Speaker 1 0:00

Hello, welcome to a Train of Thought Podcast. My name is Matthew Harrington, your host, and today's guest is Dr. Olu Jagadik, Senior Vice President and Chief Health Equity and Community Impact Officer at Cone Health, a physician, executive, and nationally recognized health equity leader. Olu has spent his career improving population health, expanding access to care, and building stronger partnerships between healthcare systems and the community they serve. Olu, thank you so much for being on with us. Thank you, Matt. I'm glad to be here and it's so good to see you again. So I'm curious, tell me a little bit about Cone Health and your mission over at Cone Health, keep health equity in the community.

Olu Jegede 0:39

So Cone Health is a value-based care organization in Greensboro, North Carolina. We serve, we have a presence in about five different counties. We start from Guildford County, Forsythe, Alamance, Rockingham, and Randolph. We are still expanding. And our mission is really to care and ensure excellent health outcomes for all.

Speaker 1 1:02

And what first pulled you towards this intersective medicine leadership, community health? Thanks for asking that question.

Olu Jegede 1:09

So my path to community health and leadership began. During my recent residency years in Flint, Michigan, I was a resident in internal medicine and pediatrics. And at the time, I actually planned to pursue a fellowship in gastroenterology. Then I started to notice that some patients kept coming back to the hospital so frequently, and I began to wonder what the what was missing. Because we care for them really well. Then we distract them home and then they come back. Some of them have uncontrolled diabetes, you know, hypertension. Many had no primary care physician. I found out, some had no insurance, and there was no follow-up when they leave the hospital. You know, and they were cycling through the hospital because there has been an unmet need. So one of the patients that really stuck with me, you know, Mark, when I was in my second, my first year in residency program, I met this man. He was 44 years old. He was about six feet five foot tall, maybe five inches tall. And he was living with diabetes. But he was coming to the hospital, I would say, probably about three to four admissions a month. It was one of the patients that reminded me that care is really where the people live, not in the hospital. So his disease advanced, and before I finished my residency program, he has had so many amputations above knee that when you see him in hospital bed, he looks like a baby. He looks so small. And that picture in my head, I will not forget. So I began to think, what is missing? Then it was a whole population at the time living in certain zip codes who have all these barriers to care. And then I changed my mind. I said, I'm gonna go study how I can make a difference. So I went to UNC Chapel Hill to earn Masters in Health Administration. There I was able to learn more about health care in the United States. And then I met some friends who introduced me to Corn Health, and then there were the same population here in Greensboro, certain zip codes, having the same issues, and I said there is no way I know what I know now and do anything differently than care for this uninsured, undersoft population. So I have been with Corn since 2014, doing the same thing, just in a different platform. At the point I was seeing these patients one person at a time. Now I have the platform to actually care for them at the community level and making sure that no one is left behind and making sure that everyone have or move closer to that excellent outcome for all.

Speaker 1 3:54

It feels like home health definitely takes a different approach to the type of care they provide, focusing on the community. Can you talk a little bit about how you have built trust with the community from own health as an organization?

Olu Jegede 4:08

Yeah, so the way I see it is in different. We have our patients and our neighborhoods, we have the community-based organizations, and then we have the peers and the grant and the founders of our programs. All of these we have to build relationships. So we're not only building relationships with one patient at a time, but we're also building relationships with our community. And one of the ways we do this is taking our mobile medicine into the community. We have multiple units now that we provide different types of care. And what we are saying to our community is that we understand those barriers to care. We don't want you not to be checked out for your blood pressure because you have a childcare issue. We don't want you staying and let that diabetes have complications before you seek care just because you don't have transportation. So we take care to the neighborhoods and we don't even need appointment. Just show up and we will see you and make sure we care for you at the right place, at the right time, at the right cost, regardless of whether you have insurance or not. And our patients are seeing that, that we say we will do this and we are doing that. So we are building trust. We are also listening to the neighborhood organizations, we are listening to what really matters to our members, not only what is the matter with them, and we are getting those information and making sure that we provide the needed services for those individuals in the communities. So we're not only serving, like caring for those conditions like diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol, and all that, we are providing education and we are also, through our partnership, solving for those social drivers of health that we as a healthcare organization cannot impact. But we with the partnership, the right partnership, we are able to provide like food for those who are in food insecure, housing, for those who have who are unhoused, you know. Through those partnerships, we are making sure that the whole person is cared for. Yeah, so one of the biggest lessons I have learned is that you develop a mission, but that mission is not enough. So the real work really begins when you begin to ask the questions: what does success actually look like? You know, and how will you measure those success? So at Core Health, we've worked to move, you know, from intent to community impacts. We are moving from just talking about disparities and zip codes into actually tracking outcomes on those programs that we design for the individual communities because the needs are different in different communities. So whether we are looking at cancer screening rates, maternal health outcomes, chronic disease management, life expectancy, we are focusing on the data and the accountability and partnerships that we have developed. I also learned that data alone will not tell all the story, right? Um, some of our most meaningful successes have come from listening sessions in churches, community centers, and neighborhood meetings, and those residents who help us see the barriers that we may not see in our dashboards. That is how we are able to make a difference at the community level.

