Delvecchio Finley is one of the most accomplished men in the healthcare field. His career highlights span both coasts and could take a lot of ink were they all written down. He’s the president and CEO of Atrium Health Navicent, but those are just the formal titles. He is a board member of the American Hospital Association and the Health Affairs Council on Healthcare Spending and Value. He was recently elected to the boards of the Georgia Hospital Association and the Georgia Alliance of Community Hospitals.
Finley is the immediate past chair of America’s Essential Hospitals Institute. He was also the chair-elect of the California Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems and a member of the California Hospital Association board of directors. Board certified in healthcare management and a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE), Finley recently completed a term on the ACHE Board of Governors. That’s why Munson Steed thought Finley would be the ideal person to talk to about various issues. Their conversation follows.
[Editor’s note: This is an extended transcription. Some errors may occur.]
Munson Steed: Hey, everybody! This is Munson Steed and welcome to another edition of CEO to CEO. In this case, I have my dear brother, who truly is a leader. He’s called “president” but we consider many of these titles the same. He is definitely in charge when you think about health disparities. When you think about the beginning of where we all started, which is in some type of health care, we must continue to find that place as a child, from life to birth. We need care… Welcome, my dear brother. How are you, brother Finley?
Delvecchio Finley: Doing well, Munson; it’s great to see you, man. How are you?
MS: Great to see you. For over 24 years, rolling out has been providing insight, obviously, on this platform. You, being a brother inside the system of health care, see and hear about the disparities. From your leadership, what should we, as a community, begin to do differently that you don’t see really happening, that you’d like to encourage us to join you on your journey inside the health system?
DF: Well, that’s a really, really great question. And before I answer, let me just say it’s a privilege and an honor to be a part of this, and to add to the rich legacy that is, what you are dealing with, with rolling out, and the outreach that you do, all the education, inspiration, encouragement you provide to your viewership and the audience. And so again, [it’s] just a privilege and honor to be a part of that. So, thank you for that.
I guess I was saying in response to your question, I wanna be careful. I think I do see these things, but I really would encourage and love to see more of it, and that really is just more proactive ownership of our health and understanding the importance of our health as a foundation for so many other things that we do or can do in life. As a leader for a health care organization, very proud to be a part of Atrium Health, which is a part of now Advocate Health, one of the largest integrated delivery systems in the country, and we promote what we call our “for all” mission.
So, we promote in advance health and healthcare, obviously, but hope and healing for all, and we believe that all three of those things are important. And so a big portion of that is people leaning in, taking active engagement in care delivery being a part of the conversation and the work. So, seeing more people engage with their healthcare providers where there’s doctors, nurses in a more transparent, a much more accountable way, where people are asking questions and questioning things. If they don’t sound quite right or they don’t make sense.
I think it’s incumbent on us to make sure that we have the requisite knowledge that we need to advance and support our own health as a means of the end, supporting our ability to lead more active full lifestyles. and supporting ourselves and our families. So, I really love and appreciate. I like seeing signals that people are doing that, and they feel like they have the agency to do that. And I would love it if many more people both knew that and did that.
MS: It’s a powerful word, “agency.” If there were three things that you would like us to do as we take agency, as it relates to our health and be in charge. What would you suggest we begin to do, to establish as a health protocol, as it relates to taking, maybe agency back that you don’t even know you have.
Atrium CEO says, ‘Basics still matter’
DF: Sure, great. So, I’ll tell you this, one of the benefits of…talking to someone like me is, I’m a healthcare executive but I didn’t come up through a clinical route. I studied chemistry undergrad and learned that science didn’t love me nearly as much as I once did, or it did. So, I come at it certainly from a professional perspective, but also in that respect a link perspective. And one of the things that allows me to do in response to your question is to say things like, the basics still matter, right?
So, the basics of health care of getting out and being active. And one thing I learned last year, really even, I should say, to relearn is the power of walking, man. We hear often about getting 5,000, 10,000, I think the recommendations now are up to about 8,000 steps a day, but moving actively and consistently every single day does so much for not just your physical health, but your mental health and well-being. I actually put on my headphones, and I walk around my driveway or in my neighborhood. Just do circles and go and take myself away. Get my mind clear.
