Fixing a Broken Healthcare System - Debra Geihsler

Jackie Simmons: 00:00:06

Welcome back to Your Brain on Positive. All the love and support you need is residing inside of you. And we're going to make it easier to turn it on.

Jackie Simmons: 00:00:23

Welcome to Your Brain on Positive. I'm Jackie Simmons, I am the host of the show. And I am here to make sure that you know that your brain on positive is 31% more productive than your brain on negative, neutral or stressed and to help us understand the power of positivity and the ways to bring more positivity into our lives and why we might want to and why our brains might thank us if we do is my guest, Debra Geihsler. So without further ado, I am going to bring you up into this realm with me. There you are, Debra. All right, feel free to unmute. And we'll get into your bio and everything in just a minute. But first, Debra, we were sharing before the show started about challenges when you have people you really, really, really love. And they end up going into hospice care and dying. How did you prevent that? How did you take what you were experiencing with your brother? And bounce back? What did you do? Well, I

Debra Geihsler: 00:01:34

mean, I, I think for my brother, it was a, he had been struggling for a very long time. And it was not something that he he would want to live the life that he was living. And so we you know, and I had been the person who for the last few years, I still do fund my family and fund their retirement take care of them. So I'm sort of the caregiver, even though I'm the youngest. So I have been really looking after people for a very long time. And knowing him and knowing what he how he wanted to live his life, he was not living it. And so I really had to support him to, to come to the conclusion that it's okay. And I feel like he's in a better spot. Because he was not living, what he wanted, how he wanted to

Jackie Simmons: 00:02:24

live. So giving yourself the power of perspective. So I don't mean perspective on that. That's awesome. All right. Debra Geihsler. Who are you? And what do you do?

Debra Geihsler: 00:02:42

I have to say that I would my family and my sister, not me, my sister and I've always been blamed of being the most positive people that they know always. Always seeing the positive side of it, even when it was my family would be like, we're we don't know if we can put food on the table. We'd be like, Oh, you haven't we're still have each other, you know. So I have not had really times where I felt like, there isn't a better option that you can get to. So, so grew up on a farm poor farm, we didn't have running water, we didn't have telephones, we were kind of pretty distant, very rural Nebraska. But we always had optimism about the future could be could be good. So Wow.

Jackie Simmons: 00:03:29

Okay, so from a rural farm in Nebraska, we're just going to bring everybody to the present moment. What can you do now?

Debra Geihsler: 00:03:37

Well, I'm a CEO for grey matters, but I sold my company. So that's how I got here, I start started my company. The philosophy for grey matters, resonated with me, as a former healthcare CEO. I felt like we were not taking good care of our patients. And I felt like through the process that we were just processing people, I was been around long enough to remember when health systems used to be community centers. And then we turned into big business. And I felt like, you know, during the way we forgot who we were there to serve. And so I started my own company in 2009 2010. To bring to do two things. One was to recognize that everybody's unique and individuals, because we treated everybody the same, you have diabetes, we treat all diabetics the same we have this we treat all the same. But I what I learned along the way as a CEO in Chicago and in Boston was that every person is unique. Every person is different. You have to take him to circumstances of what they've gone through how their mission and values work and how they make decisions about their lives. And so I started a company in 2009 2010 to work directly with employers to to manage their total population by putting primary care back in the center and becoming a center of trust and engaging people early was Whoa, whoa, whoa,

Jackie Simmons: 00:04:55

putting primary care back in the center and re engaging trust? Yeah. I wonder, just pause. And I'm going, Wow. I don't know about anyone listening. But this concept of trusting the system of medicine trusting that people have the time and can really have the capacity to hear us putting trust back into health care. Are you some kind of radical?

