Nashville Health Care Council President: Focus on the Needs of the Consumer

The president of the Nashville Health Care Council details her unconventional career and what she's learned from years interfacing with healthcare executives.  

This article appears in the November/December 2020 edition of HealthLeaders magazine.

Hayley Hovious did not follow an orthodox path to becoming president of the Nashville Health Care Council.

She began her self-described "most fun career ever" as a ski instructor following her graduation from Smith College. After deciding she no longer desired to pursue a career in hotel management, Hovious enrolled in Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management in Nashville, her hometown.

From there, she interned at Mattel, where she worked on the Hot Wheels® brand, and E. & J. Gallo Winery, a company based in central California where she marketed sparkling wine brands. Through these experiences, Hovious attained an understanding for how consumers think and shop, which has carried through to her work in healthcare as she tries to help leaders understand what patients expect out of their various care journeys.

Related: Nashville Health Care Council President on Preparing for COVID's Second Wave

Citing her desire to be closer to her family, Hovious returned to Tennessee to work at a software startup and subsequently as the trade director for the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development. On a business trip to France in 2013, Hovious networked with numerous leaders from around the Volunteer State, namely healthcare executives and, specifically, members of the Nashville Health Care Council.

Shortly thereafter, she was approached to serve as executive director of the Council Fellows program and subsequently, she was appointed to lead the overall organization, a role she still holds more than six years later.

Below are highlights from Hovious' conversation with HealthLeaders about her unconventional career and what she's learned from years interfacing with healthcare executives.

"In my interview with the director of the organization at the time, I remember saying, 'This is great, the program sounds fascinating, but I'd like to address the elephant in the room: I know more about the French healthcare system at this point than about the U.S. healthcare
system.' "

"[The director] looked at me and said, 'That is totally fine. You have the best teachers in the country that you'll be working with. You'll learn very quickly and will have no problem.' "

"Those teachers were former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who is a heart transplant surgeon, and Dr. Larry Van Horn, who is a professor of healthcare economics at Vanderbilt. I cannot imagine a better education on healthcare than working with those two and having a chance to work very closely with them."

"That being said, healthcare is a complex industry, and I don't know at what point I'll feel like I have true mastery of it. But at the same time, it was such an amazing opportunity to be able to work with those two. I knew that there was a chance in the future of potentially running the Council, and this organization is unique in that it does bring together leaders of some of the largest healthcare organizations in the entire country."

"For six-and-a-half years, I've been working hard on gender diversity. The Council has instituted a number of programs for our Leadership Healthcare Group, and we have programming specifically for women and trying to bring women together to create important relationships with other women."

"For our Fellows program, which is for senior executives in healthcare, it's been a journey from the first Fellows class, which had two women and two people of color in it, to now where we're at least approaching half [that are] women and also higher levels of diversity."

"At the same time, there's so much more work to be done [regarding diversity], and I think right now is a great time. The Council was called out pretty publicly for not being very diverse, and so it has allowed for a public and open discussion. [The discussion] has brought a lot of resources to us, and it made conversations with CEOs so much easier because this is top of mind for everyone. The ability to be able to talk to these leaders and have candid discussions about how we make the Council better and what their organizations are doing has been valuable during this time."

Related: From Hip Hop to Healthcare: 'A 20-Plus Year Story'

"It's been so interesting coming to healthcare without a healthcare background. I mentioned that I was a brand manager at a winery, and I knew all about how people make decisions. I feel like with healthcare, [the industry] is still so new in that process. Healthcare has for so long been 'top down': The doctors tell you what you're supposed to do, and you go sit in the waiting room. There's a lot in healthcare that could be vastly improved, and those are the little things."

"If there's one thing that I've learned over time, it's being able to focus more on the needs of the consumer."

"When you start looking at social determinants of health, it's important that we fund early childhood education, feed people, and house people in a way that is safe, secure, and healthy [and starting] at a young age because those types of things move generationally, and we'll end up paying three times the amount that we need to by not investing in those early years."

"From the Council's perspective, I would love to see us continuing this whole innovation [wave] that has happened so quickly and push that within our environment. Innovations that can take place within the national market all of a sudden are affecting a huge percent of the U.S. population when it comes to healthcare. I'd love to see [the Council] take the momentum that we have from this to continue to help our companies do that quickly and more efficiently."

"I think healthcare is so exciting just because you have a chance to make people's lives better. It would be exciting and fun to be a part of that innovation, to be able to make the change happen as opposed to being the person who connects and allows other people to make the change."