How One Healthcare Leader’s Lived Experience Reframed Access, Empathy, and Operations

Healthcare leaders spend their careers designing better systems for patients, but the work looks different when they have had to move through those systems themselves. For Patrick Makarewich, a diagnosis of HPV-related head and neck cancer transformed familiar operational issues — scheduling, access, support services, staff flexibility, and communication — into deeply personal lessons. His experience reflects a larger reality in cancer care: HPV-linked oropharyngeal cancers have been rising, particularly among middle-aged men, making prevention, early detection, and patient-centered care urgent leadership concerns.How does a cancer diagnosis change the way a healthcare leader thinks about access, empathy, and the people behind every clinical process?On this episode of I Don’t Care, host Dr. Kevin Stevenson speaks with Patrick Makarewich, FACHE, Clinical Practice Manager for ENT, Head and Neck Surgery at UT Southwestern Medical Center, about how surviving HPV-related head and neck cancer reshaped his approach to leadership. Their conversation moves from Patrick’s diagnosis and treatment experience to clinic operations, workforce retention, generational leadership, patient access, and the cautious but promising role of AI in healthcare documentation and care delivery.What you’ll learn…Lived experience can deepen healthcare leadership. Patrick explains that going through cancer treatment gave him insights into patient fear, scheduling friction, support needs, and survivorship that he could not have fully understood from an administrator’s seat alone.Staff retention starts with daily leadership. He argues that the most important recruiting happens with the people already on the team, through flexibility, goal-setting, quality interactions, and support for employees’ real lives outside work.AI may help reduce provider burden, but healthcare still needs human judgment. Patrick discusses UT Southwestern’s creation of a Chief AI Officer role and describes how AI-supported note-taking could help providers with documentation while still requiring accuracy, oversight, and empathy.Patrick Makarewich, FACHE, is a transformational healthcare executive with deep experience in physician practice management, service line leadership, operational improvement, and patient-centered care. He currently leads Otolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery clinic operations at UT Southwestern, overseeing a large multidisciplinary team while improving patient access, provider efficiency, and employee engagement. Across roles at UT Southwestern, Acclaim Physician Group, JPS Health Network, Children’s Health, Cook Children’s, Premier, hospice leadership, and Kaiser Permanente/SCPMG-related consulting roles, he has driven service line growth, Lean process improvement, revenue cycle optimization, workforce efficiency, accreditation success, and multimillion-dollar cost savings.