And I’m telling you just that sole act of actual physical engagement particularly now in this world that we’re always on, screens like this, or watching television and things like that and leaving these otherwise sedentary lifestyles. Moving matters, moving matters a lot in terms of like, I said, physical and mental wellbeing. Obviously, what you eat. So those basic, all those things are really important. But to the extent that anyone either has an acute condition or chronic condition and you’re engaging with health professionals. Go with questions. Go with questions around, “Hey, I’m not feeling well,” and if someone tells you, “Hey, you need to take this medication.”
I’m a big proponent of tell me what this is supposed to do, and tell me what I’m supposed to feel, because medication has benefits. Sometimes it has side effects, a lot of times, it has side effects, and I need to know when something’s not quite right, so that I know to actively engage with you. And then the last thing I would say around, that is. Don’t be afraid to bring someone with you. So if you particularly, no matter where you are, if it’s a language issue, if it’s a comprehension issue or if you just want somebody cause you’re ill. Sometimes your mind is not completely flowing.
If you bring a loved one or a family friend with you and invite them. Someone you trust, I believe, into that setting. It can be a traditional clinical appointment, a hospital visit or virtual appointment, having someone beside to say, this is what I heard. Did you hear that? Or someone to say, Hey, remember how you were complaining about this before you got on this call or went to this office. Maybe we should ask about that. That buddy system, I think, is that kind of it takes a village thing, and doing that type of thing again, just helps us to have that agency, helps us to know that when we show up in these rooms.
Closing the gaps on disparities
One, we’re all here to serve people and we’re trying to create that space where we close gaps of what we see in terms of outcomes for communities, whether they are communities of color, whether they are gender-based disparities, where there’s social, economic based disparities and the extent to which our community engages and helps the providers, makes all of us stronger, as a result.
MS: You talked about movement, I think the one thing about the entire aspect of health and increasing our health IQ, is to have accountability partners. So that there’s somebody taking some accountability. Not for all of your health, but some part of it, whether you’re my food buddy, and we actually prep food together. You prep food for me, I prep for you. You talked about movement and numbers. Somebody knows what my blood pressure number is, if I’m having complications with it, somebody who really understands what it is, as it relates to my sugar level, so that they can understand that.
How important is it for us to have members of our team to be accountable, and to help us move out of the shame and stigma that come with saying, blood pressure high today. I need peace.
DF: Yeah.
MS: …then the person says, “Well, did you take your medicine today? You know it might be a good start.”
DF:: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It’s really, really important, man. And your question makes me think of two examples that I gladly share. I was one of the unfortunate people that, right when this is heartening back to COVID, that the throes of COVID-19 right when the vaccine had been released and we were distributing it. And you remember there was prioritization for the chronically ill and highly vulnerable, and then it was health care workers.
COVID forced CEO to get honest with himself, others
Well, right when we were getting it to the healthcare workers, I got COVID. I was home one day with my wife and daughter, and just all of a sudden had this rush of symptoms, and just thought that I was tired, or whatever it turns out, I was COVID-positive. And I isolated for a while, and I was monitoring my vital signs. I saw my O2 saturation and my blood pressure! And I started not being honest with my wife. I was in a room by myself, and I didn’t want to be a burden, right? So, I stopped telling her. And then one night I got really ill and ended up having to go to the hospital.
She got really, really upset with me, and she wouldn’t trust me anymore. So, I couldn’t just text her what my vitals were. I had to take a picture of them because she was like, you won’t tell me what’s going on with you and that’s not okay. So, it made me accountable. She loves me and she wants me to be okay. So sometimes it’s not even just a shame of Stigma, you don’t want to be a burden to people. You realize people really care for you. They want you to let them know and they want to help you. They want you to want to help yourself, but they also want to help you.
So I say that and right now I’m actually, I was out of the gym for about three months. Kind of doing my thing and started realizing the belt got a little tighter. My buddy gave me some tough love, and now we’re in a challenge now. He’s like you hate losing money. So if you don’t go to the gym, this many times this month. You’re gonna pay me some money, and I’m like, “All right you got me.” So, I’m in the gym largely for myself, but also, so I don’t have to pay him some money. So, you can make this fun but it’s people who care about you, and I think the extent to having accountability pieces. You can also return that back to them as well.
