What really keeps physician leaders awake at night? In this episode of the Direct Well-Being Podcast, Dr. Anders Apgar sits down with emergency physician and hospital executive Dr. Neil Roy to explore physician burnout, hospital leadership, financial literacy, and why understanding money may be one of the most important wellness strategies physicians can adopt.
Physician burnout isn't simply about working too many hours. It's about losing autonomy, purpose, and the ability to care for patients the way physicians intended.
In this insightful conversation, Dr. Anders Apgar welcomes Dr. Neil Roy for an honest discussion about what physician leaders actually worry about behind the scenes. Together they unpack the realities of physician shortages, why hospital administrators aren't the villains they're often perceived to be, and how communication failures create unnecessary distrust between frontline physicians and leadership.
The conversation also dives deeply into financial wellness, delayed gratification, physician autonomy, and why learning personal finance should be considered just as essential as continuing medical education.
From burnout prevention and leadership transparency to real estate investing, passive income, and building a sustainable medical career, this episode offers practical strategies every physician can begin implementing today.
Episode Highlights:
Resources Mentioned:
About the Show:
Direct Well-Being is hosted by Dr. Anders Apgar, MD, FACOG, M.S., An Ob/Gyn physician leader and nationally recognized voice in clinician well-being. The show is a trusted, peer-driven space for honest conversations about what actually supports physicians, beyond resilience training and surface-level wellness.
Each week, Dr. Apgar sits down with physician leaders, partner organizations, and frontline clinicians to talk about the real drivers of distress: financial stress, mental and emotional health, family dynamics, and the systems in which physicians practice. Conversations are evidence-aligned, research-informed, and grounded in lived clinical experience, never promotional, always physician-first.
Produced as a Direct Self Care production in partnership with the Doctor Podcast Network, the show draws on insight from the Well-Being Index, Champions of Wellness, Tend Health, and the broader Direct ecosystem to move listeners from awareness to agency.
About the Guest:
Dr. Neil Roy is a board-certified Emergency Medicine physician and serves as the Chief Medical Officer of Shady Grove Adventist Hospital. Alongside his leadership responsibilities, he continues practicing emergency medicine, giving him a unique perspective on both frontline clinical care and hospital administration.
Passionate about physician wellness, leadership development, healthcare systems, and financial independence, Dr. Roy advocates for helping physicians build sustainable careers by combining clinical excellence with financial literacy and intentional life planning.
About the Host:
Anders Apgar, MD, FACOG, M.S., is a physician leader dedicated to transforming clinician well-being. As host of the Direct Well-Being Podcast, he leads honest conversations about the real drivers of distress : financial stress, mental health, family dynamics, and broken systems, for physicians and the organizations that support them.
A trusted voice in health care, Dr. Apgar blends lived clinical experience with evidence-aligned insights. He’s part of the Direct Ecosystem (Direct Self Care, Direct Wealth Care, Direct Practice Care), partnering with organizations like Tend Health, the Well-Being Index, and Champions of Wellness to move the conversation from awareness to agency.
Connect with Dr. Anders Apgar:
Websites:
directwellbeingpodcast.com , dwbpodcast.com
Emails:
[00:00:00]
All right. Welcome back to the Direct Well-Being Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Anders Apgar, and with me today, I'm really excited to have a good friend and colleague, Dr. Neil Roy, who is a board-certified practicing ER physician, as well as the chief medical officer for Shady Grove Adventist Hospital.
And Neil, thank you very much for being here with us.
Thank you for having me, Anders. I'm looking forward to the conversation.
I'm really excited. We have both been colleagues. We've worked together in the ER. We've been together as administrators, and also I was very happy to have your leadership while serving there at the hospital.
Our audience really is people who are trying very hard to stay in the game and we're going to get to their, eventually as the program continues. But we really are interested in trying to give people tools to help themselves and trying to understand the system that they're working around, and that's why I'm really happy you're here because we're looking for that perspective of a physician leader like yourself to see really what happens behind the scenes that would help [00:01:00] us understand the system too.
So, you know, the lead-off question really is this. What in your mind, what keeps physician leaders like you awake at night?
