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00:00:01
Maria Fernanda Levis
52 Plays3 days ago
Thanks for listening to our episode with Maria Fernanda Levis.
To keep up with or connect with Maria:
✨Impactivo Website: https://impactivo.com/
✨Maria’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marialevis/
To stay in touch with Meredith and Medbury:
Follow Meredith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-farley/
Follow Medbury on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/medbury_agency/
Subscribe to the Medbury newsletter: https://meredithfarley.substack.com/
Email Meredith: Meredith@MedburyAgency.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Impactivo
00:00:01
Speaker
Maria, hi. Hi, thanks for having me. Thank you so much for joining. For anyone who doesn't know you, can you say who you are and what you do? So my name is Maria Fernanda-Levis. I am CEO of Impactivo, and our company is committed to transforming health systems. We do it mainly through empowering leaders and also with working with organizations on redesigning the way care is provided.
00:00:25
Speaker
Can you tell me a little bit about your career journey up till now? And then I really want to dig into your day to day and the work you're doing currently.
From Nonprofit to Healthcare
00:00:33
Speaker
When I graduated from college, I started a nonprofit organization. And for nine years, I worked with the issues of homelessness and author K through 12 education reform, both at the same time. Both important issues to me. I studied sociology and literature. So I was looking for a way of making an impact.
00:00:55
Speaker
With the tools that we have at our disposal, how can we affect change in society on issues that are important to us? And that's actually how I started the first organization. It was a nonprofit and I ran it for nine years.
00:01:09
Speaker
And it was my first job, but I was not really an employee. And I learned a lot about automated employees from that. But what happened was at about nine years, we started doing research on what was causing homelessness.
00:01:25
Speaker
And I realized that there were more homeless and they were younger. And it kind of broke my heart. So I decided to go back to school and figure out how to work more upstream.
00:01:38
Speaker
And that's actually how I got into healthcare. So I went back to school, did two master's degrees.
Consulting and Healthcare Insights
00:01:44
Speaker
One public health and one in public administration. And then i really wanted to see how the system worked. So I got a consulting agreement with, at that point, the largest health insurance company in Puerto Rico. I also wanted to work with someone that I admired. And this woman had funded our organization for years. And I was the advisor to the president of this insurance company.
00:02:06
Speaker
And it was amazing because I got to see how insurance was run. And at the end, I also decided that I wanted to do more than that. And I wanted to figure out how we could actually transform care at the level where people were receiving care.
00:02:21
Speaker
And that's what we've done ever since. Why do you think you are so drawn to helping people and to solving tangible problems in
Social Entrepreneurship Motivation
00:02:30
Speaker
that way? I think it's a matter of two things.
00:02:33
Speaker
One is i come from Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is an area where I can see homeless when I walk down the street. And I think sometimes when you see things, you can't unsee them, right?
00:02:43
Speaker
And the second one is I grew up with a family that told me that I could achieve whatever I wanted, right? The way that I would coin it would be to say, you can do anything. You can't do everything at the same time, but you can achieve anything if you propose yourself to it. So I've always felt that we can make a difference, right?
00:03:00
Speaker
that we can have a sense of agency, right? That we can do something about these things. So I think it's twofold. One, because I see it and two, because I know I can. And by now I've seen it happen so many times that I'm convinced that entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship, it's such an extraordinary force for good.
00:03:19
Speaker
Yeah. That why do anything else? I want to double click on what you said.
Launching the First Organization
00:03:23
Speaker
So you started in your own organization before you'd even had like a full-time nine to five corporate or office job. Is that right?
00:03:30
Speaker
Yeah. I presume it means you didn't have quite as many models as other people insofar as what leadership looks like in action in a corporate or business environment. What was that like for you to be starting something of your own as a very first stop?
00:03:47
Speaker
Well, the first thing is the reason I was able to do it is multiple fold, right? One, i didn't have a salary. Two, my parents housed me.
00:03:58
Speaker
Three, I ate their food. i And four, my father was a businessman. Okay. And he allowed me a space in his office. And he allowed me to do things with some of his resources.
00:04:12
Speaker
Okay. Right? So, for example, I could ask his assistant for help with things. Right? Or i remember one time they had extra free newspaper ads because they received them as a company. Yeah. And he was like, well, if you want them, you can have them. I'm like, great, I can do a campaign. So I kept on using what was like leftover.
00:04:33
Speaker
i had his full support and he was my coach and mentor. So I think that's what it was. but With respect to then hiring staff as we grew, that was a challenge because I didn't know what the perspective was of being an employee.
