A Legacy of Compassion in Women’s Health

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A Legacy of Compassion in Women’s Health | Linda Longo

In this episode, we explore the inspiring career and personal story of Linda Longo, VP of Operations (previously Regional Director of Operations) at Together Women's Health. Linda recounts her challenging start to nursing, detailing how she overcame obstacles that allowed her to rise within women's health to become a trusted leader, all while maintaining a deep personal connection to her work. Her story highlights the essential role of compassion, trust, and resilience in navigating the complexities of healthcare.

Transcript

Introduction

Linda Longo: I think that it's probably a cliche to say I'm most proud of my family, but in my life, I'm most proud of growing good, kind, decent human beings. And I think that some of that is nurture, some of it's nature, but having one daughter who is able to do that, such a great mother and the other one who takes such good care of other people's children and are just kind and good. I think that that's certainly something to be proud of.

As far as work and my work life, I think that I'm proud of how far I've come because I applied to nursing school out of high school and I didn't get in my first try. It took 10 years to get the courage to go back to nursing school and become a nurse. If I had to be proud of something in my work, it would be that.

Anderson Williams: Welcome to Everyday Heroes, a podcast from Shore Capital Partners that highlights the people who are building our companies from the inside every day, often out of the spotlight. With this series, we want to pull those heroes out of the shadows.

We want to hear their stories. We want to share their stories. We want to understand what drives them, why they do what they do, how they might inspire and support others to become Everyday Heroes, too.

In this episode, I talk with Linda Longo, a regional director of operations with Together Women's Health.

Linda's story is one that feels unique to women's health. It's a story of profound professional growth and purpose in generation healthcare relationships, but ultimately remains rooted in her own tragic loss.

Before we get started, will you just share a little bit about yourself outside of work, things we can't find on LinkedIn, family, hobbies, interesting facts, anything we should know about you?

Linda Longo: Sure. I grew up in Michigan. I'm one of three and the oldest of three. I act like an oldest child, so I fit that stereotype very well.

I'm married to a retired healthcare worker, which is kind of great. He understands my life, which is nice. I have two children. My stepdaughter lives here near us, and I have four beautiful grandchildren. And then I have another daughter who is a special ed teacher in Savannah, Georgia, who just got engaged, so we'll be planning a wedding very soon. So that's fun. Another wedding, I should say.

Anderson Williams: Very exciting.

Linda Longo: Yeah.

Anderson Williams: So in terms of your work, say what you do and where you do it.

Linda Longo: I am a Regional Director of Operations. I function kind of as a bridge between the practice and the corporate office. I like to think that I'm the voice of both. I love leading and guiding, coaching leaders, so I think that this position allows me to do just that.

I'm responsible currently for nine practices. I have 71 providers, 22 locations over three states with a concentration in Michigan, which is nice because I live in Michigan, so that works out well.

Anderson Williams: So, tell me and tell the audience a little bit about Together Women's Health and given those statistics and all the practices and all the people you're part of leading, what does Together Women's Health do?

Linda Longo: Gosh, I could talk about them forever. I love my job and I love this corporation. Together Women's Health is a health organization that supports private practices. We provide support along with pathways for growth and legacy protection by succession planning. We've mainly partnered with OBGYN practices, but we have expanded beyond that by partnering with a urogynecology group and a radiology group that focuses on women's breast health.

So it's a great company.

Anderson Williams: And how did you come to be a part of TWH?

Linda Longo: I was the practice manager of the platform practice, so the first practice that joined Together Women's Health in Michigan. I was fortunate enough to be their practice manager, and that was in the early 2021. Diligence was during COVID in 2020, so that was not fun at all.

I was grateful to get to New Year's Eve and sign. We actually signed on New Year's Eve. So I was grateful to get to New Year's Eve and sign. So I always say that I'm one of the few employees that never had an interview that I was gratefully acquired.

Anderson Williams: But gratefully acquired and yet in a very short period of time have gone from a practice manager at a single location to now managing nine.

Linda Longo: Yes.

The Opportunity

Anderson Williams: Talk to me about both how that opportunity came about, but also just what you've had to do to grow and change and evolve to that kind of scale?