Debra Geihsler: 00:05:27

No, I'm just kind of common sense, I would say. Well, and I think you're absolutely right. Because I used to say to CEOs before we worked with them. Look, if you think that your population trust the health system, walk through the hallways of a hospital someday and hear people say, You're not my doctor, are you sure that's my medicine? Are you taking care of me? I've not seen these things before. And so we said, what we started our company based on was, each person is unique and an individual and we really want somebody to listen to them. We trained, we had the chasis from Rhode Island come and talk about stages of change and understanding the person and training our providers to not come in and just listen not to come in and just preach because the providers are very, very smart people.

Jackie Simmons: 00:06:09

They know what's going on. Who is it that again, women, you're saying this word like I should know them? And maybe I do, but I'm not catching it. Who is this?

Debra Geihsler: 00:06:17

Are Chaska is they created stages of change and the their philosophy was they were out of Rhode Island, their philosophy was to understand the willingness of people to be ready for making change. Wow.

Jackie Simmons: 00:06:30

Okay, so I haven't heard of them. Obviously, I'm about to go add another book to my collection. All right, so they came in from Rhode Island to introduce the awareness of stages of change to your health care practitioners.

Debra Geihsler: 00:06:47

Correct? Because the goal was to understand if the person was ready to make differences in their health life.

Jackie Simmons: 00:06:56

Yeah, we call that motivation in my world, are they motivated to actually change?

Debra Geihsler: 00:07:02

Well, then we had pre contemplation, contemplation, motivation, preparation, and then maintenance. And so we really wanted the providers to understand you can say all the things in the world you want to, to the patient, but there's only one person in the exam room who can improve their health, and that's the patient themselves. And so that's why our name was activate because we really wanting to activate the patient to understand they control if if they don't follow their prescriptions, if they don't follow their care plan, if they don't understand how their choices in life make a difference. We can't it doesn't matter how smart we are, we have to engage the patient.

Jackie Simmons: 00:07:38

All right, I got free contemplation, contemplation, motivation, and then one,

Debra Geihsler: 00:07:46

then preparation and maintenance.

Jackie Simmons: 00:07:48

Got it? Okay. If people and I'm a energetic healer, I'm one of those multi certified experts. So in energetic healing, and in mediation, the same training that I received was slow down. So at first, so you can go fast later. What I'm hearing is that once well, I'll ask, because I could be just making this up. What happened next, when your practitioners understood these five stages of pre contemplation, contemplation, motivation, full preparation, and maintenance, what happened in their interactions with their patients?

Debra Geihsler: 00:08:35

So the first thing was, we also taught them motivational interviewing. So the first thing for them to do was have the patient tell their story. It didn't matter what they came for. We wanted to hear who they were. And we found such great examples for patients who came in as example with strep throat. But we talked, we talked about what else is going on with you and and tell us about, you know, how, why you have this wealth as impacting it, your other health conditions. And our very first Doctor Who we hired, did a great job. He'd interviewed people, he got to know who they were. But he also started with a statement further into the line about to describe to me when you felt healthy when you and what did that feel like? Because I think sometimes we forget what it feels like to feel healthy and describe to me what it feels like to feel healthy. Describe to me how you feel today, and let's talk about some changes along your life that may have impacted how you feel today and what's different. And then we could actually get into what's happening with the patient who learned so much more about them. And we uncovered so many health issues that may not have ever been identified or that was impacting their health, but it was amazing for people and it was a great experience for the patient. We were we were dedicated to number one being the service to people not having the patient via RVU center or cost center to be respectful so when they made an appointment, we saw them on time and they spent with the provider. We did not well

Jackie Simmons: 00:09:59

now you're talking radical, you're talking radical for the patient to actually be seen at the time of their appointment. Yes. That's cool. I like that.

