INTERVIEW SERIES

Meet Community Member
Andrew Wiesenthal, MD, SM
Managing Director (Retired),
Deloitte Consulting, LLP

Available On

Connect with:

Transcript

Douglas Riddle (00:02)

Hello, I'm here in the studio with Dr. Andrew Wiesenthal, who is a member of the Leadership Council and has been a mentor for Carol Emmott Fellows at least since the second class. I see you had Philynn Hepschmidt, who I think was in CEF2, and every year since you've had a mentor. So that's been a terrific contribution. We appreciate that very much.

Andy was at Deloitte, before that with the Permanente Foundation, was responsible for a bunch of things I'm going to ask you about later, and is a board-certified pediatrician and expert in pediatric infectious diseases.

You can read the rest of his background. It goes on for quite a while, but I want to get into the conversation as soon as I can. Welcome, Andy. Good to see you.

Andy Wiesenthal (00:33)

Good to be here. Thank you.

Douglas Riddle (01:01)

I didn't warn you I'd ask about this, but I have spies everywhere, and I understand that you worked as a disc jockey when you were in college. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Is that accurate?

Andy Wiesenthal (01:15)

Well, I did. That is accurate. I was a disc jockey at college and also during college in New York. And then afterwards, when I went to medical school, I did some work at what was then called the Listener-Sponsored Radio Station in New York. Now it would be part of the National Public Radio System, WBAI.

So I, yes, I was a disc jockey. This was in the 1960s. I did the rock and roll part of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll. We won't talk about the rest of it, whether I did that or not.

Douglas Riddle (02:03)

That's great. So, you made a career change at some point, which led you, even, I understand, you worked for a couple of years for Dr. Anthony Fauci. Is that true?

Andy Wiesenthal (02:14)

No. Tony Fauci was at the NIH, and in between my residency in pediatrics and my fellowship in pediatric infectious diseases, I was what's called an epidemic intelligence service officer. So I was in the commission core of the public health service. I worked for and was trained by the Centers for Disease Control, but not the NIH.

I was stationed in Illinois and was a field officer for two years. The pediatric infectious diseases community and the overall infectious diseases specialty community were not very large in that era. You know, when I trained in the early eighties, we all kind of knew each other, but I would not say that Tony Fauci would remember me or be able to pick me out of a lineup.

Douglas Riddle (03:12)

That's fine. Well, so we won't call on you directly to get a connection with him, but we'll keep that in mind anyway.

What led you to pediatrics as a specialty?

Andy Wiesenthal (03:25)

It just clicked for me. I've always enjoyed children, even when I was one. And, you know, I just was attracted to working with kids. I had a real affinity for working with them. When I was in medical school, part of my medical school curriculum was to be in a family practice where we had patients, a small number of patients, who were our own, of all ages. And I just liked taking care of the kids. And so it just was a natural thing for me.

I never thought I would do anything different. I do think that one experience in childhood may have had an effect on that. And that was, I was hurt pretty badly and spent a number of months in the hospital. When I was nine, I spent the better part of a year sort of getting better from the injury. And when I was a pediatric resident, I wondered if that had affected me.

The hospitalization experience was absolutely wretched. And I was old enough to sort of get past it, but it was in an era when parents were considered an interference in hospital routine, and they were allowed to visit for one hour a day. And I was on my back the whole time that I was there. And I just remember listening. It was a ward, a pediatric ward, and everybody was crying all the time. And I could never see them because I was on my back.

And so I would think of them as the babies. I didn't know how old they were, but they all seemed like they were very little. And they cried all the time, except for one hour a day when their parents were allowed to come see them. And I must have concluded in my little nine-year-old mind that I was going to do something to make that better. So that was what I did. And I did a very informal survey of all of the other pediatric residents who were in my group and my cohort. And of the 20 of us, 15 had had significant illnesses and hospitalizations as children.

Douglas Riddle (05:55)

I haven't seen that article yet, Andy.

Andy Wiesenthal (05:57)

I didn't write an article, and I don't think it was a very scientific sample. And I don't know if it would hold up today, but it was sort of a curious thing to me. And so that may have had something to do with it. So I liked kids, and I wanted to take my experience and turn it into something better than it had been.

Douglas Riddle (06:09)

How did you get into healthcare leadership from that?

Andy Wiesenthal (06:23)

So, you made a little mistake in my background. The entity that I was in before I joined Deloitte was something called the Permanente Federation. There is a foundation, but that's a charitable enterprise. The Permanente Federation is the umbrella organization for all of the Permanente medical groups, which are the medical groups that are the physician arm of the partnership that is Kaiser Permanente. And so I was a physician with the Permanente Medical Group in Colorado. And because of my background, I got tasked with building the quality measurement and quality improvement programs of the medical group and Kaiser Permanente in Colorado in general.

