Thought Leadership > Vijay Shah, M.D., Leads Transformational Change Through Self-Care

Vijay Shah, M.D., Leads Transformational Change Through Self-Care

By Gianrico Farrugia, M.D.

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Leading transformational change requires transformational leaders. At Mayo Clinic, we’re making a concerted effort to cultivate five core skills to help our leaders sustain performance, inspire and motivate staff, and build a workforce that drives patient-centered healthcare transformation from within. 

Gianrico Farrugia, M.D., president and CEO, highlights Mayo Clinic leaders who exemplify these competencies with the hope that their stories will inspire others to come forward to lead healthcare transformation at this critical juncture.

“Leads self” means taking action to address personal well-being, manage stress and mitigate burnout while modeling these behaviors for others and using these actions to be a more effective, productive and innovative leader. 

Prioritizing self-care helps us maintain stamina for the leadership journey. Self-care takes many forms, and at Mayo, one of the ways we prioritize self-care is by finding joy and fulfillment at work. Personally, I have always found joy in my work as a researcher, and despite the demands of current or previous leadership roles, I have kept research as part of my life as a source of fulfillment. I also designate three days a month of “brain freedom” for personal reflection or stimulating conversation with thought leaders internal and external to Mayo Clinic. 

Prioritizing personal and professional development is also essential to self-care. To support this, we have created self-guided activities that focus on social, financial, emotional and physical well-being, as well as collaborative workshops and coaching groups to enhance work-life integration and meaning in work. 

Self-care in healthcare also requires proactive steps to mitigate burnout, including embracing new technologies and innovations like automation that free up time for more meaningful tasks. 

Vijay Shah, M.D., Kinney Executive Dean of Research and Carol M. Gatton Professor of Digestive Diseases Research, exemplifies the competency of “leads self” through his efforts to support well-being and his personal commitment to consistent self-reflection. 

While leading Mayo Clinic in Rochester’s Department of Medicine, Dr. Shah initiated a transformative strategy to support well-being and professional growth amid the ongoing nationwide threat of physician burnout. Through his leadership, the department has introduced new well-being programs tailored to diverse wellness needs, including piloting the Headspace mental health app prior to its rollout across Mayo Clinic and launching a well-being coaching program that improved clinician well-being scores by 17% using the World Health Organization well-being index. Dr. Shah also initiated career development strategies to better support physicians at every career stage, implementing a six-month program to help them create personalized career plans. 

Recognizing the critical need to ease the burden of clinical documentation for all members of the care team, Dr. Shah also led our Electronic Health Record (EHR) Reimagined Challenge to encourage staff to share their innovative ideas for how to make Mayo’s EHR work better. As a result, departments have implemented new documentation solutions, utilized AI to enhance note-taking during patient visits, tested AI-generated message prompts in patient portals, and categorized patient messages based on required actions. These innovations have created new and better ways to serve our patients while helping improve work experiences for care teams. Dr. Shah is now serving as the Kinney Executive Dean of Research and Carol M. Gatton Professor of Digestive Diseases Research, where his approach to self-development is helping to encourage and inspire others to persevere through change and lean into the digital transformation of our research shield at Mayo Clinic. 

On a personal level, Dr. Shah believes the hardest part of leadership is often self-management. To help better promote that capability within his own career, each morning he dedicates time to self-reflection, asking himself — What did I do well yesterday? What could I do better? He approaches these questions with genuine curiosity about his interactions and how to improve them.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn.