Dr. Laura Roberts focused on the ways human interactions and personal stories can illustrate big-picture ideas Tuesday, during remarks she delivered as one of three candidates to replace retiring OHSU President Joe Robertson. After delivering her prepared remarks, Roberts was asked a series of questions identical to those posed to Jay Hess, the first presidential candidate to present at OHSU.
The final candidate will make his presentation Thursday, after which OHSU leaders will collect community feedback via an online survey and the university’s board will name its choice to replace Robertson.
All three candidates were asked to prepare speeches on the same topic, Robertson said as he introduced Roberts: the future of academic health centers, and OHSU’s role in that future.
“Those are big questions, kind of abstract,” Roberts said, as she took to the stage, facing an audience of several hundred invited guests and an online OHSU audience that watched via livestream. Rather than focus on the abstraction, she got personal.
“I want to tell you about one of the very first patients in my care,” she said, recounting a young man with aggressive incurable cancer who she met during in the south side of Chicago during her third year of medical school.
The patient had enrolled in a clinical trial that had no potential to cure his own disease, but could expand scientific understanding, Roberts said. “He was unbelievably stoic. On the last day of his life he told me he could not beat the odds, he would not beat cancer, but he hoped that his participation in the clinical trial would make a difference.”
That patient was one of many people to teach her critical lessons over the course of her career, Roberts said.
“There is an entire medical school in every patient. Our patients are our best teachers,” she continued, saying that it’s a critical role of academic medical centers to create an opportunity for students to learn medicine, ethics and respect for these patients.
“We work to transform health,” she said, outlining five missions for academic medical centers:
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Advancing science
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Clinical innovation and service
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Educational excellence
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Engagement, collaboration and partnership
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Leadership.
Turning specifically to OHSU, Roberts listed strengths:
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Its status as a public corporation.
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Its role as an institution of higher education with a focus on the health professions and science.
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Its role as a platform for the advancement of science and technology
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And its position as an academic health system with robust and growing partnerships.
Roberts described OHSU as an economic engine, with 16,000 employees, $4.3 billion in annual impact, and a broad depth of service to Oregon combined with a strong reputation and global impact.
But all academic health centers face challenges, and Roberts focused on six:
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Strategic forward transition of the culture with a focus on inclusiveness, sustainability, transparency and accountability.
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Strategic advancement of key priorities and continuum of sciences.
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Strategic development, growth and partnership across the system – keeping high value, high quality, evidence driven care that serves people of all backgrounds, and balances payer mix.
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Strategic embrace of population health by all health professionals, which includes identifying and developing new practices.
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Strategic focus on educational innovation; continuous learning; decreasing barriers like student debt.
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Collaboration and partnership across sectors, with mutual goal setting.
“I could list more, and in the big picture we have a lot to do, and OHSU needs to focus on this while running the day to day things –teaching, keeping the lights on, running the laboratory,” she said. “We cannot over promise and under deliver.”
After her presentation, Roberts responded in depth to a question about diversity and inclusiveness, saying her strategies to support a diverse and inclusive culture would be multi-fold: “attending to structural issues of symmetry and fairness, making sure opportunities for success and achievement are made clear and available to all who do good work, incentivizing this kind of work… and building a leadership team where it’s very evident that you value diversity, you value the different professions, in terms of the leadership team, the distribution of resources, the lived experiences, and the ways of living.
Responding to another question, she acknowledged the role that fundraising has come to play as central to any university president’s work.
“When you go to medical school, you never think you’re going to spend half your time doing fundraising,” Roberts said.
“I spend a lot of time on philanthropy right now,” she continued. She is a professor and chairwoman of the Stanford University School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and chief of Psychiatry for Stanford Health Care. “I welcome the opportunity to do more. It’s all about relationship building.”
After the final presidential candidate presents his remarks on Thursday, faculty, staff and students at OHSU will be given about 24 hours to respond to online surveys that will be given to the OHSU board. Stay tuned for continuing coverage from The Lund Report.
Reach Courtney Sherwood at [email protected].