00:04:47
Speaker
So I have spent a lot of time figuring out how to best work with people. Because I didn't have that experience of having like a real boss. What is the average day in your life like now?
Daily Routine of a CEO
00:04:58
Speaker
I don't think there's an average day. But a lot of my time is spent meeting either with my internal team to organize them or with potential customers and partners.
00:05:10
Speaker
So my job is mainly around meeting with people and then also putting that into like form and function. So plans and I do a lot of writing.
00:05:23
Speaker
Writing is really important to me. I did study literature and I think it was a great asset. So I spend a lot of time writing and communicating and figuring out how to design things so that they get done versus me doing them.
00:05:36
Speaker
What about like your day outside of work? Are you a morning person? Do you get up early and start writing? Absolutely, I'm morning person. You are. I wake up at five, I meditate a little bit out the door by 5.30. Need to do exercise. If I don't do exercise, I don't have energy to finish what I do.
00:05:53
Speaker
Mornings, depending on what's happening, sometimes they're social. Like I'll do long breakfast with my son and talk things out, prepare him for school. And if not, I will sit down and I will start working early.
00:06:07
Speaker
And then I have a lot of purpose-driven social activities that I love to do. What you mean
Entrepreneurial Social Connections - Sunday Walkers
00:06:15
Speaker
by that? Say more. So my favorite activity every week is something I call it Sunday walkers.
00:06:21
Speaker
And the Sunday Walkers is a group of entrepreneurs who come together to walk from 7.30 in the morning until 10. We walk 10 miles and have a little coffee in between. But that group is not just about walking. It's about creating social connection. We are all part of this organization called Entrepreneur's Organization, which trains us to go deep.
00:06:45
Speaker
So these long walks are really a way of us supporting one another as well.
Impactivo's Mission and Work in Healthcare
00:06:51
Speaker
So outside of the work you're doing, you like to join and like participate in meaningful organizations?
00:06:56
Speaker
Yeah, I'm on the board of a couple of organizations and yeah, groups of people who want to make good things happen. Can you talk a little bit more about Impactivo? I mean, I understand conceptually what you all do, but can you break it down a couple levels in really tangible ways for folks listening in so far as like exactly how you're influencing the systems?
00:07:16
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So when we talk about Impactivo, we say we work with leaders to move real health forward. And real health is not just the absence of disease, it's the capacity to thrive over time.
00:07:32
Speaker
So we've done a shift in what the standard of health should be. And we work with leaders because within the health system, there are so many people who are done with the way that things are carried out with a system that spends more than any country in the world and ranks 60th in life expectancy.
00:07:54
Speaker
And it's not just a matter of statistics. Folks that are out in the field see it every day. They see how people are coming in sicker, how they're coming in with more chronic diseases, how they're coming in with more frailty.
00:08:08
Speaker
And a lot of that is related to a lack of a focus on lifestyle factors. So we have an expertise in payments and innovation, and we've done so much work with clinical teams to bring them to a place where they can actually transform the entire business model so that it focuses on keeping people healthy.
00:08:33
Speaker
And we do this with hospitals, we do this with government, and we also do this with primary care organizations and other community groups. So when you say you work with leaders, like what kind of leaders are you working with? What are their titles and verticals?
00:08:47
Speaker
So generally C-suites. yeah So we work with a lot of chief medical officers. Okay. We work with a lot of CEOs. We work with a lot of CFOs.
00:08:58
Speaker
Within healthcare, care the three of them are vital to getting anything done. Like in healthcare, care you really need to look at the three. You can't just focus on the medical side or the financial side. You really do have to look at the three. So we work with generally C-suites in different organizations. So for example, we also work with state health officers. We also work with folks that are directors of Medicaid, folks who are in either policy or health administration and help them to plan accordingly.
00:09:32
Speaker
So our firm has a vast expertise in research. So everything that we do is very evidence-based. And then because we've been doing change work from the financial and from the clinical side for such a long time, it just comes naturally how these two can combine.
00:09:48
Speaker
So I want to really understand, like, say you went into practice, how would you be working with that leadership team and what type of changes would you all enact? That's a great question and such an opportunity to explain what we do because sometimes it is a bit abstract. Yeah.
00:10:04
Speaker
So, for example, recently a hospital hired us and we did two things for them. One is we work with their and leadership team and we make sure that their leadership team understands what real health is and not from an abstract perspective, but literally what it means for them in their lives.
00:10:22
Speaker
How are they making sure that they live in a way where they improve their own health so they understand the challenges for other people to improve their health? And what that does is when we look at the evidence on what keeps us healthy, our relationships are core.
