Kevin
Welcome to the Content Machine podcast. I’m Kevin Adelsberger, and this week, I’m joined by Amy Garner, who is the Chief Compliance and Communications Officer at West Tennessee HealthCare. Thank you for joining me, Amy.
Amy
Thank you for having me.
Kevin
Amy, you have a really unique journey in your career, and I’d love for just the audience to hear starting about that. If you want to tell us a little bit about how you got to the position you’re in now.
Amy
Okay. Well, it’s probably going to be surprising to a lot of your listeners because I actually do not have a communications background. I actually have an accounting background. My undergraduate degree is in accounting. I have a master’s in business. I also have a law degree with an emphasis in health law. And then a few years ago, after I got the communications gig, I decided, well, I need to probably get some formal training in communications or public relations. I do have a certificate in public relations now. But my first love was math and accounting, of all things.
Kevin
Wow. Okay. So the first two make sense. The law degree is a little bit of an oddball there. How did you end up with a law degree?
Amy
So I was working in health care already, back in the late ’90s, and I knew that I wanted to further my education. I knew that I wanted to get a doctorate, but I didn’t want to get a PhD. So I wanted to do something with an advanced degree that would be useful at work. And obviously, I couldn’t just go back to medical school. So I decided that maybe health law might be of interest because of what I was doing at work already, because that was when the HIPAA privacy rules had just come out, and it was very useful to what I was doing. And so I thought, Well, that might be a good route for me to take. And so I ended up getting my law degree in health law.
Kevin
How about that. Did you spend any time as an accountant then?
Amy
Very briefly. I was in accounting for about four years after I joined West Tennessee HealthCare. And before that, I had actually worked in banking for a little while. But after I was in the role of the controller at one of our small hospitals, I decided that I really loved operations. I really did not want to sit in the office behind the computer and just deal with numbers all day. I really enjoyed getting out and learning from the different departments. And I was in such a small hospital, and they all just took me under their wings and taught me what they knew and what they thought I should know. And so I was able to learn all sorts of things from what happens in radiology to what happens in billing, to what happens in medical records on the nursing floor. So it was a great learning experience for me because I was so young and I just wanted to soak up everything. And so I think that that’s what led me into being the candidate for the compliance officer’s job, because you have to know a little bit about privacy. You had to know a little bit about the rules that the emergency department has.
Amy
You have to know about billing and Medicare. And so I think that that’s what led me to the place where somebody said, Hey, she might be a good compliance officer.
Kevin
So a lot of times when people hear the words Compliance Officer, nothing fun comes to mind. And all of my interactions with you, you don’t come off as a Compliance Officer to me. You have a little bit more fun than that. So what do you do as a Compliance Officer?
Amy
Well, I have to say that I’ve heard that before. It is not the most popular position to be in. And for a long time, I thought, this is the most thankless job because nobody wants to see you coming, right? Sure. And nobody wants to come to your office to tell on themselves or ride anybody else out. But I try not to be scary, and I’ve done this for so long now that I really think being in communications has helped me because people know who I am, and they know that I’m not necessarily the police. And so I think that from that perspective, you’re probably right. I am probably not the typical compliance officer, but I want to be a resource for people. And I was just sharing with somebody earlier this morning that my favorite part of my job is answering questions. As strange as that sounds, I love being able to answer people’s questions or to help them figure out where to go to get the answers that they need. And so I think that from that perspective, I try to be a resource rather than just, Oh, hey, I got you. You’re not following this policy. And sometimes I have to do that, but I try not to be awful about it.
Kevin
So you worked your way up in the business side of things, which naturally progressed into the compliance thing with the law degree and stuff.
Amy
That’s right.
Kevin
Where does communications come into that, then?