Yeah, that's a really good question I think the common misconception is that leaders, not just physician leaders we don't care about our teams. So I was watching The Pit, I'm an ER doc, my wife's an ER doc, and I got really irritated in the first episode where a hospital administrator pulled a ED physician out of a code saying, "What's going on with your patient satisfaction scores?"
And, that doesn't happen. And while, yeah, there's certainly outliers, by and large, leaders in healthcare, especially physician leaders, do it because they fundamentally care about their teams, which are the physicians, nurses, patients, and care about the system just being better.
Yeah.
So when you ask the question about what keeps us up at night, it's really the [00:02:00] wellbeing of our physicians and the pipeline for what's gonna happen in the future, and what's gonna happen with healthcare, not tomorrow, but a year from now.
And then what are the consequences of burnout amongst our physicians that impact our patients? So a good example is there's a rule called MTALA, which is the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. and the concept is simply that if someone comes to the ER or needs to be transferred to your hospital, that receiving hospital needs to say yes.
And the goal was to avoid patient dumping historically.
Now, in my mind, if you have a burnt-out physician that's tired and doesn't wanna get a phone call, and let's just say he's an obstetrician here at Shady Grove, and someone from a hospital out in the boondocks calls Dr. Anders Afshar and says, "Hey, I've got this patient that's coming," and this is your [00:03:00] fourth day in a row, you're exhausted, you're tired.
I'm worried that you may just say, "It's not my problem," and hang up.
And that puts the whole hospital at risk. Obviously, you would never do that. Like, that's something you wouldn't do. But when people get burnt out, they view those things as confrontational, and it's a burnout that I'm not always aware of.
Yeah. it's a very good point and I appreciate the confidence. But you certainly think about that at your exhaustion level that every one of our physicians feels. You get to that point where, gosh, you hate to say it, but patients become a burden. They become, quote unquote, "The problem."
And you hate to see that. That's where burnout really is significant, right?
Yeah, I'll tell you. I used to work full-time as an ER doc, and then as I climbed the ladder, the amount I work clinically has gone down, and now I work about six days a month. And I enjoy my clinical time-
...
Far more than my admin time.
And part of the reason is, if I'm working six days clinically in a month, [00:04:00] I can give every single patient my cell phone number. I can say, "Hey, you know, if you're having this problem, let me help with that." I can spend an off day getting someone follow-up because I'm only doing it six days a month. Mm-hmm.
Like, you can't break me. There are no shifts bad enough to where I'll be like, "Ugh, I don't wanna do this again."
Right.
I have a luxury that most people don't have.
Yeah and it's interesting, in our first episode, we talked to another ER physician, an old friend of mine, who in a similar fashion feels really good about the fact that, "Look I've been able to kinda have a little bit more control over my patient-facing time," and it's really been a great divide.
I think most of the folks I've spoken to talk about that, and what I worry about is people have a hard enough time getting an appointment now. Th- it clearly looks like one of the strategies would be, boy, if we could just tell every physician, look, you know, work this much," whatever percentage that might be, less than 100, right?
Probably somewhere 75, 60 of full-time care, call that full-time in front of a patient, right? Be [00:05:00] beautiful. But if we cut the number of visits down 40% so that everybody had a better chance to breathe, how would we be able to even see all those patients?
Yeah. That is the million-dollar question, right?
Like, we're facing unprecedented physician shortages.
Yeah. I,
I think part of my job as a hospital administrator is fundamentally to allow physicians to do more with technology to leverage their abilities. So really make sure that we're embracing ambient technology, make sure that all of our ancillary support staff is practicing at the top of their license.
Mm-hmm. And then make sure that patients are going to the right place to get the care that they need. So I'll give you an example. There are organizations where patients come for dialysis to the ER Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and they come to the hospital, the hospital dialyzes them there, the ER docs see them there and the patients [00:06:00] leave.
Terrible care for the patients because they're not getting any continuity of care.
Mm-hmm.
Terrible for the ER docs because they're seeing these patients that don't need ER docs, and terrible for the hospital because you're doing essentially uncompensated care. We create a model where we're actually supporting an outpatient dialysis center to dialyze these patients.
