Wow, Debbie Weems has had a variety of career paths in her life!
Her natural curiosity led her to try many different things.
Currently Debbie is Vice President of Product Development and Design for a company that specializes in healthcare. Also she is the COO of Multi-state hospitality company. They have bourbon, a couple of bed and breakfasts, and some Social Houses. In addition, she is managing Director of Highland Advisors and Highland Mediation. And, if that’s not enough, she is a Senior Advisor to a telehealth and provider quality company.
So mostly she has worked in healthcare, with some technology sprinkled in.
What she really likes doing is taking things from an idea to execution. The messiness of accomplishing this doesn't bother her! If you have an idea and you need to have an event, start a company, or you need to resolve a conflict, she and one of her companies can help you!
Her natural curiosity led her to try many different things.
Currently Debbie is Vice President of Product Development and Design for a company that specializes in healthcare. Also she is the COO of Multi-state hospitality company. They have bourbon, a couple of bed and breakfasts, and some Social Houses. In addition, she is managing Director of Highland Advisors and Highland Mediation. And, if that’s not enough, she is a Senior Advisor to a telehealth and provider quality company.
So mostly she has worked in healthcare, with some technology sprinkled in.
What she really likes doing is taking things from an idea to execution. The messiness of accomplishing this doesn't bother her! If you have an idea and you need to have an event, start a company, or you need to resolve a conflict, she and one of her companies can help you!
Debbie attended Abilene Christian University and has a degree in political science and public service.
She studied Mandarin Chinese because she wanted to go into the foreign service and work for the state department. That didn't work out, but in her first job she helped set up the Abilene Education Council. Then she went on to run the Medical Care Mission, a healthcare clinic for the working poor in Abilene, that takes no government funding. In that job she had to mediate between two competing hospitals, and the county!
After starting a family, she became the Managing Partner for the Abilene bookstore. As a community bookstore she also became involved in community activities.
After the emergence of online retail like Amazon, she transferred back into the healthcare field.
She was an executive with Abilene Regional Medical Center and was able to help with some early planning for Cedar Park Regional Medical Center, a sister facility.
After meeting her current husband and getting married, she was recruited to Austin to work for Harden Healthcare, to help them build a post-acute healthcare network. Debbie worked on figuring out how to help people, who are going home from the hospital, transition to post-acute care, things like nursing homes, home health, and hospice. She facilitated communication between aftercare and the hospitals. She also helped with re-organization of the Health and Human Services Commission for the State of Texas and as the Deputy Inspector General for Medical Services. Texas (at that time) spent over $1.5B a month in medical services.
In 2017, she had an opportunity to start building a new company that looked at improving physician quality, as COO of Embold Health, where she is still an Advisor. For example, how do you know that you're getting a great doctor, they may be a great person, but are they a good physician? This is the point in her career where she used her Rotary skills especially the Four-Way Test.
With this company, it was all about the data. They had to acquire over 100 million lives worth of data to process. They had to know their patient’s healthcare providers for the current year, the past year, and the year before that just to start. They were able to process all of this data and create enough depth so that it was statistically accurate within an area. Their first client was Walmart, who has a lot of employees and they wanted their eligible employees to get great healthcare, they wanted them to have good doctors. Years earlier, Walmart had established Centers for Excellence where they told their employees if they went to certain identified hospitals and doctors, they could get their entire healthcare procedures paid for. They would even send their caretaker spouse or other person with them, all expenses paid, to an identified Center of Excellence to get the best care. The program was featured in Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2019/03/how-employers-are-fixing-health-care. The learnings from the early Centers program lead Embold and Walmart to know there was a data driven way to identify the better performing doctors locally.
Another project was analyzing maternity care in the Dallas area.
So back to the Four-Way Test:
Number One - Is it the truth?
Yes, they have lots and lots of unbiased data that they processed.
Number Two – Is it fair to all concerned?
Yes, they shared information with the doctors with explanations of the factors used.
Number Three – Does it build goodwill and better friendships?
Yes, they were able to give information back to the doctors about their success rates, statistical information that they did not have before. They were able to advise their corporate clients about doctor’s ratings, so they could steer their employees to better care. They also shared the information with local hospitals, providing information about local doctors, so that the hospitals could provide better care. Also, encouraging doctors on the lower end of the statistics to improve their level of care, improves the level of care for everyone!
Number Four – Is it beneficial to all concerned?
Absolutely! They are seeing positive changes already in the various communities.
So, the company is still growing. They were recently covered in a JAMA article! They are all about transparency and making care better for everybody!
You can even look up provider information on the Provider Guide and find out information about your own health care services!