Picking winning strategies to improve healthcare productivity: An interview with Dr. Jim Weinstein
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This is McKinsey on Healthcare, a podcast series about visionaries, leaders, and problem solvers shaping the future of healthcare. Today, I'm joined by Jim Weinstein, who is the Senior Vice President for Microsoft Healthcare in Seattle, and before that served as CEO of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health System. We'll be discussing his perspectives as a former hospital operator and current technology executive. Jim, thanks so much for joining us today.
Great to be with you.
Great. Jim, tell me about how you initially decided to go into medicine, your first career in this space.
I became sick as a child, actually, in high school and missed a year of school. And I was quite fascinated because nobody could make a diagnosis, but they had me in isolation and said I had some strange illness. that they didn't define. And even today as a physician, I'm kind of curious what it was. But then I worked in a hospital every year until I was a junior in medical school. So I just became fascinated with the hospital environment and that there were technologies and people who actually thought deeply about helping somebody feel better. And I'd felt sick for so long as a child that I thought, this is a great opportunity. So that's kind of how it started.
Well, and since then, you've had so many careers, more than most people could dream of, really, as a practicing spine surgeon, head of the Dartmouth Institute, a health services researcher, and a CEO, and now a tech executive.
People often ask me, how did you get to where you are? How did you do all that? And with each journey, I always wondered, why me? And how did I get here? And I think what I've come to believe is that I've always been anxious to answer questions. But what I really think is in spine surgery, I focused on cancer of the spine tumors. And nobody really described how you actually operate on those. And they're pretty rare. but pretty devastating if you have one. So I spent a lot of time trying to figure that out. How could I actually take a tumor out and improve somebody's life and longevity? So that was really exciting and came out with a classification that's used today globally on how you actually do resect tumors of the spine.
During my time at the University of Iowa, I worked on pain models because all the patients I saw for back problems had back pain. And I didn't understand why. Even though I'd gone through medical school and residency, nobody actually explained to me. why they have back pain. So we developed an animal model to study pain. And I actually wrote the papers to describe why people actually have back pain and radicular pain.
How did Jim Weinstein’s early illness shape his decision to pursue medicine?
Then the question is, why do you operate on them? What does that do? So then we did the largest study ever done by NIH on back surgery. In the United States, we studied several thousands of patients across 14 states, 140 physicians, and came out with some pretty interesting studies that made front page of Otherfold, New York Times. So then I studied at Dartmouth and became director of the Dartmouth Institute, which studied health care for the United States. And so all of this stuff just happened because I was asking why. And I probably asked too many times and became CEO. I've had a fascinating life before coming to Microsoft.
If you think about the last two moves that you made from the Dartmouth Institute to being the CEO of a health system and then from that to Microsoft, what have been the things that have been most surprising to you?
I think that there's somewhat a white space between healthcare and tech. And I think as somebody who studied health services research, studied the US healthcare system, I felt like we weren't living the promise we wrote about with the variation in our own system. So my mantra as CEO for seven years was to create a sustainable health system. not a healthcare system. And so if you think about that, that's a very divergent path for a healthcare system today. And I did studies that said less is more in spine surgery, for example. And everything we studied in the Atlas showed tremendous variation, mostly surgical procedures, but
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
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