Interesting. So the patients go directly there, it makes the ER docs' life easier, the hospital stays neutral 'cause patients are getting dialysis regardless- ... and the patients get much better care. It doesn't improve my bottom line as a hospital, but it fundamentally improves the lives of the ER docs and the patients involved.
Yeah. So to the core of your question If all of our physicians are able to work a little bit less, I think that their careers will be significantly longer.
And by doing that, we're able to leverage technology to allow their careers to [00:07:00] be more fruitful, see more patients, and also last longer.
Sure.
Because if they don't do that like my wife, she works maybe 10 days a month. She's an ER doc as well. Mm-hmm. and she's almost like .8 FTEs, and we've got two young kids. Every once in a while she'll have a bad shift and be like, "Maybe I should just stop entirely. " and that means as opposed to her doing six for 15 more years, she's doing nothing.
Mm-hmm. And all those extra patients are never being seen. we made the decision to where she works maybe a couple less shifts a month. So she's also doing eight shifts a month or six shifts a month, but she can do that indefinitely- Yeah ... as opposed to making the decision to leave emergency medicine as a whole.
Yeah. And you bring up a, a couple of topics that we're going to address here. First of all, if we can figure out that million-dollar question, you and I are gonna be very famous for having done so. Probably a couple Nobel Prizes for sure. but you know, you've got two physicians in a family. What does that do to [00:08:00] the family?
What does that do to each other? What does that do to the children? These are episodes that we're gonna have, and really think this is important, especially being in two-physician families, but even one-physician families would benefit from that knowledge. And then of course, what does it do to our kids? And those are upcoming episodes.
And boy, I swear he's not a plant, Dr. Roy's not a plant, but, you're really touching on some very important issues And of course, we both know that, without throwing guys under the bus, by studies have proven that female physicians still do more of the work at home, and they deserve a lot of credit for that.
and that's another episode we're gonna talk about. But you've really opened up the can of worms and I love it. These are great topics that we're gonna use. Wanna go back to your position as a hospital administrator. And I'm in a similar position now too, and I've learned a lot from you, both as my physician leader and also as a physician leader myself.
are the competing priorities because you gotta keep the lights on. That's just the bottom line. Nobody's gonna pay for the electricity bill with my good looks, that's for darn sure, right? So you have to see patients, you have to drive income, the ugly business of medicine, if you will.
And that is really the administrative [00:09:00] side, right? So that you can let your physicians Just see patients. That's all you have to do. Just do what you were born to do. Do what you love to do. But are those priorities so competitive that they will never fundamentally align?
How can we do that? And I know that's a million-dollar question, and I don't know what's a reasonable answer. But boy, if we can approach that, we're gonna get somewhere.
Yeah. I think that in most organizations where you have cohesive leadership teams, good patient care leads to good healthy margins. I think people get lost along the way because if your goal is long-term sustainability and health of an organization, good patient care really drives to that.
So let's do a hospital in, let's use an outside state, so Texas. That hospital's margin and financial health is governed by the volume of patients it sees.
Patients will continue to come to that hospital if they're getting good effective care, if they like their doctors, and their doctors are happy .
So all the priorities are [00:10:00] aligned. What happens often is leaders of all kinds can often not have a clear picture of how to get all three together. So what'll happen is someone will say, "Hey, if we reduce turnaround time significantly for imaging, we'll get more patients through the system.
Patients will be happier." So great, and they'll make that decision, but they won't take into consideration that now you're gonna have more patients coming earlier in the day because they're going through faster and the docs that are working are gonna feel the brunt of that.
Mm-hmm.
So by an oversight, they will miss that.
It's not necessarily deliberate. Like one of my favorite concepts is Hanlon's razor. It's where you attribute malice to when it's just The term is actually stupidity, but it's not fully understanding the problem.
Mm-hmm.
I think more often than not, that's what happens . It's not malicious. It's not understanding all of the unintended consequences.
That's a term that I haven't learned yet, but I'm [00:11:00] looking that up right after this episode. But what I do see, and you've been in the physician lounge as well, and I do see a lot of clinicians, a lot of physicians who, when they don't understand why the decisions are made, they immediately say, "Well, they're just turning screws, and we're getting the brunt of it."
how can we help physicians not jump to that conclusion? But your transparency here is a huge step in that direction and that's what I hope we get to as well. But how does one, as a physician leader, actively go, "Look we're not just trying to squeeze as much as we can out of you as fast as we can so that we can profit from this.
