Haas Social Impact Fund: Finding My Path at Mayo Clinic
by Patrick Crocker, Haas MBA 2020
The human heart is a magnificent organ. It pumps upwards of 2,000 gallons of blood every day, with just a slight pause between beats as its only rest. If we are lucky, our hearts will beat over three billion times during our lives, and will never stop until we have taken our last breath. To reach the heart, a surgeon must make a vertical incision from just below the neck to the bottom of the sternum, and then use a surgical saw to cut through the breastplate before spreading the ribcage apart to expose the pericardium, which is a tough fibrous sac that envelops and protects the heart underneath. The heartbeat can be seen through the pericardium as a slight, regular bulge, and, once exposed, provides direct evidence of life through motion. The heart glistens and rolls with a strange autonomy, only pausing and shuddering briefly when touched by the surgeon’s or physician assistant’s hand. The surgeon gave me a tour of the anatomy as I peered down from the anesthesiologists position just behind the patient’s head, explaining how to tell the vena cava from the aorta and how blood flows from the right atrium and ventricle through the lungs and back through the left atrium and ventricle before being pumped out to the body through the aorta.
Our circulatory system, he explained, is an elegant dance of coordinated efforts, not unlike the dance he was about to perform with his surgical team to transfer the function of this patient’s heart and lungs to a machine and stop the patient’s heart only so long as it would take to replace a malfunctioning atrial valve. I watched this team of five people perform this dance perfectly, with little wasted motion and an astounding clarity of communication. Going “on” and “off” pump is the trickiest part of the procedure, where the surgeon cuts into massive, vital blood vessels and quickly inserts and sews into place tubes that run to and from the bypass machine. During these tense moments, the surgeon is in near constant communication with the perfusionist, who is a technical expert that operates the bypass machine. The perfusionist, oddly enough, is why I was in the room.
Thanks to HSIF, I spent my summer as an Administrative Intern at a 200-bed hospital in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, which is the central healthcare delivery hub for Mayo Clinic Health System in its Northwest Wisconsin Region. My role during the surgery was to simply observe what the perfusionist did and try not to pass out. I had been assigned a project concerning whether to bring perfusion services in-house or continue to contract for them, and my observation of the surgery was deemed essential by my preceptor (hospital speak for supervisor), Jason. It might seem odd that an MBA student would need to sit through a six-hour open heart surgery, but doing so is not strange at all within Mayo Clinic. To understand the reality of the strategic and financial implications of my analysis, Jason explained, I needed to see the people and the equipment in action. If I was going to make recommendations or decisions about the people or equipment in that room to accomplish the task of fixing a patient’s heart, I have get to know the people and the processes I am going to potentially impact. That is the culture of Mayo Clinic, and it is one of embodied, action-based leadership that immediately resonated with me at a deep level as an Army veteran.
I came to Berkeley and the Haas School of Business in the late summer of 2018 after nearly eleven years on active duty in the U.S. Army. Multiple moves and two deployments away from my wife and two children had sapped my desire to continue active duty service, but not my desire to meaningfully impact and contribute to the public good in some capacity. I had my sights set on the healthcare industry, but wasn’t sure exactly what role or what kind of organization I could best contribute to. Hospitals seemed like the front-line for me: the point where care is directly delivered to patients, and the place where the most good or the most harm could be done. As the father of twins born at 25 weeks, it was familiar territory for me as well. I still remember the feel of the heart surgeon’s handshake just before he walked off to operate on my week-old son who weighed under two pounds, or the look on my six-month old daughter’s face as the anesthesiologist carried her down a long hospital hallway to have a life-saving shunt emplaced the day after she was diagnosed with hydrocephalus. I have spent hours and days in hospitals, trying to find a way to balance bracing for the worst and hoping for the best. My summer at Mayo Clinic convinced me that I need to spend my future hours, days, and years helping others do the same, and finding ways to improve the ability of doctors, nurses, and health delivery organizations to do their jobs the best of their abilities.
The HSIF support I received, which is a direct benefit derived from the generosity of my fellow students and Haas alumni, is a wonderful reflection of incredible communal spirit of the Haas community. My summer at Mayo Clinic provided me much more than just healthcare experience and resume bullets. It enabled me to see a clear, meaningful pathway towards how to spend the rest of my professional career, and that is ultimately why I came to business school. That I was able to realize this goal with the help of my fellow classmates makes it all the more special, and makes me feel all the more connected to the Haas community. I feel as though I’ve seen and experienced the heartbeat of what makes Haas so special, and look forward to being a key piece of the elegant, vibrant relationship that binds all of us together for the rest of my life.
