The Backstory

This week, host and Jarrard Inc. President Anne Hancock Toomey interviews Shlomit Schaal, MD, PhD, MHCM, of Houston Methodist. Dr. Schaal serves as Executive VP and Chief Physician Executive, Houston Methodist; President and Chief Executive Officer, Houston Methodist Physician Organization; Professor of Clinical Ophthalmology, Houston Methodist Academic Institute; and Professor of Clinical Ophthal...

Today, host and Jarrard Inc President Anne Hancock Toomey chats with Bill Southwick, the "Physician Whisperer" and a titan in healthcare leadership. Southwick dives into his 25-year journey of turning struggling companies into success stories, highlighting his recent triumph in transforming Querm into QualDerm. He underscores the power of relationship-building, culture and leadership in driving su...

Join host Anne Hancock Toomey as she sits down with Sheri Shapiro, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer of CommonSpirit Health. Shapiro shares her impressive journey from learning customer service and breaking bad news at a dry cleaner, to healthcare consulting to leadership roles at organizations like Trinity Health and CommonSpirit Health. Throughout the conversation, Shapi...

Join host Anne Hancock Toomey, president of Jarrard Inc., as she welcomes Chris Roth, President and CEO of St. Luke's Health System in Idaho, to the podcast. In this engaging conversation, Roth reflects on his 17-year journey at St. Luke's. During his tenure, which encompassed multiple roles, St. Luke’s evolved from a two-hospital operation to an integrated health system with ten hospitals. Roth s...

Join host Anne Hancock Toomey as she sits down with Pete November, CEO of Ochsner Health, on the inaugural episode of The Backstory podcast. Starting from his early days flipping burgers at Wendy’s, November went through undergrad and law school at the University of Kentucky – where one of his most formative leadership lessons occurred – and began his career as a healthcare attorney specializing i...

Welcome to The Backstory, with Anne Hancock Toomey, president and founding partner of Jarrard Inc. For nearly two decades, Jarrard – one of the nation’s top communications consulting firms for healthcare – has partnered with thousands of leaders across the country who are striving to make healthcare better every day. But this isn't a podcast about healthcare, or politics or even communications. It...

Karin Jeffers, CEO of Clinical & Support Options (CSO), discusses the founding of CSO in 1955 and the organization's mission to provide mental health services to families across Western Massachusetts. She highlights the evolution of behavioral health care and the progress made in reducing stigma, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Jeffers also discusses the unique challenges and opportunit...

Dan Beuerlein is a managing director at Brentwood Capital, where he advises health services companies on M&A and capital raises. While his expertise extends across sectors, he has a particular focus on autism services, women's health and fertility, and outpatient surgery. Here, Beuerlein and Jarrard Vice President Ellis Metz talk about the state of the capital markets today, the work PE and other...

This Sunday, we’re unveiling our new survey (the first of its kind at Jarrard), which sought the opinion of more than 1,000 adults across the country about their perception of post-acute models of care and private equity’s role in healthcare. Over the past decade, industry segments such as urgent care clinics and post-acute rehabilitation have evolved from emergent trends to mainstream components...

McDermott Will & Emery's annual two-day event convenes leaders and investors from across the industry to discuss emergent trends and topics impacting the healthcare investment world. This year, its timing couldn’t have been more appropriate. On Tuesday, just one day before the conference kicked off, the FTC, HHS and DOJ announced their shared investigation into private equity’s role in healthcare....

Is retail healthcare the disruptor, the partner, the gap-filler or something else? What’s the best way for traditional health systems to interact with retail healthcare providers? There have been stories in the healthcare trades about these questions, so Abby McNeil and Sheila Biggs joined the High Stakes Podcast to sort them out. McNeil is a vice president and deputy lead of Jarrard’s Regional He...

In this week’s High Stakes podcast, we explore the state of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in healthcare through a conversation with Jarrard Senior Vice President James Cervantes – who also serves as the leader of our Regional Health System Practice – and Senior Managing Advisor Allyson Carr. While DEI and health equity work has gained momentum throughout the industry as a work...