00:10:39
Speaker
So we're working with teams so that they communicate better. We're working with teams so that they do deeper work of supporting one another. and also incorporating healthy behaviors, which gives them more clarity, better time management, and more capacity to execute as leaders within their organization.
00:11:02
Speaker
Then we also do deep community health needs assessment work. So we actually help them carry out very profound processes of understanding what the needs are of their patients.
00:11:16
Speaker
And we also work with their clinical teams to figure out how you redesign. And by redesign, we're talking about workflows. We're talking about the use of Lean and Six Sigma tools and patient-centered care tools in order to restructure the way the care is provided so that it's done by a team.
00:11:33
Speaker
So a lot of health care is we keep on sending folks to a physician and folks need more than 15 minutes with a physician. They need an entire team that can look at both the social and the clinical aspects related to their life, not just to their disease, in order to help them move towards health.
00:11:57
Speaker
What are a few practices or recommendations that you end up very consistently making when it comes to maybe, let's say, physical habits for workers that it just ends up being advice you all are giving over and over again? My first piece of advice is that everyone is different.
00:12:17
Speaker
So we've done research with patients with diabetes. And the difference between a patient that is able to manage their disease and a patient that does not is this what we call sense of agency.
00:12:30
Speaker
The patient who manages or controls their condition or even reverts their condition is a patient that notices that when I do this and this, I can see this result, right?
00:12:41
Speaker
So you really do have to know yourself. There are pillars of lifestyle medicine, right? So there's six pillars of lifestyle medicine. Most of us know them. Nutrition, exercise, sleep, risky habits, exercise.
00:12:55
Speaker
social connections and stress reduction, right? So those are the six pillars of lifestyle medicine. Everything we do is based on lifestyle medicine, but it's also based on the theory of self-determination, which says we need to find what motivates you And what motivates you could be, depending on where you are in your lifespan, carrying your grandkids.
00:13:16
Speaker
What motivates you can be making sure that you can dance. And based on what really motivates you, and we do exercises with them so that we identify that, Then you give folks the tools and a community, right? So everything needs to be relational. The role of relationships and health, I think it's kind of crazy that healthcare care speaks so little of it, but it literally is the top predictor of health at 80.
00:13:45
Speaker
I mean, it's more impactful than smoking. It's more impactful than than cholesterol. It's more impactful than anything else that's measured, but it's seldom talked about. And that doesn't mean that you can smoke and eat unhealthily and expect to have healthy old age, but it does mean that is the most important factor.
00:14:05
Speaker
When you were talking about how teams could communicate better, for example, I'm curious, do you notice gender disparities when you're working with groups? And I think what's behind that question for me is that I do think women tend to do a bit more emotional labor in the workplace often, not to generalize, but they might be the ones who are over communicating, listening, empathizing, et cetera.
00:14:28
Speaker
And so I'm curious as to how those trainings like play out.
Training in Nonviolent Communication
00:14:32
Speaker
Yeah. So we teach folks tools that are general, not gender specific. We do talk about gender because there are differences. I'll give you a very specific story.
00:14:44
Speaker
So one of the tools we teach is nonviolent communication. And in nonviolent communication, it's all about taking away judgment from communications.
00:14:56
Speaker
and disvalidating, right? So the way it looks is when we're using the steps of nonviolent communication, first you observe, and when you observe, right, you communicate what you observe. It's just what you see or hear.
00:15:09
Speaker
And the next step is how you feel. And feeling is literally like one word. I feel happy, sad, and there's a feeling wheel. The third step is expressing your need. And there's literally like a list of universal needs. And most of us are not versed in what those are. One of the most difficult parts of communication is just figuring out what we need.
00:15:29
Speaker
And then the fourth component is an ask. So I tell you this because after giving a training, this man, in the audience stands up and he says, you know, this is really nice stuff that you're teaching and he's elevating his voice, but you're not going to change me.
00:15:45
Speaker
So of course I've just given this group an entire training on nonviolent communication. And I'm like, well, the only thing I can do is use it at this moment but and see how it goes. Right. So standing on stage, he's just stood up, he's facing off, he's really loud and I say, sir, when you speak to me in that tone, it makes me feel scared.
00:16:09
Speaker
And I need to feel calm. So can we try that again? And the man's face pretty much just disassembles. And he says, I have a hearing problem.
00:16:23
Speaker
And I speak loudly. And I don't know what to do about it. So in this room, we had like three or four women who had all felt harassed by this man who has just confessed that he has a problem with hearing.
