Scott Boden’s reputation as a partnership builder, strategic thinker and healthcare innovator earned him what it often does: an expanded job that hadn’t existed previously at Emory, that of Chief Partnership and Innovation Officer. This new position bridges two complex ecosystems – the Woodruff Health Sciences Center (WHSC) and Emory Healthcare – as Boden will serve on the executive leadership teams of both. 

Boden, who took on the new position Jan. 1, will step down from his role as department chair but will continue as a tenured professor of orthopaedic surgery in Emory School of Medicine, maintain his clinical practice, and serve as vice chair for professional development and innovation in the Department of Orthopaedics. He also will still oversee the Emory Healthcare Innovation Hub in collaboration with Emory Digital as part of his new role.

Joining Emory in 1992 as an orthopaedic spine surgeon and clinician scientist, Boden built and led what evolved into the nationally recognized musculoskeletal (MSK) service line. “He has overseen a tripling in the size of the service line, was the impetus behind the Emory Orthopaedics & Spine Hospital and, as chair of the Department of Orthopaedics, most recently was the driver of the Emory Musculoskeletal Institute,” says Thadhani.

In his new role as Chief Partnership and Innovation Officer, Boden will be responsible for maximizing external corporate partnership opportunities, accelerating internal innovation, and strengthening the culture and processes for innovation within WHSC and Emory Healthcare.

Boden took time just before the new year to answer a few questions about his new role, leadership style, Emory’s innovative culture, the value added by pro-sports-team partnerships, and the importance of cheerful persistence.

I’ve had nearly 33 years here at Emory, so I grew up here professionally. It was my first job, and I’ve been here ever since. Early on, I got a reputation for taking on novel challenging projects and delivering results. An academic healthcare system is one of the more complicated environments to get anything done, even simple things. There are competing missions and it’s highly matrixed, with the professional schools, the university, the healthcare system, and the research enterprise. There are a million ways that the environment makes it hard to do simple things. At a university, we want to get buy-in, to involve all stakeholders and not be overly dictatorial. We want a perfect set of data, especially when we’re scientists. But that’s not the way the real world works. We have to make decisions with the data we have, even if we’re wrong sometimes, or we’re probably not taking enough risks.

I was drafted into physician leadership, it was not something I sought out, but I came to really enjoy it. I think the best leaders have a burning curiosity, a desire to fix things and solve problems, and are creative, innovative and cheerfully persistent. People often don’t say yes to bold ideas right away, it involves figuring out how to gain consensus, incorporate alternative viewpoints, and remove obstacles; some of the bigger innovations took up to a decade to execute. But consistently delivering results on progressively larger projects earns increased respect and trust over time – and that is key.

We have been able to forge many successful business partnerships at the system level with both long-term and heavily integrated partnerships. The first of our sports partnerships was with the Atlanta Hawks, and that has led to meaningful strategic partnerships with most all of Atlanta’s professional sports teams. We’ve established relationships with many other business partners and foundations, such as Delta, Coca-Cola, CVS, Amazon One Medical, The Marcus Foundation and the Blank Family Foundation. To do this successfully, both organizations must be able to achieve something they could not do on their own. 

Internally, in MSK we started coaching and counseling people who were innovative and had that creative bug, so they wouldn’t leave for greener grass elsewhere. Growing your own innovative leaders is more complicated but more rewarding. This led to the highest faculty retention rate in orthopaedics in the country for nearly 25 years. We also were among the first academic departments (in the ‘90s) to collect patient satisfaction data and connect that to physician compensation to place more focus on patient and family experience, long before it became an expectation in health care.

In 1991, MSK was one of the first at Emory to embrace off-campus outpatient care delivery settings. Emory Healthcare now has 200-plus clinical care locations off Clifton Road. When we first proposed this there were worries we would secede from the union. But moving off campus, now with 13 regional offices, allowed us to deliver a much better patient experience for a high-volume practice and expand our reach as Emory Healthcare became more of a geographically diverse system. A program can only grow so much with just one dot on the map.

Innovation and challenging the status quo has been my MO: How can we be better, more efficient, more innovative? Data should be driving and validating the success of these changes.

Even as a not-for-profit organization, we still need to have a sustainable financial margin to reinvest in our mission of improving lives and providing hope. I view us as a community asset, that’s one of the things that makes us different from for-profit healthcare systems that don’t have our quadrilateral mission of clinical care, teaching/training, research, and community outreach.

We have the ability to attract philanthropy, some of which allows us to establish community-facing programs. We can also leverage some of our fixed assets and use them during non-peak time to serve the community. I think we have a responsibility to do that and we need to do our fair share.

We can also impact people we don’t touch directly inside our walls through education, sometimes in partnership with other organizations. For example, professional sports teams view themselves as community assets as well; they also have a mission beyond scoring points on the court or field, which is being a part of and giving back to the community. So when you have two community assets that can leverage each other synergistically, that creates special opportunities.

As one example, we take part in programs with Hawks players going into high schools where they have connections, conduits and communication streams. We’ve created programming with the Hawks media department to educate public school students about various healthcare occupations and let them know which school subjects lead to those careers. Using pro athletes to help deliver messaging gains their interest and attention. We’re currently talking with the Falcons and Atlanta United and their community partners about a Healthy Georgia campaign where we will promote, for example, lung cancer screenings or diabetes education. There’s lots we can do to improve care throughout the state and beyond and decrease disease burden by leveraging technology, synergizing with creative partnerships to better meet patients where they are.

Emory is in the unique position of being the most prominent academic healthcare system in our state, so attracting top talent that values this environment and mission is a bit easier in Atlanta.

We have an integrated health sciences center, schools of medicine, public health, and nursing, a primate center and other components of WHSC that allow us to undertake more complicated endeavors and pull in our own resources while already being on same team. The scale and reputation of Emory in Atlanta and the Southeast gives us some initial credibility, but we have to amplify and earn continued credibility and respect by being responsive, a preferred partner, and delivering exceptional results.

Another plus: We have leadership willing to take risks. I have been fortunate in that many of the creative ideas I’ve been a part of eventually received support and were able to happen. That’s why I’m so excited about being at Emory and staying at Emory. We have a continued

track record of doing innovative things. Emory is a leader, a beacon. That’s what still excites me about coming to work each day: now I get to help people throughout the organization engage in innovative, complicated, high-risk/high-reward activities.

Almost every leadership position I’ve had at Emory didn’t exist before I had it, but subsequently evolved based on activities I was doing – Emory Orthopaedics & Spine Center director, CMO/CQO at a new Emory Orthopaedics Specialty Hospital, vice president for business innovation, chief strategy officer for EHC. In each case, I saw an unmet need, was asked to fill it, and ended up with a new job. Creating new things from scratch without a standard playbook takes a different kind of approach and is really in my comfort zone.

So while this CPIO role hasn’t existed before at the WHSC level, it leverages many of the skills I’ve been honing along the way in other roles at Emory. I believe that often the best job is the one you make, not the one you take.