We're actually trying to put something together for patient care." How do you get that message across?
Yeah. That one I haven't solved. I think the real key is communication as regularly and as aggressively as possible. we as in hospital leadership fundamentally does a subpar job of effectively communicating on a regular basis.
Yeah. physicians are busy. They don't check their email. They don't look at videos. I can't see [00:12:00] everyone in the lounge. So because of that, they don't come to department meetings. It's hard to communicate effectively. Yeah. And I think with physicians, most don't want to be involved in leadership.
You went to medical school because you want to take care of patients.
Mm-hmm.
So going to a department meeting is not part of your worldview prior to entering medicine. So now the fact that, "Hey, you have to come to this meeting," you're just not gonna go. And because of that, you won't see the bigger picture.
And if there's something that you don't agree with, instead of saying, "Hey, let me ask the question or let me participate," it's really easy to assume the least generous intent and just say, "Hey, the hospital just out to make a buck." When I would venture most of the time if you spoke with the hospital leaders, either they would change their mind and they would talk about a way of doing things differently, or you would have a better picture as to why this is the way it should or [00:13:00] needs to be.
These are great points. And as a CMO myself on a much smaller scale than you have, what I was told is nobody reads the Connections magazine and nobody reads their emails. Physicians have so many urgent things in their lives. How can we say, "Look, this is not urgent, but boy, if you could get to this by the end of the day"?
And, and oftentimes we can't. You're an ER physician. You know, if there's 15 traumas at the same time, nothing's happening until that stuff gets taken care of. I... It'd be great if we had an effective communication system that was accepted by physicians and could get there. And the other thing is, of course, how do you want to be in a group participate in hospital functions, communication after hours when you or your husband have to be home to take the kid to X, Y, or Z?
Yeah. And that makes it really hard and there are a lot of two-physician families that face that, all the time. and again we're gonna get to the bottom of this at some point in this season, this podcast is gonna do, we're gonna get there. But you've talked about finances too, and, the truth about anything [00:14:00] is something has to bring in more money than it puts out to function.
that's in the home, that's everything kind of short of government, if you will, that can make a, And I'm not throwing anybody's under the bus. But- Yeah ... where do you see financial literacy and financial wellness as playing a part in physicians' role and wellbeing, and maybe even participating more, in those hospital committees?
Yeah. I think about this a lot because it, during my time, similar to you, we've seen countless people burn out- way too early. And I think the problem in my view is that when we go into medicine, at some point someone tells us that your job is to learn how to be a doc and then be a doc, and that's it And I think we missed the point that being a physician is one component of your life.
In order to be a good and effective physician, you absolutely also have to know how to manage your own personal finances, understand how money works, understand how [00:15:00] healthcare works.
And only if you know those three things can you truly be a good and effective physician. So I tell new grads, "It is just as important for you to spend time understanding your personal financial wellness- Yes
and your personal physical wellness as it is to understand your patient's wellness." Because if you're not taking care of yourself, and you're not taking care of your finances, everything else is going to fall apart.
Um, I'll give you an example. Every doc, or everyone should know what their expenses are every month, what they bring in every month, how much money they need to have saved to cover their monthly expenses, and how much they will ideally have in retirement when they plan on retiring.
Everyone should know those numbers off the top of their head if you're a physician. And if you don't, then you should spend time every day understanding that. I've been very blessed that I [00:16:00] finished training when I was very young. I did like a six-year medical program, so I finished when I was like 25, and I didn't know anything about anything then.
And so I learned about personal finance early in my career, right when the White Coat Investor came out. Mm-hmm. I got involved in real estate. And part of the reason why I've always found medicine so enjoyable is at some point in my life, I realized that I've passed the finish line, that I can stop working tomorrow, and I might have to like, forego some luxuries- Sure
but I would not have to worry about leaving my house. I didn't buy too much house. I didn't buy too much car. I bought what I can support and what I can do to where I have the privilege of working, not the requirement to work. Yeah. So to a regular doc, to back to your original question, if a dual physician household understands their ability to generate revenue and spend money and [00:17:00] like manage their personal finances, they understand how much they can work or not work to make their work more enjoyable
Brilliant.
