"Leading with Purpose: How UH Cleveland Is Rewiring Culture, Leadership, and the Future of Care" with Dr. Patrick Runnels

What happens when a psychiatrist trained in homeless outreach decides the real problem isn't the patients - it's the systems supposed to serve them?In this episode, host Ashley Wendel sits down with Dr. Patrick Runnels, Chief Medical Officer of the Veale Initiative for Healthcare Innovation at University Hospitals Cleveland, for a wide-ranging conversation about what's broken in healthcare leadership - and what it actually looks like to build something better.Patrick shares how nearly two decades of leading large, complex health systems has convinced him that the crisis in healthcare is not primarily financial or clinical. It's a leadership and culture problem. Healthcare systems were built to fix people when they break - but the knowledge, the tools, and the evidence to do something far more meaningful have existed for years. What's missing is the leadership capability and the organizational courage to use them.In this conversation, Ashley and Patrick explore why the economic engine has become the default "why" in medicine, and what gets lost when it does. They discuss the difference between transactional management and authentic transformational leadership - and why so many clinicians struggle to make that shift when they step into administrative roles. Patrick introduces University Hospitals' framework of leading with love, built around three pillars: believing, belonging, and building - and explains why belonging, the middle piece, is the most critical and the most neglected.They also dig into the practical work of culture change: how UH moved from 20% to nearly 80% annual wellness visit completion over three years, what it actually took to bring resistant physicians along, and why listening - not directing - was often the most powerful leadership move available. Patrick shares his four Cs framework for leadership development and makes the case for why protecting time for peer coaching and relationship-building isn't a luxury - it's a strategic investment with measurable returns.This episode is for physician leaders, CMOs, healthcare executives, and anyone who believes that how we lead in medicine is inseparable from the outcomes we produce - for patients, for clinicians, and for the systems we build together.Send us Fan Mail