Georges Benjamin has led the American Public Health Association as executive director since 2002, but he has never been busier or more vocal.
One in a series of interviews with Modern Healthcare's Top 25 Minority Executives in Healthcare for 2016.
Georges Benjamin has led the American Public Health Association as executive director since 2002, but he has never been busier or more vocal.
“I think we’re in an environment where the forces doing things that are opposed to the public’s health are more active, and so we’re more active,” he says.
The issues are numerous, from climate change to gun violence -– and a few things that didn’t used to be controversial at all.
“When you look at clean water and clean air, there’s an effort to push back on a lot of the things that public health has done over the years to make the environment safer for us and to make us healthier,” he adds. “We’re having to weigh in on things that, in our minds, were settled.”
Some threats he sees as audacious.
“The misinformation around the Affordable Care Act continues to be a concern and the lack of national recognition of the prevention aspects of the law are absolutely amazing,” Benjamin says.
Others, he says, are the result of apathy and inattention.
“We lost 40,000 public health workers across the country through the last recession and they haven’t been replaced,” he notes. “We’re losing programs because the funding has been cut. And then there’s public health preparedness. We spent a lot of money getting ourselves prepared after 9/11. Not only have there been reductions in funding for the preparedness of our nation to deal with biological attack, but our preparedness for everyday emergencies is not as good as it used to be.”
Benjamin's words may be finding an audience. On April 19, President Obama appointed Benjamin to the National Infrastructure Advisory Council.
The water crisis of Flint, Mich., is one example of the decay of public health, Benjamin says. So is a lack of funding to deal with mosquito-borne disease – not just zika, but dengue and chikungunya. Give him 10 minutes and he can tick off a variety of issues that need addressing, particularly in the corridors of Washington, D.C., where APHA is based. And, yes, he’d like to see hospitals and health systems get a little more vocal and visible on these issues too.
“The healthcare delivery side of the house needs to weigh in on a range of things that historically they have not weighed in on,” Benjamin says. “They always show up for the Medicaid hearing or the healthcare financing hearing. But we need them to show up at the hearing for the public health budget on lead, we need them to show up for the hearing on clean water. We need them to spend their healthcare dollars in a more objective way to address climate change.”
In many communities, hospitals are one of the biggest employers and have a large footprint. While some have made moves to address their carbon-dioxide emissions, it’s often done from a business perspective to get better energy rates, Benjamin says. “They also need to do it from a health perspective because it makes their community healthier. And they need to see it through that lens.”
If providers can become more public-health-conscious, he says, then they can begin to make a difference via population health.
“We have to make sure ‘population health’ isn’t just a buzzword and people don’t take what they’re already doing and rename it ‘population health,’ ” Benjamin says. “We want to make sure it doesn’t go the way of ‘managed care’ – the idea of the moment that, when it doesn’t achieve its goals because it wasn’t done right, people call it a failure.”
APHA works with payers as well, including partnerships with the UnitedHealth Foundation and the Aetna Foundation, and isn’t shy about criticizing insurers and providers alike. “When we think they’re off-track, we scream and yell and holler at them -– but we generally have the same goals around health and the well-being of our communities.”
With that community health in mind, Benjamin says he is glad to see more of his fellow clinicians stepping up to accept the mantle of leading administratively as well. “Having made decisions around patients gives you a unique perspective that you bring to the table. When you’re the COO or the CEO, the buck stops with you and you get to use those skills differently than you would if you were the medical director and in a more advisory role.”
But physician executives need to learn that leadership “is not giving people an order and expecting them to follow,” says Benjamin, himself a former military leader. “It’s setting goals, getting people aligned to go in a particular direction, and then giving them freedom.”
It’s a far different role than simply being a clinician, he says.
“One of the reasons I enjoyed being in an emergency position was that, most of the time, you saw results of your work right away. But in management, things are like a big battleship and they don’t turn very quickly. And so the gratification is much more delayed, much more subtle, and you’ve got to really understand what a win is.
“Sometimes a win is not what you would like. You have to accept progress and be comfortable with that. And then, realize you have to come back another day and try to move the boat a little further along.”