Dr. Larry Benz: President and CEO of Confluent Health (Raise the Line)

Hi, I'm Shivani. Thanks for checking out our raise the line interview series.

In which me and my cohost osmosis chief Medical Officer Dr Rishi Desai explore how to strengthen our healthcare system with some amazing leaders in medicine, technology, education and government.

And they have some great advice for people starting careers in healthcare as well. I hope you'll watch these highlights and then go listen to the full podcast interview wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Shibani. And today on a raise the line, I'm happy to be joined by doctor Larry Benz, who's the president and CEO of Confluent Health, which owns and operates over 230 physical therapy practices around the US.

Can you tell us a bit more about your background? And what led you to even get into a career in medicine, specifically physical therapy and occupational medicine?

I'm one of the, you know, oddballs in that when I was a young kid, II knew I wanted to become a physical therapist. I was uh you know, I involved in sports and athletics and had my fair share of injuries and I was exposed to kind of athletic trainers and physical therapists around middle school age, sixth grade, probably.

And I thought, man, that'd be a great profession to go in. Keep me close to athletics, keep me close to, you know, caring for people.

When I got to college and undergraduate, the education, physical therapist kind uh migrate from bachelor's degrees to bachelor's master's and then doctorate.

And I was in that phase where it was a master's degree. So, uh after finishing undergraduate and applying to different PT schools, I had some problems in the sense that I ran out of money.

And so I went to the US army, the army was a big sports medicine center for me. Um So it was a tremendous experience.

Um and I just loved all parts of being a physical therapist. But one of the things I noticed in uh in my clinical practice was there were things that mattered other than my physical exam, you know, how patients uh responded your so called bedside manner if you will.

And it occurred to me that we need to have some evidence and research that supports sort of these nonclinical factors of clinical success, whether it be empathy, compassion, high quality listening.

Um you know, peak end of fact, uh goal setting, how do these things really, really influence and, and as it turns out, they have a tremendous influence.

And, and so during my career, that kind of stayed with me, you know, like when I was active duty army, I I'd be floored to see that if you just told patients, yeah, your x rays were normal, all is good.

A certain percentage of them were just miraculously sort of cured. There had been a study by Boeing that basically said if you're an injured worker, if they just called you within 72 hours after your injury and say, look, we care about you.

We want you to know, we want you to get better and we want you to be back at work as fast as possible. There was a statistical difference between those who called and said just those very simple phrases and how somebody got better.

So what are these sort of nonclinical factors of clinical success that eventually led, led me to the University of Pennsylvania in their program called Master's of Applied Positive Psychology, where I extensively studied to see what kind of empirical evidence there was that suggested that emotional intelligence and these so called soft skills, do they really make any difference?

And if so how do they, is there anything else you want to be able to, to talk about to share with our audience while we have you on raise the line, the difference between dehumanization and burnout?

So if I'm a physical therapist, I've had a very busy today and I'm on my 11th patient without any break. At some point, I am going to what the call center research calls calcification.

I'm gonna calcify meaning I'm gonna get a little bit tired and I'm gonna take a human being that's normally a three dimensional character.

I'm gonna make them a two dimensional character. That's a very natural human behavior to happen.

And when you calcify, you're essentially dehumanizing. But the antidote to dehumanization is empathy and mindfulness breaks and doing whatever it is that hacks you back into normality, do whatever it takes to re humanize you in the moment.

Uh But that doesn't mean you're burned out. That means you're normal burnout.

On the other hand, the real antidote is rediscovering your profession as you're calling, it's reengaging the whole definition behind empathy and why you were called there to begin with.

Burnout is much more of a diagnosis where dehumanization is much more of a symptom that can be dealt with real time. Thanks for watching this preview of Raised Line to hear the full interview.

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