Debra Geihsler: 00:10:11

Well, when you think about from a patient's point of view, there's a lot of reasons they don't try. They don't go to the doctor, somebody's going to tell them what to do. And I'd have patients tell me, why would I go and have somebody tell me to exercise, give up smoking, eat different? All the things I already know, I said, you should never pay for somebody to tell you that. Should you have somebody sit there and listen to you about what your goals and motivations are for your health and what your risk factors are, and the consequences of those choices? Absolutely. But for somebody to just tell you what to do, it's not gonna work, which is why I think a lot of the wellness programs fail because nobody educated the patient about really health people like to learn about their health that they're, they're nervous about. So So being respectful would be respectful. A second thing was we really wanted to make sure that we educated patient. And so, you know, really, let's talk about ask somebody how they got diabetes, and what that means to them. They don't know a lot of times it just got labeled. So they had no clue what was going on with that. So we really tried to educate. And then we really created the risk factors of what's your choice in life, you want to see your grandkids, do you want to do this? These are things that we can we could change, but really, how do we help you get to the goal that you want.

Jackie Simmons: 00:11:23

That's lovely. And I can see how that was kind of radical, what's happened in the business when you instituted all of these things?

Debra Geihsler: 00:11:32

Well, so we encourage the employer to say, look, 40 to 50% of the population is not engaged in health care. For these reasons, they don't they wait until they have a catastrophic event. I used to say health care is a lot like gyms, those who know how to use it are the first to come, but you want those other people coming. So we really encourage them to get people engaged. So we had a goal of getting 85% unique participants in the first year engaging the populations and their families in the first year, some kind of incentive, get them to come in and see the incentive. So consequently, what happened was, was wildly successful. People came in, they were treated with respect, they were listened to, they learned about themselves, and they learned choices if they could make or not make our providers learn to love it, because they actually were able to get to know people and not know the condition or the symptoms. And from the employer who typically spent 20 20% of population spend 80% of their healthcare benefit dollars, they actually were taking those dollars and spreading it across their total population to learn about their population. Over time, what happened is the employer now knows because they have a trusted center where people were going, maybe I could create my Benefit Plan differently. Maybe I'm addressing the wrong things. Maybe I should, you know, focus more on more

Jackie Simmons: 00:12:52

or fewer sick days, let's get to the bottom line.

Debra Geihsler: 00:12:55

Well, so consequently, out of our 200 Plus employers, almost everybody had a return on investment. The first employer group we brought in they their health care expenditure went down 28%. So not only were we increasing the health care spend and taking care of more patients, but we're actually allowing that employer they called said, You know what, you just say 15 jobs because we were looking at cutting things, healthcare expenditures are crazy. And now we can actually reinvest, well, that reinvestment also improve the community because now people had a more successful organization, and their money could be invested in the right people, and the people were healthier, people enjoyed it. And so it turned out to me, it turned out, I said, it's the first time in my career as healthcare CEO that I saw happy payers, happy providers, happy patients. That's like,

Jackie Simmons: 00:13:43

Oh, my God, The Happiness Advantage realize, that's my favorite TED TEDx talk, we shot acres, The Happiness Advantage. What he teaches is what I say at the beginning of every podcast, your brain on positive, when you're happy, you're more productive, you're actually more prosperous, it's been proven over and over, you created a whole wellness, health care culture, that prove that out for everyone.

Debra Geihsler: 00:14:13

It was interesting, because we had people of every socio economic category that you could have. And I used to say, the providers, we can't own all of their problems. But we can do is build confidence when they understand that there are choices that they make over their own lives. And so consequently, they, they understood that people really felt good and the providers became really, you know, they knew their patients extremely well. We had one provider who knew the patient wasn't accepting that they had diabetes, he would meet them every day at the factory door and say, Let's see you take your medicine. Let's see how you do stuff. So we're able to be free to actually really do the right thing.

Jackie Simmons: 00:14:54

All right now I'm about to change the energy completely because you said something at the beginning. any of this that some people might have missed? You sold the company, you sold the company? Are they still following that promise?

Debra Geihsler: 00:15:09

Well, here's my philosophy on companies. Okay? I was never intending to be an entrepreneur, I just happened to say things that weren't right.