00:16:40
Speaker
And it completely changed the dynamic of the workplace because those tools where we take away judgment and really try to go deeper into the conversation, deeper into why folks are acting as they're acting really does help, I would say, surpass a lot of the differences that we commonly see in workplaces.
00:17:01
Speaker
That's really interesting and a very cool scene of visualizing. I'm glad it turned out well, right? That could have been turned out very differently. Did you totally believe him or do you feel like he's just trying to save face a little bit? oh he was part of a program with us for 12 months. Yeah. He's one of our biggest fans. Wow. i can big Yeah, it's incredible.
00:17:22
Speaker
All right. Well, I want to zoom out a little bit at a high level and ask, like, what are you all most focused on
Rural Health Transformation and Leadership Programs
00:17:28
Speaker
right now? Like this quarter, this year, what are some of the things you're most intently working on for the business? So I would say this quarter we're working on three things.
00:17:37
Speaker
But number one is something called the Rural Health Transformation Fund. And the Rural Health Transformation Fund is, i would say, like the opportunity of a lifetime for us in the United States to transform care so that we're actually looking at a way of improving people's health, not just addressing disease.
00:17:58
Speaker
It also comes at a time when Medicaid is slated to be reduced by about 30%. So there's $50 billion dollars in funding throughout the states.
00:18:09
Speaker
And this timeline of about 10 years in which Medicaid funding will be reduced. And it's interesting because we all know that the United States is the top spender in healthcare care and the results are not the best. So it's really a moment of opportunity and those moments are either taken or lost.
00:18:28
Speaker
So we are currently working with various partners on the ground in different states to make sure that we can use the experience that we have over years of redesigning care and of listening to communities and of focusing on improving lifestyle and the causes, the root causes of disease, right?
00:18:52
Speaker
Not just so people are less sick, but so that they can actually thrive. That's the opportunity that we have. So we're spending day and night on that. We're working on two other things as well, and they are related to it.
00:19:05
Speaker
One is we have a program called Lead in Health, which is this program that I told you about where we work with leaders so that they can protect their own leadership capacity. So this program called Lead in Health was developed specifically for health professionals. We keep on getting folks from other industries who want to participate because there's so much burnout.
00:19:23
Speaker
And what we want is for folks to understand what real health is so that they can make it contagious. And then the second one is on care redesign. So we have an entire methodology that helps health organization do the best with the resources that they have. We know resources are limited, but if you intentionally go through design sprints, you really do get things to a different level.
00:19:47
Speaker
And the results we see are amazing, both in patient outcomes and in financial
Connecting and Learning More
00:19:52
Speaker
returns. We can put the link to the website in the show notes here. So if someone's listening and they want to check out the site, you can just scroll down and click. Is there anywhere else that we can send folks who are interested to learn more about you all and the work that you're doing? So our website has most of the information.
00:20:08
Speaker
It's www.impactivo, which is impactivo.com. But you can also just message me on LinkedIn. Maria Levis. All right. We'll put your LinkedIn yeah URL in there too. Maria, I think the work you're doing is so interesting and your background is so fascinating. Thank you so much for taking time to talk. Is there anything that I didn't ask you about that you would want to say or communicate?
Advice on Work-Life Integration
00:20:34
Speaker
I'll say one thing and it's just because everyone asks like, what is the best piece of advice that anyone's ever given you? And it's interesting because I have done so much work with burnout. over the years. And folks will come to me and they'll be like, should we look for work-life balance?
00:20:51
Speaker
And I believe so much more in work-life integration, right? How we make sure that we're doing things that we are excited about and at the same time taking care of ourselves and our families.
00:21:03
Speaker
And I mention that because the best piece of advice that I was ever given was by a woman president of a university. And I had just graduated from college and I called her because I was like, for my master's degree, I don't know what to do. Like I'm going back and I'm older and I'm not sure how to start with my career again. And it was very funny because I had a baby and she said, Maria, make sure your son is okay and the rest you will figure out.
00:21:34
Speaker
And I think it goes to that concept of how do we make sure that our full lives make sense? How do we balance family? How do we balance our health? How do we balance our relationships with the work that we do every day? And what I can tell you is that my experience is that she was right.
00:21:56
Speaker
I have a clearer head and I'm more capable to think because my son is okay, right? And the same thing goes for health. The healthier I am, the more vitality I have to do the things I like to do.
00:22:09
Speaker
I like that. i think That's great advice. I'm happy that you shared that. Thank you. Maria, well, I appreciate your time so much. You're an incredible interview. And thank you very much. Thank you for having me. And thank you for the work you do. And thank you for taking time to do these because these are not easy. So thank you for finding me. Love easy today.
00:22:27
Speaker
Thank you.