Speaker 1 7:52

Interesting. So when you when you work with these folks and you you see what they really need, what are some of the common threads they can hold out that might be an opportunity for other behavioral health organizations to come in and help serve as well?

Olu Jegede 8:06

When you see different communities, the needs are different. There are some communities, or let me just say, individuals who they have everything they need. You know, they live in zip codes that have all the social amenities, you know, they have transportation, they have housing, they have all the things, and you know, they are okay mentally. There is no much need except for caring for other chronic conditions, for just having to routine preventive care. Now you have other people or other communities that need a little more, and that's where health equity comes in. Health equity is making sure the principle of ensuring that everyone have fear and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. And so what we are what we are trying to do is that whole person care. So whether it is mentally, physically, and then and otherwise, what are we doing in all areas to ensure that there is no gap in the care? And you will see that we now talk about integrated care, coordinated care, because patients cannot just be going like vertical, going to every organization, every department, every service line. But how can we ensure that we are according to our patient horizontally so that the care does not look different when they go to different places? So the same person who has diabetes, hypertension, and major depression, they can get the care they need, not having to think differently that, oh, this my depression is something different, then I will go to different person for my high blood pressure. So that's really how we are doing this work in a coordinated and integrated way.

Speaker 1 9:51

And as you've grown your team, you've grown these initiatives, what are some of the challenges to providing such mission-driven work among multiple different people?

Olu Jegede 10:01

That is a tricky one. But I will say that the hardest part of this is when you scale. So when you have a small team, everyone is at the table, communication and conversation is simple, everyone seems to be on the same page and they feel deeply connected to the mission. But as we grow or as the team grows, we have to be more intentional about our communication, about our culture, about our shared purposes. So the challenge is creating an environment where everyone understands how their individual work uh contributes to a larger vision. You know, so I know that people enjoy what they do uh because they feel connected to a meaningful work with strong leadership and mission they believe in. So that that's especially true in healthcare and community impact work that we do, where people are often motivated by purpose as much as they are by professional opportunity.

Speaker 1 11:05

If you had to go back in time and give yourself advice when you were just starting out, what would that advice be to growing a mission-driven organization like that?

Olu Jegede 11:15

I would say always dream big, always think of possibilities. There is so much that needs to be done. If we don't think outside the box, especially in the healthcare landscape that we are now, we can get stuck very easily. But thinking big in terms of like value-based care and health equity, ensuring that everyone, it might sound daunting, but everyone, regardless of their race, ethnicity, demography, I mean uh zip codes and wherever they live, does not determine outcome. That everyone, everyone has that fair and just opportunity to achieve excellent health outcome. And that is really a big and bold uh vision statement to say, but that is what we need to be doing. Ensuring that no one is left behind, ensuring that there is no human suffering, ensuring that those who are less privileged have what they need to be as healthy as possible. Transportation, food, housing, getting people what they need so they don't have to really worry about this part of their life. They can focus on what really matters to them.

Speaker 1 12:29

I love that. I think there's no better way to end it there. Doctor Olu, thank you so much for being a part of this podcast. Thank you for sharing some of your time. And everyone, thank you for listening.

Olu Jegede 12:41

Thank you.