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Dr. Sean Lansing (Host): Hello. My name is Dr. Sean Lansing and I serve Trinity Health as the Mission Leader for Mount Carmel Health System. On our podcast today is Tauana McDonald, President and COO of Mount Carmel Grove City Hospital. Tauana welcome to the podcast.

Tauana McDonald, FACHE (Guest): Well, thank you. I'm excited to be here today.

Host: Yeah, I'm excited to have you. Before we dive into the meat of the podcast, just a real quick way for folks to get to know you, who are listening. Can you talk a little bit about your professional journey? What brought you to Mount Carmel Grove City, and what brought you to Trinity Health?

Tauana: I've been with Trinity Health for about 18 years now. And so I started my journey with Trinity as part of the implementation of the electronic health record. So, prior to joining Trinity, I'd spent my time at IBM doing consulting, related to helping people use technology to solve business issues. And so when it was time to introduce the electronic health record, I thought, you know, I'd like to be a part of that. And Trinity was really on the forefront of that. And my first opportunity with Trinity was to help install our EMR at one of our locations in Michigan.

And spent a few years doing that. And within my time at Trinity, have had about eight different roles, all of them related to leading large scale change. So, meaningful use and ICD-10, when we changed our coding structure, I was responsible for that for Trinity Health. And then, also moved into the value-based space as we started moving away from volume and really focusing on value, the value that we're providing. I was working with Trinity to help us set the infrastructure up to participate in that. And one of the things that I quickly realized is that I really wanted to see all the things that we were doing at the corporate office. How does that look in the field?

How is that affecting our patients every day and our caregivers. And so I really wanted to get out to the field and that's how I got to Mount Carmel. And so I've been with Mount Carmel for four years and has just been the best role that I've had in all of my roles at Trinity, because I really get to see the impact of what we do every day.

Host: Well, speaking of patients and healthcare, right, so for the last 18 months we've been living in an, the overused term, unprecedented times, and certainly all the challenges brought about by coping with a global pandemic caused by COVID-19, but also the civil unrest that's gripped our country for the last 15, 16 months, in earnest, you know, it's a civil unrest. It's probably, it's been a part of our story as a country, but certainly has been a part of the forefront of many people's thoughts and energies for the last 15, 16 months, and in that time, so many things have happened and there's so many ways that people have been impacted, both our patients and our colleagues.

Can you talk about from your perspective, stories that kind of stick with you from this unbelievable time we've been in and how it's had an impact on you?

Tauana: The unprecedented times, that is a term that you hear a lot. And one of the things that I've been thinking about, as we have been living through this pandemic, is that our mission is always talks about being a transforming healing presence. And I don't think at any other time, other than when the sisters founded these organizations, that we've had the opportunity to be such a huge transforming healing presence. And what I got to see is how people really came together. It wasn't just doctors and nurses. Everybody said, I want to be a part of the solution and I want to be a part of taking care of patients and helping in any way that I can. One thing that I will always remember is, prior to becoming the President of Mount Carmel Grove City, I was the incident commander for COVID-19. And so one of the things that we realized early on at the whole country was that we didn't have enough PPE. We didn't have enough masks for our caregivers, these N-95 masks. So we had a hundred thousand masks that we had stored. And what we found when we went to use those masks was that they had some damage to them.

They were in good shape, but the elastic band was not working correctly, would not allow them to seal to the head correctly. And we asked people if they would come and help us sew those bands and we had colleagues come from all over our health system, any hallway, you went down, they set up sewing rooms and all 100,000 of those masks were repaired so that our colleagues could be safe and take care of patients. I had people calling saying, hey, I work in environmental services. I want to help, where do I go? I work at the front desk, so it wasn't just clinical people, but everybody came together. It takes a village, but never, at any other time, did I see us being such a huge transforming healing presence, as our mission calls us to be. The other thing sticks out for me with COVID is that we quickly expanded and went out into the community.

So, as others, were not serving, you know, the populations are some of our most at-risk populations, we continued to serve and actually added more resources during these times. And so all of those things, were things that just made me so proud to work for Mount Carmel and to be a part of this ministry. And, so those are the things that I'll remember is that in this time, when people are dying and sick and our colleagues are scared because the science is developing. During out this whole time, we don't really know the answers. We don't know, how contagious it is. All those things we were still learning that, and people just dove right in and said, I want to be a part of the solution. I want to be a transforming healing presence. Here's my opportunity. And let me do that.

Host: Yeah, I remember that, especially those first few months where we really, not only did we not know anything, the information we were getting every day was sometimes very different just because were getting the new learnings as they were coming out and the potential for that to cause so much anxiety was so high. I remember that as well, people just coming together and not letting that anxiety get the best of them, but just decided, you know what, we're in this together, we're going to move forward together. I remember walking past rooms and seeing folks, taking care of those N-95 masks.

And most of those people, if not all of them were never going to wear that mask because they weren't in the position where they were going to need that mask to wear it. But they were putting them together for their colleagues who they knew would need it to make sure that they were taken care of. It was really powerful.

Tauana: It was very powerful. I have pictures that I will, have framed and always just be a reminder to me that we do all serve together.

Host: Those masks, in some ways it's a little thing, changing the elastic band and it certainly, it's not going to be one of those things that makes the news. It's not going to be, we're not going to make t-shirts, I fixed elastic bands during COVID, you know? But, how important that was. I remember how as a system, how scared we were that we weren't going to have enough N-95 masks. And then we had a hundred thousand of them and then all of a sudden, the elastic bands were old. And so that work unsung, in the big scheme of things, it'll be a story that outside of this podcast, right, will be largely remain untold because of the lack of glamour. Yet it was so essential and so important. And so many people just jumped right in and got those things done. I mean, those, they were done pretty quickly too if I recall it was amazing.

