Dear Doctor: Lisa Bard Levine MD, MBA
The CEO of The MAVEN Project, on leveraging telehealth technology to improve outcomes for underserved communities.
Lisa Bard Levine has dedicated her life to learning about our country’s healthcare system. Using her knowledge as an MD and MBA, she has worked with stakeholders across the industry to ignite change. In her current role, as CEO of The MAVEN Project (Medical Alumni Volunteer Expert Network), she connects physician volunteers with primary care providers at community health centers who serve at-risk populations in order to address the gap in access to care. Read on to learn about how her father inspired her career path and how her journey led her to use what she’s learned in medical school and business school to help solve a nationwide issue.
“My father is a physician and a healthcare strategist, and despite trying unsuccessfully to ignore my DNA, I realized I was destined to follow in his footsteps. I was always interested in science and health, and was particularly drawn to the intersection of business and the delivery of healthcare. At the University of Pennsylvania, I was pre-med and also studied healthcare administration and management. To begin my career, I worked for three years as a healthcare consultant and as an internal healthcare strategist in New York. When I applied to business school and medical school, I focused on Tufts, which at the time offered the only integrated MD/MBA program in the country.
Working in Healthcare Strategy
During my clinical training, I was offered the unique opportunity to help grow a healthcare strategy boutique firm. It happened to be the one that my father founded, though he actually wasn’t the first to know that I had been hired. The firm’s Chief Operating Officer (COO) reached out to me asking me to help grow their people, their products, their tools, and their strategy. Because I was deeply committed to working for this firm professionally and personally, I found the offer impossible to refuse and I accepted it before my father ever knew of my intentions. You can imagine his reaction when his COO described the qualities and qualifications of the firm’s new hire! It was an incredible opportunity for me to work under my father’s leadership, a nationally recognized leader in healthcare strategy (and the best teacher I have ever had).
From my work as a consultant, I had acquired a considerable appreciation of healthcare delivery operations. I got hands-on experience in system design–both successes and challenges–and benefitted from my unique opportunities to design improvements and drive change. And from my residency experience, I was able to appreciate the impact of system design on the actual delivery of care. Even though I was just starting off at the hospital, my prior experience enabled me to connect with the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) and provide insights on improvement opportunities.
Serving as a Healthcare Changemaker
Later in my career, I accepted a role at Commonwealth Care Alliance, an organization that focuses on providing healthcare services and resources to the dual eligible population (Medicare and Medicaid) in Massachusetts. I was the Director of Clinical Value and Quality. In that role, I was responsible for ensuring that the right resources were getting to the right people (patients) at the right time, and also for creating value for their health and health improvements. It was in that role that I had a “eureka” moment, realizing that working with the population that most suffer from the lack of access to needed resources was where I could have the most impact in healthcare.
More recently an opportunity arose for me to join The MAVEN Project (Medical Alumni Volunteer Expert Network) as the Chief Medical Officer. The MAVEN Project is a non-profit healthcare start-up that leverages telehealth technology to connect volunteer physicians of all specialties to clinics around the country that serve the uninsured and Medicaid populations. Our goal is to close the gap in access to care and provide support for the day-to-day needs of frontline primary care providers. I joined the project a little over two years ago, and five months later, I was asked to take on the role of CEO.
About the MAVEN Project
The MAVEN Project was founded by Dr. Laurie Green, a full-time practicing OB-GYN in San Francisco and the former President of the Harvard Medical School alumni association. She recognized a valuable and underutilized healthcare resource: the incredible network of physicians at different stages of their careers (many recently retired) who were willing to volunteer time and effort to help reduce the disparity of access to needed to care for the 100 million who are uninsured or on Medicaid here in the US. Simultaneously, she realized that we could connect these physicians with clinics serving those most in need via telehealth, diminishing the traditional barriers that would normally prevent the two from connecting.
When The MAVEN Project pilots began, a group of presidents from several medical alumni associations across the country came together to discuss this concept. Initially, our physician volunteers were recruited through this funnel. However, over time, we also began recruiting experienced volunteers from professional associations, such as the Association of Clinical Endocrinology, and through public relations efforts, such as the PBS NewsHour feature segment which was recently nationally broadcast. We have increasingly found that healthcare delivery systems like hospitals and group practices are looking for opportunities to enable their physicians to give back or begin to think about retirement in a way that provides engaging opportunities to leverage their clinical expertise.