Jackie Simmons: 00:15:20

I'm an accidental entrepreneur. Okay, so I'm right there with you. Right? And okay, so you sold it, and you let it go. Congratulations, talk about stress management, one on one, you actually released it, and it will go and it will continue in whatever form the new owners take, right?

Debra Geihsler: 00:15:40

That's correct. They did have me they wanted me to stay on because I, I was very passionate about knowing every client, every customer, every you know, provider, you know, even though we grew to be a national company from Maryland, California, I still worked. People trusted me, they'd have my phone, my personal cell phone number, clients did. So I stayed on but it wasn't my company after wellness, I can't be here, because it's not my company. But I think in the evolution of companies, what happens is you have a good idea, competitors come along, money gets invested, you know, the environment starts to change in the environment you're trying to change. So now you're competing against more money. And we're just a small mission driven organization, eventually, because now we had, we had six years, I'm

Jackie Simmons: 00:16:21

gonna I'm going to take and we're going to bring this into something I actually speak about how big mission driven helps you stay calm, focused, and profitable. And you were while you were in mission driven, and head of this organization, you were calm, focused, and the organization was profitable, your clients had a positive, not just an ROI, because everything's a return on investment. They had a positive cash flow, ROI to working with you on positivity. Now, you pivoted and you're down here in Florida, right? Yeah. All right. So what got you into what you're doing now.

Debra Geihsler: 00:17:04

Dr. Bredesen has the same philosophy that I do, which is get to the root cause of what's driving the issue. If I were a healthcare CEO, I know, the providers are going to provide the treatments, I know people are gonna take care of it, people are gonna manage the systems, but you really don't know the consequences of what you're doing and how the patients are being treated and acting. And so it's a space that I learned so much about. So what I loved about Dr. Bredesen was, you know, we're all we're doing is treating the symptoms, we really need to get to the root cause of what is causing cognitive decline. And that can be caused by he would say at the beginning of his research, maybe 36 different issues that are going on that could cause cognitive decline, we need to get to the root cause of what's cognitive, cognitive decline issues. Okay, so

Jackie Simmons: 00:17:51

you went from the broad topic of total health and wellness care on a systematic employee management platform, to something very, very specific, and specific is brain health, and cognitive. I can't even find the right word cognitive maintenance, cognitive increase improvement, as opposed to decline. What if we could change that dynamic as we get older, maybe we get smarter.

Debra Geihsler: 00:18:23

Right? Right. Well, he's actually turned people around, we've actually seen our own patients that have come in. Normally, if you get diagnosed, what happens when you get diagnosed, you get a treatment plan, because it's sort of a fatal, you know, this is a decision this is

Jackie Simmons: 00:18:37

okay. Good diagnosis, we're talking about specifically, is Alzheimer's, correct? Correct. cognitive decline at the Alzheimer's level?

Debra Geihsler: 00:18:48

Correct? Well, and there is different cognitive decline, of course. And so we treat at all because because each of them have a root cause of what caused it to happen. So, so yes, that could be mild cognitive decline, it could be

Jackie Simmons: 00:19:04

a lot of the bottom line is it's the scariest sentence a doctor will ever tell a client, it used to be the big C for cancer. Now, it's the big CB for cognitive decline,

Debra Geihsler: 00:19:16

right? It's frightening to people and and we've educated patients to believe that there's nothing that can be done. And we've educated who

Jackie Simmons: 00:19:24

will will we in that sentence is not you? So who has educated people to the fact that this can't be?

Debra Geihsler: 00:19:32

I think most providers if you go if you say of cognitive decline, most people are going to say we're going to treat the symptoms. Like don't get to the what caused it.

Jackie Simmons: 00:19:42

Okay, so is that why you partnered up with grey matters? Yeah. Okay. Because I

Debra Geihsler: 00:19:49

because I believe there's a different approach. I think you should get to the root cause some people you may not be able to turn around. A lot of people are afraid because we, you know, takes 20 years in advance To develop cognitive decline, that you should get screened early, because you might be able to change that around.