MS: I love that and then as brothers we have the shame, and we don’t want to be vulnerable. And yet you and I both know brothers that have had strokes because they wouldn’t report their numbers or they wouldn’t take the medicine, or it affected their sex life, and they wouldn’t talk to their doctor about it. So they’re having complications at home and shame and guilt in their mind, and knowing that, you’re gonna be off your medicine so you can think you’re happy, but then you stroke out. Can we share why and how, just in terms of, these chronic diseases that are hitting a stroke. heart disease for women. How can we understand that we have to at least establish a protocol of self maintenance in a health system? Like plug in.
DF: Yup, yeah. I think one of the, perhaps one of the most important things is that we realize a lot of these situations are, they can be lifestyle-driven, and it can be, risk factors associated with some behaviors or activities we’re engaging. So whether we’re smoking, we’re not exercising, we don’t live healthily those kinds of things, but also genetics. And genetics, we don’t get to choose what kind of lineage we came up through. You can have the exact same behaviors as someone else and your situation or it impacts you differently than those in individuals.
So, I think part of this is like just giving ourselves what I call the grease of saying, hey, we’re all human, and we all, last time I check, none of us [is] perfect and it’s just really uncommon on us to really appreciate that It’s important to have relationships with individuals who are accepting of you, whoever you are or wherever you are, and it’s important for you to accept who you are. So I think one of the things I’ve been really impressing, I’d say, I don’t wanna paint too broad of a brush. It’s not exclusively an African American thing. It’s not exclusively people from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds like myself.
But oftentimes we had a lot of stigmas put on us and we internalize them. We own them as if they were ours in our baggage to carry. And it’s like, No, that’s actually somebody else’s problem. You let it go. You accept who you are, because that then it becomes the beginning of others accepting you who you are, or quite honestly, if they don’t accept it, then you know who to avoid, who not to to be around. And I think one, I just really hope I would say broadly that we are much more sort of accepting of people as who they are. And while we may have a sort of belief system, and otherwise that says what’s right and what’s wrong. And, sort of judge people by that type of thing.
I think at the end of day, if we realize that people are people, we create the space where people can actually be accepting. You can create the space where people want to engage you, and also be the type of person that people want to engage in support. So I hope in, particularly as I’ll say brother to brother here. We do a better job. I am privileged. Shout out to my group! We call ourselves 4 brothers. My daughter laughs at that ‘cause she knows I only have one brother, but these are my brothers, and we talk about mental health issues. We talk about challenges. We talk about how bad my golf game sucks.
They give me a lot of heart grief about that. But we support one another, and we have those chances to be vulnerable in ways that. It’s funny, we think back in society we didn’t accept those types of things before. But I think we’re trying to model that in such a way that we tell each other we love you, we care about you. How’s your family doing? How are you doing? And I think all those things lead to the type of trusting relationships where you can open up about challenges that may be difficult. They’re tough to talk about, and don’t want to talk to everybody about them, but you need somebody to talk to. I think we all need that.
MS: It’s part of the mental health effort to have counselling and you may not believe it at first, but even having brothers that you can be honest about, so that you can kind of have a gut check. You can kinda say, you isolate, what’s going on? I hadn’t heard from you. How’s that? You know I was telling my wife, I said I could tell on myself on any given day, I can tell on myself. I got enough brothers to count all of my things.
DF: Yeah, yeah.
Getting help before there’s a crisis …
MS: That we, mental health. How do we lean in as a community? So, we don’t see the paranoia, the just fatigue that women deal with from a stressful, how can they tap in, and at least get some level of counseling, whether it’s virtual or others? How important is it just to get and to seek help before there’s a crisis?
DF: Yeah, yeah, it’s funny. I’m sorry trying to listen to this and engaging in this conversation, thinking, my wife is gonna look at me like, “Buddy, are you listening to your own advice?” So, I would say this, yeah, I think everybody is important, for you kind of know where you are. And I saw some recently, like a lot of men on online dating apps are now in our office, and they’re in therapy, and whether or not that’s a good thing. I don’t know. I don’t pretend to begin to understand that but what I would say is, for quite some time we, I think in mass it could be argued that we weren’t taking care of our mental health. And being mindful of how that then can contribute to a host of other things that can get out of whack, relationships, performance in work, in school, and in other settings, as well as just kind of healthiness in general.