So that was my first invitation to do something other than just taking care of patients, which was fine with me. And again, because I had been trained as an epidemiologist, the other doctors thought that I could do that well. And I was interested in it because of that. And it just continued from there. The medical groups in Kaiser are self-governing entities. They're professional corporations.

So I was elected to the board of the medical group in Colorado, and I became a sort of, we didn't call it that, but what looks like an executive vice president of that medical group. One of the things I did was to work on automating health data and building from scratch, electronic medical records, so that I could measure stuff. Because otherwise, all we had were chart reviews. This was in the 1980s.

And I decided we needed an electronic medical records. So I basically led a project to build and implement one in Kaiser Permanente in Colorado and succeeded. And because of that, my punishment was to be asked to do it all over again for all of Kaiser Permanente. So I was seconded to this national entity, the Permanente Federation, and led Kaiser's implementation of electronic medical records nationally.

And we succeeded at that, too, although it took a little longer than the one in Colorado. It took us five years. So that's one of my kind of, I don't know if you're a Gilbert and Sullivan fan, but they're often in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. They will say, "How did you become a judge?" And, you know, it's this series of stupid and unrelated steps that kind of get you to be the judge or the captain of the pinafore or whatever it is.

That's how I ended up in medical leadership. Along the way, the Permanente Medical Groups take very seriously the idea of teaching doctors how to lead. They invested in me as I became a board member and an executive with the medical group, and then an executive at the national level to train me as a physician leader to teach me economics, at least economics in healthcare, to teach me management skills and styles, to teach me about fiduciary responsibility, and so on. And so it wasn't like I was tossed into it with absolutely no help at all.

There's a long tradition of training physicians to lead at Kaiser Permanente because they are the leaders of the organization. And then they take it very seriously.

So that's how I got to where I got to. And when I got to Deloitte, it was not a huge surprise to me to see that elsewhere physicians were being asked to do leadership things. And they were being just sort of tossed into the deep end of the pool with no help at all. And some of them are good at it, and some of them weren't and failed.

So I made it part of my personal mission as a consultant to try to change that, to amplify opportunities for physicians to learn how to lead. And that's, in a way, how I came to Barbara Anderman and Carol Emmott's attention when they were at Russell Reynolds, and how Barbara and I became friends, and we talked about that a lot.

Douglas Riddle (11:20)

When did you go back? Did you go back to school for the Harvard Master's in Health Care Management? When did you do that?

Andy Wiesenthal (11:28)

I did that in 2002. So I've been at the national level for a couple of years, and two and a half things stimulated me to go. I had had a lot of executive, you know, certificate-type of business training at KP and lots of big and little courses.

But I thought I needed something in greater depth because I was dealing with the project I was co-leading, which had more than 4000 FTEs working on it. The budget over a 10-year period was going to be several billion dollars. And I felt like I needed to learn more about the financial aspects of management than I already had been exposed to.

At that point in my life, I wanted to go back to what I kept thinking of as a real school. I didn't want to do an executive program for a week or a weekend or something like that. I wanted to get to real school. And at the time, just by accident, I got a postcard in the mail from this program. I don't know if you've ever read a book called House of God. A lot of doctors have read it. It's a sort of loosely disguised description of a real person's actual residency and internship. And it's a disguised picture of what the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston was like in the late sixties and early seventies.

There are actually people in there that I knew, you know, could tell who they knew, who they were. But anyway, there's this one character named Chuck, and people keep asking Chuck why he's doing what he's doing. And his answer that he got a postcard, and it was sort of a metaphor for an opportunity that came my way. I realized it was an opportunity and I took it.

So I literally got this postcard from the program at Harvard, and I thought, hell, this is what I'm looking for. And I called them up and I asked them if I was too old to do it. They were aiming for what they called mid-career physician leaders. And at that point, I thought I was right, well past the middle of my career as a physician leader. And they said, "No, no, you're not too old." And of course, I think they were motivated by the fact that he wanted to enroll somebody. But I went and it was wonderful. It was a real school. I mean, you know, we had to put in as many classroom hours as any master's students at the School of Public Health. And I had, you know, lots and lots of wonderful experiences with my colleagues, other students in the class, as well as the professors.

So I learned a lot, and I did get a master's degree. I went to commencement, put on a cap and gown, the whole nine yards, in 2004 when I did it. It was fun.

Douglas Riddle (14:42)

Lovely. Can you tell me a little bit about the cohort dynamics of that group? I'm curious, you know, because cohorts are very important to the Fellowship and the Foundation.

Andy Wiesenthal (14:53)

We became stunningly close. There were about 24 of us, I think, and all physicians at various points, but not sort of freshly minted and not at the end of our careers. All different kinds of health care organizations and practices across the country. And the way that it worked was for each of two summers, we spent three straight weeks in class and together, just morning and night.