Yeah, you bring up a lot of points. almost like a mini hospital MBA as a course in residency. And the other thing that it sounds like you've mastered really well that myself, I have done poorly, which is mastering delayed gratification. and I think that's a really difficult concept, and we should probably have an entire show based on managing delayed gratification as well as how to raise kids in a two-physician family because you can't do it alone.
I'm sure you've come up against the wall with these things, and you might have a little bit more control over your schedule, but you don't have control over when your kids get sick. I think if you're going to marry into a two-physician family, I think those considerations are huge.
What are we gonna do if we have children or when we have children and how are we gonna manage that system as well? Excellent points. Really great stuff. Thank you for that. did you ever have a conversation with a frontline physician, maybe a ER colleague or someone, that [00:18:00] completely changed your perspective on wellbeing or how the system and the physician interact?
Yeah. I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old, so I've been out of residency for, what, 15, 16 years now. So I've been out for a long time, but because I've got such small children, their parents are also docs that have been out for, like, three or four years.
So when we're having play dates, I'm talking to them on a regular basis. I think the thing that's changed the most for me is it's really easy for me to talk about understanding personal finance when I had 13 years of being an attending, and 10 of those being a single attending, maybe not 10, like eight of those being a single attending to learn about personal finance.
Mm-hmm. To learn about managing my wealth, and managing what I'm doing, and preparing for my burnout, learning about real estate. Now that I have two kids and I talk to other parents of young children, I fully acknowledge that you only have a limited amount of time, and [00:19:00] with that time, you always want to spend as much of it as possible with your kids, most of the time.
Yeah.
So I really empathize with how hard it is for them to do what I'm saying they should do.
And when I'm saying, "Hey, invest 20% of your after-tax dollars every year," but daycare costs $3,000 a month, and it's not even a nice daycare, it's really challenging for me to tell them to do that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
do you recall when in your career or even your educational... It sounds like you were on top of your finances from the get-go. To me, it sounds like high school, beginning of college, when most people aren't even thinking about retirement, for sure.
They're not even thinking about next weekend, right? Was there a magic time in your life where you- Became all of a sudden aware of what your financial future was. When did that happen in your life?
I think it was as a resident. I remember very vividly as a second-year resident one of my attendings talked about how [00:20:00] difficult his career has been because he bought a house that has a $10,000 a month monthly payment, and his kids go to private school, and this was in, like, 2000 dollars.
So that's a very- Mm-hmm ... expensive monthly payment. His kids were in private school, and he had to work 18 to 20 shifts a month.
Wow.
And he was, like, in his late 50s, and he hated it. And he didn't even know where to start. He'd made some bad financial decisions. This was in the middle of
the Great Recession. Right around that time. So seeing that shaped, my understanding that I just do not want to be in a situation where I don't have autonomy of my own life.
Yeah.
And seeing that firsthand made me appreciate the importance of... There's a saying that is you pay yourself first, and if something's a priority, you do it first.
Yeah.
every day, even to this day, I wake up, I try to not use my phone for, like, 30, 40 minutes, but then in [00:21:00] 30 or 40 minutes, I'll quickly run through a set ritual. I'll, like, look at all my finances. I'll look at some of my side businesses, and then I'll try and read, some financial blogs or podcasts to make sure I stay abreast to what's going on.
And despite being out for a long time and spending countless years learning, there's still new things I'm learning about all the time.
Yeah.
And once I've done that every morning, then I'll do my continuing medical education. Then I'll do my, like, general work. And I try to occupy ways of learning in ways that, Don't take away from other things.
So this morning like 5:30, 6:00, my kids wake up really early. I put my three-in-one-year-old in a double stroller with the dog, and I run down Wooten Parkway looking miserable. there are a couple of finance podcasts that I like, and I'll listen to that. This morning I was listening to this guy, his name is Bentham.
He's a big hedge fund manager, and was talking about his doom and gloom prediction for the future
Not related to today , But I'm still learning and thinking about [00:22:00] finance.