Linda Longo: Well, my previous life before I was a practice manager, my background is nursing. I am a nurse. I was an operating room nurse for a very long time, and I had multiple jobs in the operating room.

So I was, you know, a staff nurse, a educator. And the most recent job that I had was running an operating room. So a large group of operating rooms and dealing with a number of physicians. So I did have some knowledge of nursing of juggling a bunch of people and budgets and P&L's and that sort of thing, although in a hospital environment, that was kind of way far away from me, certainly.

But I think that how I got to be in this position, it happened rather quickly. I think that once we had three practices, it was around that time that Anthony, our CEO, asked me to kind of oversee those practices and move into, I think they called it operations manager role at that time. We just started growing and growing and I just acquired more practices. And that's how I am today. I mean, it's just, I get another practice. I'm like, okay, that's fine. Let's go.

Anderson Williams: I love that spirit, but practically speaking, what are the differences? What are the challenges of. You know, nine versus one or nine versus three as you continue to grow, just in terms of your leadership.

Linda Longo: Sure. I think that really managing my time is important. I also think that I hate to say it, but being available off hours is also a part of it. Lots of physicians need to talk outside of work hours or on Saturdays or on Sundays. And certainly I don't mind giving my time to do that either. But managing my time is probably the most important thing.

I have two out of state practices. So figuring out when to see them and how long to stay and, you know, one on ones really help. I have one on ones with my practice medical directors and with practice managers and that helps as well to staying connected. And I feel like they, I turned my phone off for this interview because they would have called me four or five times by the time the interview happened.

And it's just sometimes to bounce things off of. I think that that's probably one of the greatest gifts that we give practices is when I was in the operating room, I had, if I had a question of a piece of machinery broke down or I needed to order something, I had 15 other people that did the same job I did across our whole platform that I could call and get advice from.

When I went to work at Eastside Gynecology, I asked our managing partner, It's like, is there like someone I can call because I've never managed a practice before. I just had some questions. You know, there's some things I needed some answers and he's like, Nope, it's you and I. And I thought, well, that's terrible that I don't have anyone to call.

So I think that one of the things that we give our practice managers is a support group. And I think that having this, in fact, I'm missing a meeting right now. We have a practice manager meeting once a week where they all get together and we have obviously an agenda, but in the end it's, does anyone need anything?

Is there anything we can do for you? And the practice managers in my region in Michigan actually now instead of calling me, they're calling each other, which is exactly what I want them to do.

Anderson Williams: That's great.

Linda Longo: So they're calling each other. A lot of them took our Together University class with you and I think they learned some pointers during that time as well.

A Special Leader

Anderson Williams: It's clear in a very short time that Linda has proven herself a critical part of Together Women's Health and their ability to support and scale their partner practices. Her spirit of, okay, here's another practice, let's go, is a dream attitude in any growing company. So, I wanted to hear the perspective of TWH and what Linda means to the company.

Anthony Ahee is the CEO of Together Women's Health. He describes the foundation of what makes Linda such a special leader, trust. Linda has built and earned trust from her doctors, patients, peers, her team, and Together Women's Health as a company.

Anthony Ahee: Linda experienced a unique circumstance of becoming employed by Together Women's Health where she was the practice manager of our platform investment at Eastside Gynecology and so she didn't necessarily have the choice to select us and we didn't have the choice to select her other than we certainly lucked out.

And we were fortunate to inherit Linda's trust and knowledge in what we were building and what she could bring to the table. Early on, Linda had to trust her physician partners that they were making the right decision in partnering with a group like Together Women's Health. And furthermore, she had a trust that was what was best for the patients in the community and the employees that she led.

What we found over time is that this concept of building trust was core to Linda's DNA. Many providers, both partners and associate doctors, when Linda said something, they believed her, because she was always looking out for what's best and always trying to do the next best. And I think when you think about this trust building concept of having somebody in the helm or in the leadership role, whether that's as a practice manager or beyond, you want to feel confident that they always have your back and they're always doing what's right for the greater good of the organization.

When doctors come to me and they say, I wish we could duplicate Linda, she must be doing something right. And I think as a leader of an organization, keeping our physicians engaged and satisfied is a keystone of what we do. And having a operational leadership that has that level of trust with our physician partners, with our providers and with our staff enables me to focus on bigger picture.