Amy
So I joke all the time that the reason that I was asked to be in communications is because I like to talk too much. So there’s probably some truth to that. Sure. J.R, my CEO, as you know, J.R, he’s the type of guy that if he ask you to do him a favor, you cannot tell him no. You’re going to say, Sure. What do you need? And that’s exactly what happened. He asked me to temporarily work with the communications and marketing team seven years ago. And at the time, I said, J.R, I don’t know anything about marketing, communications. I’d had some limited experience when I was working on my master’s degree in marketing and communications, but nothing formal. And so I was really out of my element, but I was not going to tell J.R. no. Actually, after a few months of working with the phenomenal team that I have, I said, J.R, I love it. Please let me keep it. I love it so much. And it was, I guess, part of it was that it was not so rigid, like the compliance role, and I could have some fun with writing or with doing things like this that you can’t really do as a Chief Compliance Officer.
Amy
Sure. Yeah, yeah. So I loved it. And then who knew that there was going to be a global pandemic, and so at some point, I probably should have said, No, I’m not the one. But I just felt like when all my colleagues were struggling to take care of patients and doing all that they could do, I felt like, Well, this is one way that I can help them for sure, because I’m not a clinical person, and I didn’t really know what else I could do to help them during the pandemic. So I did what I was asked to do. Actually, when I was looking back at my Facebook memories today, this is my fourth anniversary of the night that J.R called me and said, I need for you to put together a press conference for tomorrow. I need the mayors to be there. I need Kim Tedford from the Department to be there. You all are going to coordinate this. And it was like 10 or 11 o’clock at night when he called. And I was freaking out because unbeknownst to him, I had never coordinated a press conference before. I had never been a part of one, and I was clueless.
Amy
But he didn’t know that, and I didn’t tell him that at the time because I knew that no was not the right answer. And we pulled it off, and that was the beginning of all-
Kevin
Of a nightmare.
Amy
Yeah, it was the beginning of all of those media interviews and press conferences and all of those things that I did with Kim at the Health Department.
Kevin
Yeah. So you said seven years ago, you became communications. So that’s It’s March 11th, ’24, when we were recording this. So that would have been ’17, right?
Amy
That would have been 2020.
Kevin
It was four years ago. It was four years ago.
Amy
Yeah, ’17 is when I took on the role.
Kevin
So you had three years in the role before COVID struck and changed everything. So talk to us about how do you deal with communication when you’re newer into communication and you have a global pandemic ravaging your city?
Amy
I don’t know. I don’t really know that I have any great advice. I will tell you that the three years prior to the pandemic, one of the things on my to-do list was to develop a crisis communications plan, and I never put that down as a priority, and then I was living it. And so for me, it was just day to day, who do I need to communicate with? What are the messages that I need to get out there from my team? I was also having to learn all about operations and surge capacity and what it meant for us to have those portable HVAC units that were turning our units into… So that we had negative pressure rooms on those COVID floors. I mean, I was having to learn a lot, but my colleagues were great because when I asked questions, they were more than happy to share with me the information that I needed to get out there. And so in the morning, I would get up and I would follow social media to see if there was anything that I needed to address during the day, if there were any questions I needed to answer.
Amy
Then I would get on multiple calls with our incident command team, which is our emergency response teams, if you will. And I would learn what we were facing for the next 24 hours or 48 hours, what we had faced for the last 24 hours, what our COVID census was. Is there any specific information I need to get out to the public today? And then I would go through that process of whether it was a media interview, whether it was a press conference, whether it was a radio interview, whatever it was. I would try to get that information out. And then the rest of the day, I would pretty much monitor local news, social media, respond to questions. It was just a constant cycle. And I call it on the job training because I really did not know what I needed to be doing that I wasn’t doing. I just tried to keep up with everything and tried to figure out how to get information out to everybody, not just Madison County, but I had people contacting us from Haywood County or Chester County or Gibson County saying, Hey, what about us? What are you seeing in our counties?
Amy
What can we do? Can you come over here and talk with our mayor? And so there was a lot of that, too. So it was just… I just was doing whatever I could to get information out there. Yeah.
Kevin
Well, and I’d say as a citizen, I felt like it was really organized and went from my perspective, you guys were proactive and communicated well in a really stressful time period.. Thank you for tuning in to episode one of two with Amy Garner from West Tennessee HealthCare. Join us back in a couple of weeks when we release episode two of the interview.
