Dr. Jean Wright
VP, Chief Innovation Officer
Atrium Health
Education
University of Michigan
B.S.,
Class of 1974Wayne State University
M.D., Medicine
Class of 1978Emory University - Goizueta Business School
MBA, International Business
Class of 1994Podcasts
28:08327: What It’s Like Being a Chief Innovation Officer in Healthcare w/ Dr. Jean Wright, Atrium Health [Main T4C episode]
Dr. Jean Wright is Chief Innovation Officer at Atrium Health, the second largest public healthcare system in the United States. As Chief Innovation Officer, Dr Wright focuses on working with teams to raise the bar for patient care and population health through human-centered design, business development and novel medical technologies...
Career Path
Interview Highlights
“No one person or no one team can do all the innovation for a big system. But what we do is we do serve as catalysts or accelerators by identifying opportunities. We use skills like human-centered design to go in and put ourselves in the patient’s place and understand how they’re interacting with the system.”
Best Career Advice
“Do you want to be right … or do you want to be successful? And I think too early in life, I wanted to be right … whereas later in life, you realize to bring about these big systematic changes, you have to be effective.”
Career Challenge
“I moved to Savannah and I was the head of the women’s and children’s hospital. And it was a dream job for me … It was part of a bigger organization and the leadership of the bigger organization allowed the whole system to get into financial trouble … I built a really good relationship with the donors in that community and now it looked like I was going to have to completely uproot. And I did. And I came up here to what was then Carolina’s healthcare system. I went into an adult hospital … It wasn’t my passion … Some leaders in the community had gotten together and they felt like this was the right community to apply for this multimillion dollar grant in health, informatics, and pophealth. And they said, ‘but we need somebody that’s a card carrying academic that knows their way through HHS at NIH. Would you be the PI of this $16 million grant?’ Well, all of a sudden the woe is me over the previous 12 months faded, because here was this terrific opportunity just dropped in my lap … So what I thought was a downturn and what I thought was negative ended up being probably one of the biggest boost for my career and one of my best opportunities.”
Skills
Healthcare, Healthcare Management, Healthcare Information Technology
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