Yeah. it sounds uplifting. And you're more than welcome, this program is designed to give people tools.
You're more than welcome to say their names and put them out there. Sure. We're I'd love to give- And if this becomes that mentor, 'cause this, it, we drop this on July 1st at the beginning of residency on purpose, 'cause we'd love to get to people as early as possible. And so if we can be that mentor for someone, they'll go, "Yep, it's just a little bit at a time."
go ahead. What are those titles that you listen to?
Yeah, I think a couple of my favorite ones are, the first one is The White Coat Investor. They have a podcast, they have a website. It's super easy, digestible. I like that. Then I like real estate, so I listen to BiggerPockets podcast.
that talks about multiple types of real estate: short-term rentals, long-term rentals, and multi-families. And then the third bucket is the finance, the money. So books like The Psychology of Money, which is by this guy Morgan Housel, is really good. I Will Teach You to Be Rich by this guy Ramit Sethi is really good.
before Robert Kiyosaki became a, like, right-wing lunatic, his first book, [00:23:00] Rich Dad Poor Dad- Yes ... really a good book. Yeah. Like, I really like that book. It resonated with me when I read it 15 years ago. Concepts like that touch upon that go a really long way. and he's not really a lunatic, I'm just being but, I think there's a lot of value in those three buckets. So Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel; I Will Teach You to Be Rich, Ramit Sethi; White Coat Investor, Jim Daly; and then any of the Robert Kiyosaki books on, like, real estate and developing it. And then from a podcast, the BiggerPockets podcast is a really good primer to understand real estate.
I love it. It sounds like we should be hosting a podcast on some passive income, which doesn't have to be real estate, but I think the way to go is passive income of some type, not to replace, but to help supplement. And every little dime of passive income you get is then becomes time that you are not spending continuing to work later in life.
So You gotta do it on both ends. You've gotta get started, and you gotta figure out the end at the same time. Yeah. I
what you had hit on [00:24:00] early is about, I'm an emergency medicine physician, so by nature, I like a little bit of everything. Sure. So when I was in med school, I really enjoyed my OB rotation.
I really enjoyed my surgery rotation. I enjoyed cardiology. That's why you go into emergency medicine. I think taking that concept that you have to enjoy some type of personal finance or some non-medicine-related financial hobby goes a long way, and then pursue that the same way you pursued medicine. I'm a hospital administrator, right?
I am constantly reading books on being a more effective communicator, leader, team developer, understanding the finances of hospitals. I have a book club with my team on hospital leadership books. My boss and I talk about books on a regular basis. I am constantly trying to learn more about my craft that's not clinical medicine.
I'm still reading my emergency medicine podcast, I listen to my podcasts and reading my journals, [00:25:00] but I'm also spending time acquiring a skill set that is just as hard as being a physician
I love that. And one of the things I like to do with people is to substitute the words should or could, to the word deserve.
You deserve to look at these other things because it is the way that will prolong your existence in medicine. and I truly start to believe that, when you look at other things, "Well, where am I gonna find time for this?" I think you don't find the time, you schedule the time. and people might say, "Well, you're a hospital administrator.
You have all the time in the world." And I would submit, I heard you. You wake up at 5:30. I've seen you leave the hospital at six o'clock, 7:30 at night 'cause something comes up. And so, I get the sense now that I've been kind of on both sides of that equation, that there's just as little time in the day, and I say that on purpose.
There's just as little time in the day for people like yourself as there is for people who are working 100 hours a week, on the front lines of medicine. I appreciate that. I appreciate the books. We're gonna try and put those up on the website as well when we get that all working. this is great information.
and we're coming to the close. Couple of our [00:26:00] classic questions that we're really trying to promote, on this podcast really is if you were CEO for one dayand you still had your kind of your lens of being a CMO, is there anything specifically that would, you would change maybe immediately or maybe within the first month?
I think I'm very blessed to have a CEO here that really listens to what my recommendations are. So I don't know if there's something I would do differently here at my hospital.
Mm-hmm.
But if I was at a lot of hospitals, I think the earliest change would be to have a really enhanced presence with hospital leadership, with bedside clinicians on a day-to-day basis.