Items and ways in which we can grow the organization. Linda is somebody within this organization that individuals always are looking to seek her opinion. And so whether we're making a big shift or change in our strategy, whether we are adding a new service line. Whether we're implementing a new process, all of our functional team members look to Linda as somebody that gets it, somebody that is looking at the perspective of our docs, looking at the perspective of our practice managers, and thinking about the innovation and change and how we can always be doing better.

And when you package that all together, her perspective has allowed our team members to open their horizon, and it has allowed us as an organization to achieve more.

Creating Change

Anderson Williams: Trust is a big word. We say it a lot, but don't always think about what it means or what impact it has. The work TWH does is complex, and involves not only trust within a care team, but deep trust with patients.

Because as Linda shares, that trust has to carry and sustain all of those relationships. Through the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.

Linda Longo: One of the gifts of being in women's health is we experience the highest of highs and the lowest of lows with patients. So we see everything from a cancer diagnosis to a loss of a pregnancy to the birth of a healthy baby and you know, some benign diagnosis or someone's been cancer free for years and years and I don't know very many fields that you can get that span of highs and lows, that extreme highs and extreme lows.

I think that being in the women's health realm. Women don't take care of themselves in general. You know, whether you're a wife or a mother or you have a career and don't have children, but I think that getting to the doctor and taking care of your health is probably last on your list. So, we have really concentrated on getting as many services in one place.

So that it can become a one stop shop kind of a thing. So we have, not only can you come for your annual exam, you can have a mammogram, you can have a DEXA scan, you can have an ultrasound. You can have a diagnostic mammogram and diagnostic ultrasounds for breasts as well. So we are trying to create, you know, just come one time and we'll take care of you and then we don't need to see you for a year.

Just let us take care of you. So I think that's an important thing that TWH really values is how many services can we provide the patient at a single visit.

Anderson Williams: You know, Linda, I want to go back to what you said, because it seems profoundly important about women not taking care of themselves or getting themselves to the doctor.

And can we just pull on that a little bit and talk about why that is? And I know you guys are addressing that by providing more services and making it easier. But I'd love to pause and just pull on that a little bit to see from your perspective why that is and how honestly we collectively could support that.

Linda Longo: Sure, I think that women are busy, and they're busy, it's inherent, and I shouldn't say this for all women, but certainly some women make sure they get to the doctors, that's, you know, I'm not inclusive of everyone, but most of our patients need reminders. It's not something that they think of every year, they need a reminder, they need a reminder to have a mammogram, and they need a reminder to come to the physician's office, other than if they're getting medication from us, that's the only reason why they would call is for a refill or some sort.

But I think that our society values busy women. We value someone who's busy and who juggles a lot of things, takes care of their family, has a career, dresses up and is able to go to their husband's managing partner dinner, and all those things take precedent for over someone's health. And I don't have time to go to the doctors.

We hear that all the time. I don't have time. So some of the things that we personally are doing is different hours. You can come to our office, one of our offices at 7 a. m. and have a mammogram. You can see a physician at 7 a. m. We have Saturday appointments. We have late nights where we're open till 7 o'clock.

Many of our practices are. So kind of changing the 9 to 5, where someone has to leave their kids. We have less patients who come for visits in the summer because they all have kids. And they would come more during the school year when they can get an appointment during the day. But also, some of them don't want to bring their kids.

So they have little kids and they want to come after their husband comes home from work or before he leaves in the morning. So kind of thinking outside of the box and how we can make it easier and easier to get to the doctors. We measure things like door to door time, that's really important to us, that's one of our KPIs, and getting a patient from check in to check out, we have a metric that we follow that we feel like depending on how many services they have done, what's an appropriate time to get them in and out, we measure that, and our practice managers are responsible for that, and they're always looking at ways to decrease that time, I should say.

So those are some of the things that we're actively doing.

A Personal Story

Anderson Williams: As it turns out, this is all really personal to Linda, and not simply because she's a busy woman herself. Here, she shares her story of how she made the transition to women's health and why.