Jackie Simmons: 00:20:07

Let's talk about four things that anyone can do to improve the odds that they won't face cognitive decline today, or sin. Well,

Debra Geihsler: 00:20:17

so the first thing you could do is get a screening test, you know, lab work, get an assessment, evaluation, that is the that is issue, if you're not going to get the screening test, you really need to, and I, and I will digress here a minute, but I do think that healthcare has not kept up and, and in healthcare, it takes 30 years to implement a new change into health systems takes that long. I believe that in the health care systems, what we've ignored is the chemicals are exposed to the food, things that are in our food, the environment, we don't really test that. And healthcare, we just treat the symptoms of that. And so if you're not going to go for the screenings, you need to look for things like what am I exposed to in my, my daily environment? Is there mold in my environment? Is my water good? Do I have mercury in my, in my system? Am I eating clean food, or I'm eating processed foods, you know, really kind of getting to know the clean part of life. I think reason one of the reasons I'm so healthy is we had no choice big clean because we grew on the farm.

Jackie Simmons: 00:21:25

Alright, so the first thing, I've got to just bring it down into four words. If you want to prevent cognitive decline, clean up your app, clean up your act, look at your food, look at the quality of your water, look at the heavy metals in your environment, look at the chemicals that you are surrounded with and clean up every thing that is non essential. And there's there used to be a list of a Dirty Dozen, these your products that had arsenic in them that we didn't know how to arsenic in them and stuff. Most of those companies have cleaned up that list from the last 20 or 30 years. Is there a new list that people need to be aware of?

Debra Geihsler: 00:22:11

I think there's always going to be a list there's always going to be a changing list. Okay,

Jackie Simmons: 00:22:15

is there a new credit list?

Debra Geihsler: 00:22:18

Not that I know that I know of there may be out there somewhere. I mean, I'm

Jackie Simmons: 00:22:24

in this age of generative artificial intelligence, which is the meeting I just came from was understanding chat GPT and all of its variations and cousins and yes, step families and whatever's when in doubt, there was once a very wise woman who said, As you read the label, and it looks like it belongs in a chemistry lab rather than a kitchen. It probably does. Right. That's true. Okay, so that was my my guy. Mark. His mom said that to him. So he's been reading labels since he was born. Smart. expire. Yeah.

Debra Geihsler: 00:23:05

So the while the other thing is exercise, because you have to Dr. Bredesen is very keen on the keto diet. But you know, you have to the other thing that people do, and I think this is true, we get into the habit of eating when it's time to eat, not when we're hungry.

Jackie Simmons: 00:23:27

Got it. So cleaning up your environment, exercising more, no matter what level of exercise you have exercise more and eat only when you're hungry. Right. That would be an amazing thing that would absolutely cause chaos in our public school system. Because that's where most of us learn to eat on a schedule.

Debra Geihsler: 00:23:51

Well, you're right. I never thought about that. You're absolutely right. Oh, right. We're playing

Jackie Simmons: 00:23:54

from the moment we had to go to school, your breakfast before you get on the school bus. You have lunch, when the bell rings, you stop eating when the bell rings, we were trained like Pavlov's dog. When you got home, you had a snack and a couple of hours later, mom had dinner ready. And we were trained for this. And then we wonder why we have obesity. Right?

Debra Geihsler: 00:24:16

Right. Right. And then parents both parents started go work. So they had to buy fast food to feed everybody, all these different routines that we had to have. So yeah,

Jackie Simmons: 00:24:25

we can undo a lot of this. And I'm part of a charge for this. So I'm so delighted that you brought that up, there's going to be more and more information about what I'm involved in as the products become more and more available. In the meantime, we've got clean up your act, exercise more whatever exercise you're doing, add more to it and eat only when you are hungry and if it's inconvenient, you get hungry drink what?

Debra Geihsler: 00:24:54

Water. Good water, good water.