At the end of 2023, we published our annual piece on healthcare trends primed to shape the new year. Leaders from each of Jarrard Inc.’s five practices shared insights on various challenges and opportunities facing the health systems and other provider organizations they serve. In this week’s High Stakes podcast, we’re releasing our full conversations with Tim Stewart, Jarrard partner and leader o...

This week, we continue our series of conversations with Jarrard practice leaders in an episode focused on Regional, as well as Public and Community health systems. In the podcast, senior vice president James Cervantes lays out the trends he’s watching for regional health systems in 2024. Vice president Letitia Fecher offers insight into what matters most for Public and Community health systems mov...

Last week, we published our annual piece on healthcare trends to keep an eye on in the new year. This year, our practice leads discussed a number of critical healthcare issues, from cybersecurity to partnerships between health systems and community providers. But, as the title suggests, the core piece of advice our team offered is to select the One Thing that can make the most impact and start the...

Long-term success is contingent on consistent performance. In the context of healthcare’s continual change, leaders are challenged with maintaining performance standards while the walls shift around them. This unpredictability impacts more than the day-to-day — it can rattle the confidence of every stakeholder and create doubt that impedes teams’ ability to act.     In this week’s High Stakes podc...

There’s no single pill to cure all of healthcare’s problems. It’s a vast and incredibly complex organism with a long list of infirmities, each requiring a treatment plan that is simultaneously highly specialized and interoperable with the many other moving parts. Nowhere is this more evident than in the pursuit of value-based care.   Fortunately, there’s a growing market for organizations focused...

Private equity is increasingly part of today’s healthcare’s framework. As a $4+ trillion industry teeming with innovation, healthcare is a seedbed for new ideas and, thus, investments from private equity streams. But as a relatively new trend, at least at this scale, private capital partnerships tend to be shrouded in some mystique.   This week, we continue our Nashville Health Care Council Sessio...

Healthcare providers, traditionally among the most trusted institutions in society, are facing unprecedented scrutiny from regulators, the media, the marketplace and the people they serve. But despite the narrative, this high-pressure moment says more about the state of the industry writ large than than any specific player – particularly providers of care. In this week’s High Stakes Podcast, indus...

This week, we continue our Nashville Healthcare Sessions podcast series with another conversation about the role of retail in healthcare, this one with Kroger Health’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Marc Watkins. Dr. Watkins was on stage at Sessions with Dr. Kevin Ban of Walgreens. Seeing the leaders of two major retail healthcare organizations sitting side by side discussing the future of their secto...

This year’s Nashville Healthcare Sessions was a unique meeting of the minds, convening high-level industry peers and competitors to discuss the current state of healthcare. Featuring in-depth conversations between leaders often pitted toe-to-toe in the marketplace, the event provided candid snapshots of healthcare issues and conditions that everyone is facing. In one panel, Walgreens Chief Medical...

This week, we continue our Nashville Health Care Council Sessions series with an episode focused on the industry’s stepwise progression to value-based care (VBC). The shift to value is something that everyone across the healthcare continuum supports in principle, but achieving it is a massive economic and technological undertaking. Ingrained structural challenges have made the transition slower th...

Last month, the Nashville Health Care Council (NHCC) launched its inaugural Nashville Healthcare Sessions Conference. The five-day event convened industry leaders from across the country for two days of collaborative panels, in-depth discussions, interdisciplinary problem-solving and relationship-building, followed by over 30 associated events and gatherings. With a focus on innovation, the confer...

Here at Jarrard, we're always interested in not just how healthcare leaders are doing the work that underpins our system of medical care, but also how they lead through the work. How they develop and empower teams. How they demonstrate through words and actions how the work – which is often so difficult and exhausting – affects each person involved and how those people can be part of the shared mi...

The National Rural Health Association is hosting the Critical Access Hospital and Rural Health Clinic conferences in a few weeks, from September 26-29. Our colleagues from both Jarrard and Chartis will be there, digging into the issues facing rural providers today. They’ll also be providing resources, research and education to rural healthcare leaders – content that will extend well beyond the con...