right intervention, right? So again, how do we do that creatively? Collectively, we can do this. But these are all now, we can thematically pull these together and actually create an objective set of goals and tactics to maybe help build them. Some of them are pipeline issues of training. Some of them are maybe college issues. Some of them are each one of us being advocates to help break these down. That would be what I would throw out. Yeah. What strikes you about these results, Bill? Well, I don't think I feel qualified to tell you what challenges or barriers that you have to build greater trust with the public. I can see all these make sense. But I just came here from a business conference, directly here from a business conference, and the subject was leadership, energy, and climate. And these companies are on the move. They are making change. They're creating change. And I think I can say with great assurity, they need you. They want help. They're willing to figure out how to make this change. They want health and well-being among their employees. They want to change the environment. They want to change public discourse. I think, as I said before, there's where the opportunities are. Yeah, thanks, Bill. What strikes me is the overwhelming number of responses that have to do with people not knowing, lack of understanding of who preventive medicine professionals are. I saw visibility a lot of times. You know, just like, I think that, plus I saw consistency a number of times, too, around messaging, like, what are we about? How can we be good partners? I think that's something that can be a challenge. I also question if, I saw a few responses that questioned whether there is a trust issue between preventive medicine and the public. And I'm curious about that, too. I wonder, you know, I feel like trust in institutions across the board is very low. And so relative to other institutions or other fields, I'm not sure that there is a trust issue. So I kind of question the premise of the question. That's a good one. Which one? You can't explain it to yourself. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, I think we have an expert that we may be able to pull into public relations, massage our visibility and our brand awareness. But I think your call to the business group on health, which actually the company I'm in now is a member, if you think about that group, what created HEDIS wasn't the government. It was businesses getting fed up with double-digit benefit costs with no change in outcome. And so they instituted that if you don't have metrics that are gonna improve, we're not gonna take your plan, let's say. And it really drove a series of KPIs and metrics, which people may not or may agree that were helpful. But I think knowing that the ultimate beneficiary of the value that we can create, bringing them in is important. Because if you're gonna affect the bottom line of an organization and you can influence their willingness to accept that, then you've got an in. So it's always like, it's the show me the money. Where is that money eventually gonna be valued and that value actually create for an organization, whether it's the government or a private entity or a nonprofit or a collective community? Absolutely. And that's a great segue to the next question. So what's the number one skill, just one word that preventive medicine can learn from business? I'm sure we're gonna get some funny responses here too. Yeah, so marketing, branding. And then some of the, kind of, on the opposite side, ruthlessness. So, Bob, what do you think is the number one skill that, what word would you put in here? Well, I mean, they're all skills, look at your own skill development, the competency. So, you know, capability is a combination of competency, leadership, and the infrastructure that supports the execution or delivery of that competency, right? So, you need all to have a capability. So, I think all of these are relevant, and as each one of you, you may have strength in one or another, we all have to individually and collectively assess our own skill sets. And actually, when we think about training, you know, these are very much business words, right? And I think in training, we go back into medical word mode. So, like, if I'm thinking leadership, we think health policy and management. And, but do we really bring in examples of marketing in health policy and management? We talk about communication, we talk about behavioral modification, those are medical, right? So, the thematic elements for us to be more known is we've got to actually speak the language of whoever we're walking with, right? So, if I'm at a manufacturing, I'm not going to speak an R&D language, I'm going to actually understand enough about the manufacturing environment that I talk about our messages being delivered in quality circles every morning for 15 minutes. Because you can't just take people out and do a two-hour workshop in a manufacturing. In R&D, I'm not going to talk without having the evidence and the references about everything I do because I'll be torn apart, right? And in the commercial, they'll want it to be, you know, like bold and exciting and passionate, right? So, each audience comes with a culture. And our language has to shift to that agility of messaging, agility of people relationships, right? So, we have to shift. And I think that these are all great for us to begin thinking about what are the critical skills that we need to influence more and make more impact at a personal level and, of course, maybe at your team level. And then begin with yourself, right? Self-leadership. What can I do tomorrow to begin building those? And what can we do as an organization, as a specialty of society, as a training program to actually begin thinking about, well, how do we map what we're doing to a more relevant name and nomenclature, right? That's business and the general population would understand. So, again, I think this morning in the typical barriers to health communication is we communicate in very complex technical and our own jargon. And we forget about, you know, how to connect our words to the relevance of the individuals that are receiving them. You know, I think these are great. I think we could use these to really think through what we're talking about. The one word that I don't see up there and maybe it's there and I'm missing it is entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship means let's build something. Let's create something. Let's be agile. And also, let's be accountable. And I think being entrepreneurial with business is a big opportunity. Yes, thank you for focusing on that. For me, a thought I had was something around, we've already talked about influence, but also design and all the practices of design and taking small risks and evaluating those experiments and using a lot of the frameworks we understand from public health