Jackie Simmons: 00:24:59

Okay. And good water is defined as distill filtered.

Debra Geihsler: 00:25:05

What? Well distilled and filtered. I mean, a lot of times things like Florida and stuff are in your water, that's probably not good for you. And And where's your water coming from? I'm going I was just from another state and I won't mention it, but they have tremendous water problems, you know, they're gonna have problems for a lot of people. So, so yeah, good, why drink water all day long. I'm wondering. So then the other thing is really sleep. And, you know, interesting enough, when I was building my other company, I was really traveling in every time zone you could imagine to every place on the road. fascinating to me, as soon as I get into like a regular sleep schedule, in the same time zone, how much that improves your health.

Jackie Simmons: 00:25:54

So there, I'm going to invite people to just do some research on this because I travel a lot. I'm, again, a multi certified expert, one of my certifications is in eastern healing arts and one of my mentors, Susan flirting our has a meridian reset chart. So whenever I travel, I reset my Meridian time clock to my new times that and I do that in every time zone that I landed, when I'm in the air, I don't worry about it, but whatever I land at. And so I'll invite people to just look for what are the tools that help you reorient to a timezone if you're traveling, because that is a sleep impact or just what we the stories we hear about just going into Eastern Daylight Time or Eastern, say Daylight Savings Time, or not daylight savings time, what it messes with people's minds, we know this, right, not just our schedules and our clocks.

Debra Geihsler: 00:26:53

Well, but yeah, I mean, your body processes the food and the energy when you sleep. And if you're not getting that you're not it's, you're not processing your food, right. So you're not getting that stable environment. So sleep and then stress.

Jackie Simmons: 00:27:08

So I'm a stress management consultant been that for about 30 years, it was totally self focused, because I had three daughters all in high school at the same time, and I needed all the help I could get. This girl was still standing and all of my daughters survived. So and so did I. Yeah. And there were moments where it was really challenging. So if someone says, Well, maybe I'm dealing with stress, oh, by the way, FYI, you can tell me what the statistic is now, the last time I checked 94% of all primary care office visits were for stress related disorders. Wow. Yeah. So this is the key for me in a lot of different ways. I've got my own emergency stress management technique. 101. What's yours?

Debra Geihsler: 00:27:58

stress release.

Jackie Simmons: 00:28:01

Management. Yeah, I call it distress. Because that's my business stress management. Technique. Number 1101.

Debra Geihsler: 00:28:07

I'm kind of a I like to I'm a walker outside exercise person I get I get with my dog, we get about six miles a day. And then I work out for 40 minutes a day. And so I kind of, you know, that makes it I used to be a runner. But now that I got a dog that I have to walk around. I don't run so I come back and work out. But you know, I always I used to love getting up in the morning and going for a nice run and getting out in the air, you know, not being stuffed, stuffed in somewhere. So that's probably my stress reliever, but I like to walk around.

Jackie Simmons: 00:28:42

I think that's a great one. So when I realized that there was this new member, emergency repair procedure, number one for a piece of machinery was given a swift kick. So emergency stress repairs stress management technique for me is take a deep breath. Yeah, hold it, and then release it. Yeah. So that's mine, because it's something I can do anywhere at anytime. You're sure. Debra, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, thank you for bringing this awareness. This history, the fact that health care can be interactive, not transactional. The fact that there's a financial return on interactive health care that you saw among your employer clients that you're now seeing in grey matters, and I love that I also love the fact that you're local, so we get to get to know each other. Right? I love that. I'm excited. If you don't have grey matters where you are, you want to check out gray matters. And we'll put some links in all of the notes in the show notes. And for everyone listening thank you for popping in to you Your Brain on positive today. Remember that the power of positivity, the power of optimism and positivity is special magical. Pu P O P the power of optimism and positivity. So would you just go poop on the world? They need you now more than ever. Thank you for being part of the show.

Debra Geihsler: 00:30:24

Thank you so much. Pleasure. Thanks so much.