So, mental health takes on all their forms, right? There’s online therapy. There’s more like, kind of outpatient forms of counseling and therapy and targeted for certain things. So you can get marriage and family therapy. You can even get coaching, if you need that type of thing. It comes as a whole continuum. What I love about this is that it’s increasingly destigmatized that people are understanding like, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with talking to people. I mean, high-performance individuals have been doing this for long.
You think about any sort of professional actors, athletes obviously, models, other people. That’s therapy, that’s counseling, that’s coaching to make you better. And this is just like, how do I get through the day negotiating the challenges that life throws at me in such a way that I can feel fully engaged. I can feel like I’m self-actualizing. I can feel like I’m working through some of those challenges and not repeating patterns or bad hay behaviors, because sometimes this stuff is emotional, sometimes behavioral, sometimes it’s chemical, biological.
And all those things contribute to factors where we need professionals, I will say, from a professional perspective and healthcare, and particularly in this country, we could do a lot better. We have such an unmet need. And unfortunately, that need is further, longer continuum where people’s conditions are much more acute and chronic. Because we haven’t dealt with it sooner. So I think the extent to which we as a profession can support and encourage more people to pursue professions in mental health, and support their ability to get into those practices, and sustainably lead those practices. We could do a lot better in supporting individuals who are making that effort to try to seek help, get support and improve themselves.
MS: Just thanks for that and for me, I guess the hoping, being able to share whether it’s brother to brother, whether it’s the counselor to counselor. Whether it’s therapist to therapist is just harm reduction like not adding smoking to it to cope, not adding drinking to it to cope. But knowing that there is help available so that you don’t have to kind of substitute to create your own balance and then ultimately create other harm in terms of hurting yourself, trying to manage your stress, which took a walk. It would be a little bit better than smoking a cigarette.
DF: Agree.
MS: Additional circumstances. If you were giving a speech at Morehouse or Emory, and you were going to encourage more young brothers and sisters and just humans in general to get into the health field, to be the future CEOs in the health field. What would the title of your speech be? And what would the 2 things you do to challenge them?
DF: Wow! That’s a great question. I would say, I’m gonna borrow something that we use in our organization, which I’ve actually used a lot as a platform for my term as chair of the American College of the Healthcare Executives is finding your purpose. So, I think I am in the profession, and I feel very privileged to be in this profession largely because of a huge sense of understanding. At least, I believe I understand what my purpose is, and it is largely informed by my background.
I was raised by a single mom in public housing and also for a good portion of a life raised by my aunt, who instilled in me a lot of great values around service, and giving back, and being a voice for the voiceless, or those who perceive themselves to be the voiceless. And so, I think the profession of healthcare, whether you’re on the clinical side or the non-clinical side, is about serving others, and creating conditions where people can be better, and can be helped to be better. So, I think I would say that the title would probably be connecting to purpose.
Challenge the status quo
And I think you said two pieces of advice that I would give to individuals, I would say from this profession. Don’t be afraid to challenge the status quo. I think that, for better or for worse, we have a lot to do in this field with respect to improving equitable access for everyone across our country. In a country, I should say, as resource-rich as we are. We still have way too much disproportionate access to services, disproportionate outcomes, and all the other sorts of things. And a lot of that is fueled by how it’s structured, and how care is financed and delivered.
It’s tough to do that in real time to make monumental changes, but I think, again, I’m privileged to be a part of an organization where we’re trying to really buck that trend in some very substantial ways. I know there are others that are doing that as well, and I commend them. I think, anyway, that we try to. I hate this word sometimes, but I’m gonna use it. But disrupt things in such a way that they’re designed to create a better outcome, and not just to accept the status quo. I think that’s great. And then I would say, and then the latter part of it, I say, do it with a sense of making the world a better place than you found it.
MS: Well, I wanna thank you for that. There is a book out that talks about living long and living in purpose is one of those things that allows you to live a long, long time. I want to thank you, Delvecchio Finley for really being a part as a CEO to give us an inside view on how not only we can help heal and leave hope, as we all encourage each other to increase our Health IQ. And truly get the vision of people seeing a leader like you, and an example of what we all can choose to be if we choose to be a CEO in this world, make a difference in our community and in the future generations, just being able to see who and what you do each and every day. I’m Munson Steed.