Wow.
So I think early on, it's really important for hospital leadership to be accessible to all of their clinicians in multiple different venues. here we've seen a really remarkable improvement in our clinician engagement. It's been dramatic. We were in the 40th percentile three [00:27:00] years ago in terms of physician engagement and alignment.
Now we're in the 80th to 90th percentile. And Maryland is one of the worst compensating states in the country, so our docs are way above the national average in terms of engagement, but still compensated less for the ones that are not hospital employed. I think a big part of that is over the past few years, our hospital leadership puts a lot of deliberate, structured intensity around them being available.
Mm-hmm. Every hospital physician knows who the CFO is and has met her. Everyone knows who our hospital president is and has met them . I worked at multiple hospitals before I worked here. I never knew who the CFO was for any hospital.
I think hospital leadership owes it to their clinicians to be accessible, be visible, and communicate with them on a regular basis.
That's fantastic. and I wanna give you a lot of credit, too, having worked, again, you were my physician leader. your CMO Corner, which I [00:28:00] know is an email. We talked about emails being tough to read. Yes. but there are people that wait for that at You know, my family and my wife, we wait for that to come out, and we read it.
You know, people do read it, and it's a matter of keep putting it out. I stole this from you, by the way. I should footnote you. We have a Similar communication in our little, healthcare system, and so I've stolen your CMO Corner. Good. Good ...
and I don't know if people are reading it or not, but I still put it out there. And, and if they do, if one person reads it, then you've got that connection, just like you're saying. Beautiful, excellent points. And so now I'm gonna turn it one more time against you, just tighten it a little bit.
What's getting in the way of fixing that?
I think what you hit on earlier is there's a concept called the Eisenhower Grid. It's where you have an X-axis that has importance and a Y-axis that has urgency.
I think most people, and this is both their personal lives and their professional lives, spend 90% of their time doing things that are urgent but not important.
And then they neglect the things that are really [00:29:00] important but not urgent, and that concept's called, like, Q2. Yeah. I think the reason why, and this, it happens to me too in my personal life. Mm-hmm. Like, I'll forget to go and get a good amount of sleep on a given night, or I'll skip my runs, or I'll skip date night, and I'll miss the things that are super important, and probably the most important things, but are not urgent.
Because Jayco's here, and it's something that's urgent and probably important, but, you know, maybe. Is it really? or other things that are urgent and definitely not important that I'll have to take care of in lieu of doing things that are truly meaningful but not time-sensitive.
Mm-hmm.
So I try to be as deliberate about making time for Q2, which is really important but not urgent, and try to have my teams do the same thing.
And I think that is getting in the way, not doing that is getting in [00:30:00] the way of most people, not just hospital leaders, but all people- ... from really reaching their potential.
I love that. and for those who may be hearing it for the first time, the Eisenhower Matrix is something you can look up and try and help determine what's urgent and important, which has to be dealt with immediately and what is important but not urgent, which should be scheduled.
and then there's the two other quadrants that we'll let people think about that. Dr. Roy, thank you so much for being with me. I have one final question for you. you may have answered it a couple times today, but I wanna leave people every episode with an action item. So my question to you is, of the things you've discussed today, and please feel free to repeat something you've said, what one action item could the Direct Well Being podcast listeners do today to make this conversation stick with them?
I think they should start every day. First thing is spend some time learning about their financial wellness and their personal health wellness, and start your day off with that. And whether that's, skimming on your phone, looking at The White Coat Investor and seeing what's new, and then [00:31:00] spending two minutes looking at the Huberman Lab podcast.
I'm not endorsing that, I'm just saying looking at it. Anything is better than nothing, and most people are doing nothing every single day.
I love that. Little steps. It took me 20-something years to learn, understand that little steps are the way to actually get things done, and there's no home runs, it's all singles kind of thing.
Um- Yes,
totally ...
Dr. Roy, I really appreciate your time. Thank you for being here on the Direct Well Being podcast, and, sorry, but we're gonna invite you back at some point to do this again.
Well, thank you for having me. You did a wonderful job. I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much.
Ah, it was all my pleasure.
Thank you so much. Have a good day