In formal health care-speak, this was “an absence of appropriate engagement.” And it immediately established a serious lack of trust between the doctor and this patient’s mother. In less formal language, I was steamed. I adopted a different approach with that emergency room doctor. I became more assertive, more intense, threw some medical terms back at her. Enough so that she called the attending physician, who ordered more tests, including a chest X-ray. What they found was that my daughter had pneumonia. Although we walked out of the hospital having gotten the appropriate tests and with the antibiotics we needed, it was not so easy to establish trust in that place and with that doctor. My husband and I talked about how another family—a family that couldn’t toss back the medical lingo, a family that didn’t have the confidence to question what was happening—might not have gained the attending physician’s attention, might not have received that vital X-ray. I still think about those families and those children. I know how frightened we were that night, but I knew in my heart that we would get help. I could make that happen. What’s exciting to me about becoming president of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is that, perhaps, I can help make “appropriate engagement” happen for other people, too.

ROOTS AND INFLUENCES
This is my own personal tale about the often abstract notion of access to high-quality health care, an issue in which this Foundation is deeply engaged. And having seen the system up close as a clinician, a teacher and a researcher, I’m personally committed to providing quality health care to all people equally. I am also an M.B.A., a parent and an African-American woman. I bring to this new challenge everything I’ve learned in these roles, plus the core value that has guided me in all of them—a strong passion for helping others. As a geriatrician versed in chronic illness who made house calls most Mondays, I understand the fears and insecurities that individuals and families feel when the health care system fails them.

I also bring to the job a grounding and training in finance and management from my days as a Wharton graduate student and faculty member. The importance of measurement, of accountability, and of taking a disciplined approach to resource management and motivating people are all skills that I learned—and taught—in my business studies. They will guide me as I refine and recalibrate the goals, objectives and institutional brainpower of the Foundation, so ably developed over the past decade by my predecessor, Steve Schroeder. What I’ve found so extraordinary here is the passion and dedication of our entire staff to this Foundation’s core mission to improve health and health care, to make a tangible difference in the lives of all Americans. To a physician given an exceptional opportunity to lead, this spirit is infectious.