And then over the course of each of the subsequent years, there would be five long weekends where you would get there on a Thursday night, be there Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and then go home Monday night. So lots and lots of contact with each other. And we, you know, in a sense, lived together, ate together, had projects that we talked about in great depth with each other. And so we even decided to have a celebration when we graduated. We called it the seniors' prom, and we had a dance and a banquet; the spouses came. It was a very, very tight group. And you know, I still keep in touch with a number of them over the last 20 years or so. So it was a very important phase in my life and in the lives of many of us.

Douglas Riddle (16:33)

Yeah, I'm just kind of pressing on it because I've been in leadership development for almost three decades. And so often in the early years, particularly, these kinds of cohort effects were seen as some kind of a side effect, a byproduct, not as core. But I think we've learned from that. And that's been central to the development of the Carol Emmott Fellowship, that the cohort is a lifelong resource for those who will use it.

Andy Wiesenthal (17:02)

It is and it was. You know, so for example, not all of us did different things, but everybody in the cohort knew that I was deeply involved with developing the implementation plan and actually implementing the electronic health record at Kaiser. Over time, Kaiser was an early adopter. So many of them were involved in those kinds of implementations after that. And they all called on me. And that was fine.

You know, they all said, well, did you encounter this? Did you encounter it? So we were part of a network of people each. You know, one guy was a senior executive at the Red Cross and was deep with blood banking and disaster relief. Several others were very deeply into quality measurement and improvement. There were all kinds of skills and skill sets in the cohort that everybody knew about because we had been with each other.

As I said, I spent multiple hours doing stuff. And we called on each other for years. It's dwindled over time. Most of the cohort is retired from what they were doing now. But it was very valuable.

Douglas Riddle (18:17)

That's great. So, talk to me a little bit about Barbara Anderman, and who was at that time associated with Carol Emmott. So they persuaded you, or you were seeking, or how did we make the shift from leadership in these large healthcare providers to the consulting world?

Andy Wiesenthal (18:43)

It was from me going to Deloitte. So I had been at Kaiser Permanente for 28 years. I had reached a point where, from a sort of rules-based approach, I was able to take early retirement, full early retirement if I wanted to. The electronic health record was fully deployed everywhere in Kaiser, which meant that this big thing that I had been in charge of was successful and done.
I was there trying to help leverage it, to use it, to make things better. But I always had this sense that there was a risk, as you reach the conclusion of various phases like that in your professional life, that you can get stale.

You can keep doing what you're doing, but it's not challenging or different anymore. And you can get stale. And so I decided that I needed to do something different. And my whole professional life had been sort of phased like that. If you think about what we've been talking about, the first eight to 10 years after I completed all of my training were pretty much practice, patient care, all of it with some additional tasks and duties, kind of as assigned, right? Then I shifted into doing quality work, learning about measuring quality, learning the techniques, and getting trained to be a little bit more of a leader and being in charge of program development for quality measurement and other aspects of non-operational programs at Kaiser in Colorado.

So I was still taking care of patients, a little bit more focused on just my infectious disease patients. Again, that was the depth of the HIV pandemic, still doing that. But I have these other things that are pretty core to my work. That was phase two. Phase three was all electronic health records stuff, all day, all night. And the quality work was a little secondary, still doing a little bit of patient care, but not very much anymore. Just trying to keep myself sharp, if I could.

And I reached the end of that, and I realized I needed to do something different. And I was because I was at Kaiser, so that's a well-reputed organization in healthcare, and it's big. We have succeeded at something that everybody now is going to try to do, which is put an electronic health record in. I was recruited, you know, and Barbara and Carol were recruiting me for different positions. So people were interested in me. That was novel. Nobody had done that before. But I decided this was a new postcard, right? And the postcard came, and I thought, you know, maybe I should take it seriously.

And several of the major consulting firms and some other big hospital systems recruited me, and I paid attention and decided to retire from Kaiser and become a management consultant at Deloitte. It didn't seem completely alien to me because, again, I had already gotten that master's degree. I had a lot of training in management and in finance that I hadn't had before.

I had been an executive at a very large organization, which equipped me for a lot of things in terms of helping other large organizations. And this may strike you as strange, but being an infectious diseases consultant is like being a management consultant in really important ways. It's very similar, even though it's clinical care versus non-clinical care.

Being a consultant is being consulted. People encounter a problem with a patient, and it's either because they don't understand what's going on and they need some help figuring it out, or they know what's going on but they don't know what to do. And they call an expert and they ask you to tell them, are we on the right track? Are we doing the right things here? If we're not, what would you recommend we do? How should we approach this? How should we deal with the issues? What should we anticipate in terms of issues?

