You Decided What She Wanted Before You Asked Her | Mary O’Connor

"We're not anti-surgery. We're just anti-inappropriate surgery."That's Dr. Mary O'Connor's mission statement in one sentence — and it's also the best diagnosis of a mistake that has nothing to do with healthcare. Executives reach for the big, expensive, dramatic fix constantly: the platform overhaul, the process relaunch, the AI rollout. Rarely do they reach for the boring, unglamorous work that would've actually solved it.Mary is co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Vori Health, a virtual-first musculoskeletal care company. She's Professor Emerita at Mayo Clinic, a past professor at Yale, an Olympic rower, and the author of Taking Care of You. She's spent a career watching patients — and the systems built to treat them — default to the invasive fix when the patient work would've gotten them further.The episode's best moment isn't even about surgery. It's Mary almost not offering a telehealth option to an older patient because she assumed the woman wouldn't want it — and catching her own bias just in time. That's not a healthcare story. That's every leader who's ever decided what a client, employee, or stakeholder wants without asking them.What you'll walk away with:Why the "quick fix" instinct costs more than it saves — and how to spot it in your own org before it costs you a clientThe bias-catching moment that changed how Mary asks questions, and how to build the same check into your own decisionsWhat actually drives adoption of anything new (hint: it's rarely the thing you'd guess)Why "movement" — literal and organizational — is the one lever that compounds every other outcomeNo matter if your business is B2B or B2C, it's H2H — human to human. Happy connecting.#H2H #HumanConnectionPodcast #HealthTech #ClientRetention #B2BRelationships===You can connect with Mary O'Connor here:https://www.vorihealth.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/maryoconnormd/You can connect with Karl Pontau here:www.vouchedconnections.comwww.thehumanconnectionpodcast.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontauhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!