Linda Longo: I think the story of how I got to Eastside tells a lot about who I am and how I got here and how I got to TWH.

So Dr. Nira did come and ask me if I wanted to, um, run his practice. And I'd been a patient of the practice since my 20s. And I had a connection to the practice in the way of I am one of those people I just talked about that has the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. So I personally had a twin pregnancy after a second trimester loss, which, you know, was a devastating thing.

I had it in the office and, you know, I remember that moment in the office. I remember those moments. I remember those people and how they treated me and how they took care of me. And I think that it's that memory that makes me think about what a patient needs and how someone has this lifelong journey with a practice and a connection with a practice.

My twin pregnancy, you know, didn't turn out the way it should and I, you know, I spent lots and lots of months in the hospital. This was a long time ago. My daughter is 26. So. Lots of months in the hospital. I did lose one of my twin girls but were able to save my daughter. It certainly changed my outlook.

It changed how I manage people. It changed how I deal with adversity. How I am calm in a storm. It changed how I interact with people and it gave me even more empathy and it taught me what we need to do for our patients in order to have lifelong patients. I used to live 40 minutes away from the practice and I never left.

I still would go for my annual exams to the practice. My mom was a patient, my sister's a patient, my own daughter who I delivered is a patient. So it's that legacy, I talk about creating a legacy by succession planning, that's what we do for our practices, but that's also what we do for our patients. So that's just a little part of my story of how I got there.

Anderson Williams: Well, and I think that goes to something that is maybe unique to women's health, that multi-generational kind of relationship that when you get a good doctor, you want your daughter to go to that doctor, you want your granddaughter to go to, you want your mother to go to that doctor. Like that's a profound relationship.

Linda Longo: Yeah, we have many of our physicians across all of our practices have delivered generations of babies, you know, delivered the mother, the mother of the mother, and then now they're delivering the granddaughter's baby. So it's really. I don't know any other medical field that you can get that kind of depth.

Anderson Williams: And I can only assume, Linda, that in your, both your highs and highs and lows, that even in that difficult time, you were treated a certain way. Or what was it, especially in the most challenging time, about the practice, the people at the practice, and how you were treated? Would love to hear you say more about what it was that was so deeply impactful.

Linda Longo: I think that it started with empathy and it wasn't fake. It wasn't someone just doing their job. It's interesting that the person who took care of me that day, who took my blood pressure, and I remember every moment of the one day where I had my second trimester loss. is now the practice manager of one of the practice that I came from.

I remember every person that came to talk to me and how they allowed me to go even leave the office without signing out so I didn't have to go to the front desk. All the little tiny compassionate things that they did without even thinking and it was not by them just doing their job. I tell this story when I was a practice manager of Eastside.

I told a lot of these stories because you never know who you're standing in front of, you never know, you know, did their father die yesterday and their, or did they get a cancer diagnosis? You don't know before you look in their chart. So you never know who's standing in front of you. And so it's just treating every person with compassion and empathy and how you'd like to be treated.

You know, going back to the golden rule, treat people the way you'd want to be treated. I think that is the core of our business, and like I said, I remember every moment, and that's the reason why I'm there.

Anderson Williams: Linda Longo is an Everyday Hero whose superpower is trust. In the midst of the highest of highs and lowest of lows with patience and in a growing business, this trust holds people together and keeps them feeling a part of something bigger.

In her own challenging time as a patient, it’s a trust Linda put in her care team at the practice she ultimately joined as a practice manager. A practice that launched her career with TWH and a practice where she and her family remain patients to this day. Linda knows the power of trust in women's health care. Because she's lived it.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure and check out our other Everyday Heroes at www.shorecp.university/podcasts or anywhere you get your podcasts. This podcast was produced by Shore Capital Partners with story and narration by Anderson Williams. Editing by Reel Audiobooks. Recording, sound design, mixing, and mastering by Mark Galup of Reel Audiobooks.

Special thanks to Linda Longo and Anthony Ahee.

This podcast is the property of Shore Capital Partners, LLC. None of the content herein is investment advice, an offer of investment advisory services, nor a recommendation or offer relating to any security. See the Terms of Use page on the Shore Capital website for other important information.