How the MAVEN Project Works
When a physician joins our volunteer corps, we credential them and provide them with appropriate malpractice insurance. Our current physician volunteers represent over 40 different clinical specialties. We have three main service offerings.
The first offering ties to our educational sessions: our physicians deliver clinically pertinent didactics to the frontline primary care providers on topics that are relevant to their practices. There can be a host of different topics for these sessions, like depression in teenagers, opioid management, the 101 of rheumatoid arthritis, and the ABCs of EKGs. Many of our sessions are now coupled with continuing medical education (CME) credits as well.
The second offering is our mentorship program where we pair a volunteer with a clinic provider. Many of the clinics we work with are free clinics or Federally Qualified Healthcare Centers (FQHCs), staffed by MDs, DOs, NPs, and PAs. One of the biggest challenges for these is the recruitment and retention of staff. Our mentorship program is designed to provide support that is confidential and non-judgmental, and that helps to improve job satisfaction, provider wellness and retention, and recruitment of staff. Mentors provide decades of experience to help guide their mentees through managing life as a primary care provider.
While many of our clinic partner primary care providers may be working on large teams, many feel as if they are “working alone together,” feeling much more isolated than their practice settings might appear. Our mentoring program seeks to create meaningful guidance and support to reduce stress and burnout. We also pair physician executives with clinic leadership to provide the management and leadership coaching needed for success.
Our third offering is advisory consultations (clinical consults), which enables a clinic primary care provider to connect with any volunteer about a single clinical case, a group of cases, or general population health approaches to different conditions via telehealth. These consultations are used just in time (‘available now’) or scheduled in advance to validate or augment care plans and help determine appropriate care. We will soon be offering asynchronous consults as well. Over 70% of the time, these consultations avert the need for the patient to be seen by an in-person (often distant and with limited access) specialist. Keeping the care local for these patients saves time, stress, cost, and burden — and it also helps optimize care.
The MAVEN Project’s Impact
Our impact is tripartite — on the lives of our clinic partners’ primary care providers, the patients that they care for, and also on the lives of our incredible physician volunteers. In one of the free clinics we support in Miami, there was a young boy who was constantly in and out of the emergency room and hospital due to exacerbations of his asthma. As a result, he was missing a lot of school and his parents had to leave work to take him back and forth to the Emergency Room. His pediatrician connected with one of our pulmonary doctors, and in about a half of an hour they discussed adjusting some of his medications. Once his medications were adjusted, he has not been back to the ER once, he’s back at school, and it’s a win-win for all. We’re able to make a difference in the lives of individual patients, in communities of patients, for the providers that care for them, and in the lives of our volunteers, which is really rewarding.
Leveraging Technology to Help At-Risk Populations
From my perspective, the ideal use-case for telehealth is for the at-risk population. For these communities, visits to providers are an enormous burden from time off of work, childcare, transportation, and out-of-pocket costs.
I believe that an increasing number of studies will emerge supporting telehealth technology as a mechanism for improving outcomes for at-risk populations and lowering costs.
At The MAVEN Project, the physicians who volunteer benefit by being able to flexibly give back. We’re taking a workforce that is diminishing nationally (physicians are retiring from practice earlier) and re-inserting them back into the healthcare system. The primary care providers who are connecting with our volunteer physicians have support that they never had before; they are more confident in decisions they’re making; and they have people to connect with when they need guidance. Simultaneously, patients in need are now able to receive the care they need in their local clinics — avoiding the escalations of chronic conditions, ER visits, and hospitalizations, all of which represent a significant cost, burden, and stress to the patient and family. It gives me great joy and pride in knowing that we are not only providing a solution for one party, but also for all the parties with whom we engage.
Lightning Round
One thing I wish more people knew…that the gap in life expectancy between the wealthy and poor is 20 years in this country.
Best advice I’ve ever received or given…it’s important early on in your career to not focus on the journey of getting to the destination, but rather focus on being sure that you know which destination you are headed toward.
I can’t live without…my family, my dog, running, and chocolate.
Everybody needs some chocolate sometimes. (see a theme?!)
Favorites
TV shows: New Amsterdam
Books: Anything by Atul Gawande or Robin Cook, I also loved When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.
You can learn more about Dr. Lisa Levine and The MAVEN Project here.
Know a great female doctor in NYC? We’d love to meet her, introduce us here!