Tauana: We set up a sign up genius and people signed up for shifts and came before work, after work, took them home and we got it done. We really did.

Host: With the motivation, just making sure we're keeping people safe, especially since we didn't know what was going on, for me, it speaks to both our commitment to safety as a core value, but also the integrity. This is who we say we are as part of our mission since day one. And this is how we stepped up and we just did it. We were who we said we were going to be. We didn't make a lot of headlines making sure that our commitment to those who are poor and underserved in our communities remained underserved and our resources were stretched to that time.

And I remember that as well, that deep, profound commitment to making sure that the most vulnerable in our communities weren't left behind, who are often left behind in the best of circumstances. And then, especially in the worst of circumstances. And, we worked to maintain our relationships with all of those people who deserve the best healthcare they can get. It's powerful stuff. It almost feels a little bit like we've got some breathing room and you know, I almost hesitate to say that, as we are in this time, but we have kind of shifted and started thinking about the future again, which for so long, the future was the next 15 hours, the next 24 hours. As you think about the future and who we are and who we are continue to become as a healthcare system, and just as a community in general; what are your hopes and fears for our future?

Tauana: My hope is that, we saw not only at Mount Carmel, could we all work together, all different roles, but we saw as a community, we could work together. So, you know, all of the health systems came together. Where, normally we would be called competitors. We were really collaborators and the power in that, of how we can really shift healthcare because people don't choose to be sick, it's not a choice. And so being able to provide services and to be creative and be able to do it on a broad scale, as a community, I think is a powerful thing. And I think it's a gift that we would be able to do that for the greater Columbus community. And so can we still maintain that and leverage those relationships we built across health systems and with the Department of Public Health to really make huge, impactful change related to healthcare disparities and just helping people have those things that they need to be healthy and to live their best life, from a health perspective. And so, I'm just really hopeful, that we are going to be able leverage what we started as part of COVID as a collaboration, to be able to use that, going forward.

So, I'm really hopeful. Just being able to make huge, impactful change. And also what we saw is that we could change on a dime. And so healthcare change is really slow. They always say that if something new comes in healthcare will take you 10 to 15 years to be able to really adopt it.

And now what we saw was Telemedicine. We flipped the switch overnight, and now that is ingrained in how we deliver care. And so I'm hopeful that we will be able to move quickly because we know that we're creative and we have technology and we have all the things to do it. And we know that when our backs were against the wall, we were able to make it happen. Now let's take advantage of that and figure out how we can fix some of these things that have been broken in healthcare for a long time, even faster.

Host: The pandemic created a level of urgency that we hadn't recognized before. And now we're going to get through this pandemic, but there's still a lot of healthcare disparities, a lot of need out there. And how can we maintain our level of urgency as a community to deal with these equally pressing and important needs for so many people in our community, as we move forward, learning the lessons that we learned of what's possible when we do that? I remember, we're working on, getting the vaccines out to folks and that's one of those things where you talked about, it's still an ongoing collaboration, as different healthcare organizations, we're kind of going back and getting back to our regular work and probably in some ways as competitors, but with this vaccine, it's all hands on deck still, and we're all working, making sure we're coordinating where we go and that no one's overlapping each other so that we're serving the community as best we can.

So, it's a really important lesson for us to continue to learn, as we think about the importance of every person's healthcare in the communities that we're serving. Anything else you want to make sure that our listeners know? Any kind of wisdom that you've learned from this time that is important for all of us to remember as we move forward?

Tauana: One of the things that I think has been really important and it's broader than a Mount Carmel it's, broader than Columbus; is that, you know, we always say this is a global society and COVID did not spare anyone, and so what it showed us is that at the most basic level, we are human and that we all have to come together to solve these issues that really affect our ability to function. COVID just affected everybody from every country. And it really, for me, opened my eyes to just how much we can't just be concerned about me.

We have to be concerned about the we. Because we're all interconnected. And I think that was a big lesson for us. We can solve COVID in the United States, but if we still have COVID in other countries and some of our less developed countries who maybe provide some of the things that we need, there's an effect for us. You know, there's an effect for us, just from a human level, because people are sick. But we have to think bigger and broader about how we are a global society, and I think COVID, showed us that. And I hope that we learn that lesson. That we really have to think bigger outside of just how this affects me and how we all have to think about how we make bigger global solutions that work for the masses.

Host: Yeah. When we talk about our Catholic sensibilities is, you know, one of those sensibilities is this idea of solidarity and it's a really profound and important part of our Catholic social teaching this idea that we are all deeply interconnected with each other and certainly the pandemic has reminded us of how deeply connected our lives and our fate are together.

It reminds me of an organization, Catholic Relief Services, who is an organization with the, the United States Catholic Church that serves all over the world. And they always talk about us being one human family. And that's kind of what you're talking about, you know, we really have to remember we're all one human family.

Tauana: We are. And I think that we forget that sometimes. We may not speak the same language and we may eat different foods, but at the base, we're human and we're one human family, just like you said. And I think COVID showed that.

Host: Well, our time is coming to an end, Tauana. And I really want to thank you all who are listening and Tauana, I really want to thank you for spending your time with us. I know you're busy and have so many responsibilities and service to all of our colleagues. But I really appreciate you being able to spend time with us today to talk about our values and, and just share a little bit about the wisdom you've learned over the last 16 to 18 months. So, thank you so much for that.

Tauana: Well, thank you. I appreciate it.

Host: All right. Well, I'm your host, Sean Lansing. Until next time, be well.