Dr. Robert Pearl
Ep. 10 — A father’s death from a medical mistake propels his son to tackle the most serious problems in our healthcare system / Dr. Robert Pearl, former CEO, Kaiser Permanente Medical Group. Dr. Robert Pearl went to college to learn philosophy. But when his favorite professor was denied tenure, Dr. Pearl veered towards a career in cardiac surgery, naively believing it was devoid of politics. But his naivety was short-lived. Pearl says he quickly became disillusioned by the inequalities he discovered in his specialty and profession. He shifted course again and became a plastic surgeon, finding a renewed passion for medicine after he went to Mexico to help children with cleft lips and cleft palates. Later offered a chance to lead Kaiser Permanente, Dr. Pearl describes how he sacrificed his love of surgery to rescue the nation’s largest medical group from its dire predicament (when he took over as CEO, the group had just two days left of cash reserves, in violation of California regulations, which required three). In the process of turning the company around, Pearl realized with a shock just how broken the U.S. healthcare system really is today and how much effort it will take to set it right. Pearl’s disillusionment came full circle when his father died from long-term complications from an easily preventable medical mistake. And he began to grasp the financial, emotional, and social toll that medical mistakes cause, including 200,000 deaths annually. Pearl shares how he took his father’s death to heart and vowed to spend the remainder of his time as CEO of Kaiser Permanente and beyond solving some of these seemingly intractable problems. In concluding this compelling saga of the education of an American doctor, Pearl mentions some striking examples of companies such as Amazon that are trying to solve the healthcare dilemma. And he describes how he is continuing his mission and passion to transform U.S. healthcare today in his third career as an author, professor, and public speaker. Transcript Download the PDF Chitra Ragavan: Hello, and welcome to When it Mattered. I'm Chitra Ragavan. On this episode, we will be talking to Dr. Robert Pearl. He's the former CEO of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, the nation's largest medical group. He also serves as a clinical professor of plastic surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine, and is on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Chitra Ragavan: Dr. Pearl is the author of the bestselling book, Mistreated: Why We Think We're Getting Good Healthcare – and Why We're Usually Wrong. Robert, welcome to the podcast. Robert Pearl : Thank you very much for having me. Chitra Ragavan: How did you enter the field of medicine? Did you always want to be a doctor? Robert Pearl : I went to college to become a university professor. I expected to be a teacher of philosophy, but the professor that I thought was the best didn't get tenure, not because he wasn't excellent at the field, he ultimately became the chairman at Reed, but because of his political views. And I decided I didn't want to go into something that would be based on politics; and in the naivety of a 20-year-old, I thought it would be medicine. Robert Pearl : When people learn about my career, the CEO of actually the nation's largest medical group, and thinking that I was going into it to avoid politics, they often laugh. But that's how I saw it; it was life and death, and why should politics come into the middle? And so I went to Yale Medical School to become a doctor. Chitra Ragavan: And what was your specialty that you wanted to pursue? Robert Pearl : That's also interesting, because not wanting to get caught in political crossfires, I thought that cardiovascular surgery would be the best. At the time, the mortality rate was moderately high, and those surgeons who could get the best results, the lowest mortality,