but also being willing to take more risks and fail. Yeah. Well, you know, the two cultures are different. So, you know, in the business world, the MBA students, they've all got five ideas for startups, right? Every one of them. But if you go to a big company even, what they're basically saying is we need to fail fast. We need to fail forward. You've all heard those clichés. Well, in your world, if you fail fast, people die. So we don't want to fail fast in the world of preventive medicine. But we've got to get it together so that we're accountable together. So, Linda, I'm going to ask you a funny question. So I heard from somebody who I know is in the audience, I'm just not going to name, said a funny thing. He said that instead of getting an MPH in training, it might be better if we earned an MBA and had some extra public health courses on the side. What do you think about that for in terms of preventive medicine? Well, okay. Somebody else out there who wants to answer that. No, I think what we're fundamentally getting back to is that some things went wrong in the pandemic and public health somehow lost track of the message. And, you know, it may not have been the fault of public health, but I think the public got very confused. They were getting, you know, conflicting things. And here we're talking about what can we learn. And I kind of answered that question with my last response, but the issue around quality, consistency, and good communication, those are definitely messages that we can get from business. I don't know that we have to have an MBA to do that. I think what we're talking about is how can we build into GME and CME the ability to learn some of these skills. And what we have to do is we have to both forge, I think, for GME specifically, that looking at finding these opportunities and forging linkages and developing coalitions where we can create opportunity, but we also have to prep our trainees. And we have to prep our trainees to be able to do a two-way street. They have to learn the lessons learned from business, and they also have to have the skills to contribute. And in so many of the examples that you gave, some of our residents come with these, but sometimes we have to do more training. So I think just really we've really opened up the horizons in terms of what the opportunities are for training. Yeah, I think when I coach, one of the first things I do is ask myself and then try to get from the client, what are your self-limiting beliefs or self-limiting practices that prevent you from actually achieving a forward movement in whatever you want to be coached on in our process? And I think I'd like to hear from you all. I think maybe the next, what is, no, it would be the next one. Yeah, let's do the next one, because the next one is that. There. Yeah, that's not it. It's the one about skills from preventive medicine. What is the biggest challenge or barrier holding us back from more effective engagement? This is our own, right? So it's question number five. What is the top strength, capability, preventive medicine? Oh, yeah, yeah, we did that. I think it's what is holding us back I'd like to hear from everyone. What do you think are some of the things that are holding us back? I love crowdsourcing. And while we're doing this and we're thinking this is on the fly, actually this is going to be collected and we're going to look at this because I think that this is important from an element of at least the conference attendees that gives us insights into some of the things we may be able to work on as self-development or leadership development or technical competency development going forward. So I appreciate your input here. And so just any comments? No, I think those are good. I really appreciate what Bob said just now, which is we need to collect all this and do an analysis if we're going to make progress. I see this as the workshop of prevention 2023. No. You do have the skills. I think what they're saying is you have the lack of skills of engagement, perhaps. How do we engage? What's the first step? How do we learn how to dance with a business? It's like that first asking someone to dance with you. Time is a good one. So we'll let those roll in. And just to, in the interest of time, we'll go to the last question, number eight. Next question. Next question. Okay. So this is your call to action, at least collective call. I feel like this is the answer to the last question. The question is based on today's insights. What is an action item that we can take away? Okay, great, now we're coming maybe to more actionable partnerships, good. Weak initiative, haha, everyone tweeting right now, hey, that's not, you know, leveraging social media in the moment is important, got folks in the room, good, good, good, oh, there's a good one for you, yeah, yeah, okay, so any last comments on this question before we turn it over? I'm going to let the experts answer that. I just repeat what I said before, I understand all the different negatives, all the concerns, everything from burnout to time to you name it, but I see opportunity. A little bit of a closing statement. Yeah, I mean, this is your call to action and you can pick someone else's if it's better than yours. I always like this because it gives me room to think about more options to consider. But I would really want you to intentionally leave this meeting today, but also this conference, with one or two intentions of mindset shift and tangible action that you'll try out, meaning if we go away with, oh, you know, I've got a lot of great ideas, but nothing happens in your journal that you're going to actually convert to an action that can actually maybe become a habit. Nothing will happen, right? So I would use the intentional change model where you set an intention about a mindset and a specific action that you're going to try out for the next week to help you better either understand where you can engage business, understand if you're currently involved with business, how to mine that relationship better, and or help others, if you're actually great at it, help others who are struggling. Because I think collectively we are power, but we can't all work independently. We need to collectively come together and help each other and coach each other and be sounding boards for each other and networks for each other. Because I think that's how we're going to succeed in raising visibility and our brand. Yeah. We're going to be together in a short nine months, and it would be wonderful to have the opportunity seriously to share what you got accomplished. Yeah. Absolutely. Great. Thank you all.

business role in public health

partnership strategies

trust in science

public health erosion

business as unifying force

employee well-being policies

societal benefit

business coalitions

population health promotion

intersection of business and public health

bridging two worlds