Karen Murphy, PhD RN Innovation Leader
“I think I’m most excited about the sense of urgency to transform healthcare delivery. Sometimes we don’t move unless we have a sense of urgency.”
Dr. Karen Murphy is the winner of the Sharp Index Awards Innovation leader.
Dr. Karen Murphy is executive vice president, chief innovation officer and founding director of the Steele Institute for Health Innovation at Geisinger. Dr. Murphy has worked to improve and transform healthcare delivery throughout her career in both the public and private sectors. Before joining Geisinger, she served as Pennsylvania’s secretary of health addressing the most significant health issues facing the state, including the opioid epidemic. Prior to her role as secretary, Dr. Murphy served as director of the State Innovation Models Initiative at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services leading a $990 million CMS investment designed to accelerate health care innovation across the United States. She previously served as president and chief executive officer of the Moses Taylor Health Care System in Scranton, and as founder and chief executive officer of Physicians Health Alliance, Inc., an integrated medical group practice within Moses Taylor. An author and national speaker on health policy and innovation, Dr. Murphy also serves as a clinical faculty member at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine.
Janae Sharp and Shereese Maynard, MS MBA sat down with Dr. Murphy to discuss innovation in healthcare and the importance of recognition.
Transcript:
SPEAKERS
Karen Murphy, Janae Sharp
Janae Sharp 00:08
I'm really looking forward to talking to Karen Murphy, the winner of our Innovation Award for 2022. For the Sharp index, we give out awards to recognize great work and healthcare. And innovation is typical and interesting. So, I'd love to talk to you about your work and what you're most excited about. And also, just respect that you've done a lot of good.
Karen Murphy 00:35
Thank you. Do you want me to stop the dog from? Could we restart the conversation? I'll stop the dog from barking. Can you hear?
Janae Sharp 00:43
The dog? Oh, dogs? You know, dogs are welcome here, baby. All right.
Karen Murphy 00:50
I'm sorry. I'm going to close this door, though, because he is distracting.
Janae Sharp 00:53
Thank you. That's funny. I didn't hear the dog at all. Okay, thank you. All right. I'm really looking forward to talking to Karen Murphy, you were voted for a nominated for the Innovation Award for sharp index. Every year we recognize leaders in health care, we had over 250 nominations this year. And its people who care a lot about making change and improving physician, clinician nurse and health care mental health. Congratulations. I am also honored to hear about your work. And John went to the Commonwealth Medical College, now Geisinger. I'm just proud of it and I want to hear more about what is going good.
Karen Murphy 01:55
Well, thank you so much. And I'm really honored and humbled to receive the award. I'm extremely appreciative. And thanks for having me here today to talk about the work that we do, what guys are and how excited we are. I think what gets me- I always am a glass half full person as opposed to looking for looking at anything negatively. And I think we learned a lot during the pandemic. And we had a tremendous amount of health impact. And I don't think we've recognized what it would do to other areas of the health care industry. You speak about mental health of providers, nurses, physicians, every health care provider, we're certainly seeing an unprecedent amount of workforce shortages, much of which I'm sure is due to the high stress environment, that right health care to provide health care is a high stress environment. So having said that, I think whenever there's challenges, there's room for innovation, and it guys go all we do is sell problems. We define innovation as a fundament, a fundamentally different approach to solving a problem that has quantifiable outcomes. And what does that mean? It means that we don't work on a shiny new nickel, we try to tackle problems head on. The Steel Institute for Innovation has worked with our Department of Behavioral Health. Significantly, some of the ways that we're innovating to serve our community is we've launched a large effort of virtual health and leveraging a company called Iris that augments our workforce. And really is we're able to serve many, many more individuals in our community that have mental health needs. I am very proud of that work. Also looking at ways that we can transform that makes it easier for our patients, our providers, in our communities to access carrot guys there and make better health easier. So many, many areas that we can be excited about. I think we can solve. I think we must solve the problems that were brought about by the pandemic, we must solve that with innovation looking at things in a fundamentally different way.
Janae Sharp 04:47
Yeah. One of the things I like about your perspective, too, is that Pennsylvania has always had a shortage. And I remember Learning about that. So, I think you understand a lot about what goes into the long-term planning. I'd love to hear, like Long Term versus short term. What do you think people need?
Janae Sharp 05:15
If you could boss us all around? You know, you could.
Karen Murphy 05:20
I think the needs really are very important to create a culture of openness, I think to create a culture of support. For providers, I think I mentioned I started my career as a registered nurse in ICU. So I understand what the health system is about. And you know, what the health system was even pre pandemic is not what it is post pandemic, and I think, openness, being willing to acknowledge the problems and challenges that we have. And then also, I think it's tremendously important to provide the support.
Janae Sharp 06:06
Yes, that's so important, provide support. I just wanted to thank you for all the things you've done, and that you're still going to do. Is there one thing that you're most excited about in the upcoming months that we can share with everyone?
Karen Murphy 06:26
I think I'm most excited about the sense of urgency to transform healthcare delivery. Sometimes we don't move unless we have a sense of urgency. And I think we all have a sense of urgency right now. So, I'm looking forward to seeing how the healthcare industry transforms again, for the communities we serve for our patients and our employees. Yes, I love that.
Janae Sharp 06:51
And I think for people like me, we've been waiting for that sense of urgency, a little bit, just like waiting for people to want things to be better.
Karen Murphy 07:03
And, and I think really is what is slow, what is an industry? What has slow guys, and it is a tremendous place to work because it has a culture of innovation. We were transforming healthcare long before the pandemic, but I would say the normal human reaction is to keep things pretty much the same way. Yeah. And but I think there's a sense of urgency now that creates the creates the case to move forward and transform what we do.
Janae Sharp 07:35
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.
Karen Murphy 07:40
Well Thank you
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