When I describe infectious disease consulting in that generic way, doesn't it sound like management consulting to you? And of course, the denouement is that they don't have to do what you suggest, and they usually don't. The same thing is true for management consulting. And so I was used to putting in a lot of time and then having the clients say, you know, I'm not gonna do it that way. And that didn't bother me quite as much as it might have.

So that was an easy transition, or easier than it might appear on the surface. And yeah, it was. It was a good, new challenge, a different kind of thing to learn. And I enjoyed it. It was great. And I would have retired a little earlier except I joined Deloitte in 2010.

Douglas Riddle (23:57)

Well, the timing was right for you, is what I hear too. It's just key.

Andy Wiesenthal (24:20)

And I became, I was 70 in 2020. So I was sort of using that as a kind of pegged milestone, but the pandemic hit. And so there I was, a senior infectious disease physician with expertise in health information technology and in quality assessment and management, having done vaccine research when I was a more junior physician.

So, this pandemic comes; it sounds horrible, but I was made for that. So I had a brand new job for three more years of guiding the firm itself, Deloitte, through the pandemic, but also Deloitte's clients.

Douglas Riddle (24:51)

Right? All the vectors arrived at the same time.

Andy Wiesenthal (25:17)

And that was very gratifying for me. And then I retired.

Douglas Riddle (25:23)

I want to ask you just briefly before we're done, a little bit about your experience as a national mentor for Carol Emmott Fellows. These are some of the top women mid-career in healthcare in our country. And you've had quite an interesting range of leaders from across the country, with a real, actually quite a wide variety of backgrounds, but obviously tapping into your expertise in information technology and some of that as well.

Talk to me a little bit about that experience for you. And in particular, you've now had eight, and you have a current mentee, I believe, from our ninth class, talk a little bit about what they've said to you that has been valuable about the relationship. I'm just curious what you heard from your mentees.

Andy Wiesenthal (26:22)

I think that it all revolves around the fact that I was in their shoes for a long time in a healthcare delivery system. And so encountered problems, had successes and failures, and can kind of recognize when they're trying to think through how to approach something, what that's like, whether or not I encountered something similar to that, what I did when I did see it.

So I'm offering my experience, and that’s what I think is valuable for them. They sort of bounce stuff off of me and say, "This is what I'm doing now." But, now, I'm not sure if I'm handling it right.
So, to the extent that what they're doing is generically about leadership in health care. That's what I did. I was a leader and also advised people when I became a management consultant on leading. So I have, I think, something to offer there.

You and I've said this, you've heard me say this, but I have to say it again. They also encounter the unique set of problems of what it is to be a woman trying to lead in health care organizations. And even though women predominate in management, various management levels in health care, much more than they do in many, if possibly in any other industry, for obvious reasons, there are many, many women professionals in health care at the entry level. And so a lot of them move on to leadership roles.

Even though that's true, there are plenty of women leading in healthcare, they still encounter the same problems that women trying to lead everywhere seem to encounter in our society. And I can't tell them what that's like. You know, I can't say what I would do as a woman in this situation, but I can say what I would do as a man. And I think that's actually important.

They don't actually, they don't have to do what I would do, but they can at least understand how the people around them are reacting to the problems, why they are contributing to the problems, if they are contributing to them, why they're helping, or how they're helping. So I've had that kind of relationship with the women that I have been a mentor for, and they like it.

They get something out of it. You'd have to ask each one of them. They all encountered different problems, and we talked about slightly different things, but they got something out of it. And so I think what ends up happening is that they say, well, he's a pretty good mentor. So Barbara takes that into account and signs me somebody new the next year.

Douglas Riddle (29:30)

We actually do ask them, as I think you know. And you're a very popular mentor and have really been appreciated by the mentees, too. And I know you've spoken up very often in our Leadership Council about just the value that this provides for you as well. And you've mentioned some things.

Obviously, you enjoy hearing new challenges as well as being able to contribute to something. So I think it's a great partnership.

Andy Wiesenthal (29:40)

Sure. Yeah. You know, I'm retired, I'm not very busy, which is exactly how I want it. My wife and I are lucky, and we get to travel and do all sorts of fun stuff. So I don't have a jam-packed daily calendar the way I used to, which is absolutely fine with me. But it is fun to engage with these people and to have a way of keeping my hand in and being helpful. And so that's great for me, and I do learn from that. And I hope that, because they've said so, my contributions have been valuable to them.

Douglas Riddle (30:45)

Well, and to the rest of us as well.

Andy, I wanna thank you so much for spending this time with me in this conversation. I want to encourage our listeners to get in touch with you. You have things to tell people. We didn't get to ask you about Uzbekistan or Oman or any of the interesting places you've been. Still, I encourage community members to connect with you and to recognize what a resource and value you are for the Foundation. So, thank you very much for joining us.
That's it for us today for The Treasure Hunt. Take care, Andy.

Andy Wiesenthal (31:18)

Thanks for having me, Doug.