September 10, 2011

I attended my 3rd Leadership Forum this week and found it inspiring and informative as usual. This one was different in that it was held at the Cleveland Clinic instead of Hartford.

Now, I'm not exactly a "yay I get to travel somewhere new" kind of person, especially when it involves an airport. It's not that I don't like flying, the actual flying part of flying is actually still fun for me and I was able to get window seats for each leg, which I enjoyed. It's the rest of the stuff that goes with flying that I don't care for.

The cheapest flight option I had was to leave Hartford at 10:10am on Wednesday, spend 2.5 hours in Baltimore, then on to Cleveland. A direct flight was 3 times the cost, so long layover it was. (See Terrie F? See how I think about expenses?). I was not the only cost-conscientious leader and so 10 of us were together in Baltimore awaiting our next flight.

And then it started to rain.

A LOT.

And so around 1:20pm, about 10 min before our flight was to board, it was canceled, and 10 of us watched the rest of our plane-mates rush in an every-person-for-themselves manner to the Southwest counter to get on a later flight.

I called Sheila instead. Between Sheila and 2 other EAs, 2 travel agents were on the case for all 10 of us. We headed to the Southwest counter, together, to stand in the long long line. Before we made it to the front of the line, travel had confirmed they couldn't get us on another Southwest flight, which was unlikely to take off anyway. They got us on Continental instead (which was a very far walk!). So we all headed over to Continental, which had a surprisingly shorter line, and got our boarding passes. Then back through security, where I totally forgot that I had purchased a water in between Southwest and Continental and so that $1.99 was not money well spent.

By now it was around 2:30pm and the flight, which was originally scheduled to depart at 3:30pm, was delayed until 4pm. Ok, not too bad. We all parked ourselves in a bar and got comfortable.

Then it was delayed until 4:30pm.

Then it was delayed until 5pm.

Then it was delayed until 5:30pm.

Then it was delayed until 6pm. By now we would have been better off having driven from Hartford! But it wasn't canceled yet, and we were comfortable at the bar, so life wasn't so bad.

We did finally get to board a bit past 6 and we did make it to Cleveland, even though we missed the welcome reception. All's well that ends well.

The Cleveland Clinic is a massive place, and we had so many great speakers at the forum. I'm anxious to tell you about everything I learned, but if I type it out now, I'll be here all day! I think that I'll pick one topic each Friday for the next few Fridays so I can do each one justice. For now I'll just mention that I was a bit ashamed to not know that there's an Aetna iPhone app, which I downloaded onto my iPad while there during a group scavenger hunt where we had to locate different types of providers in different zip codes. So we all logged into Aetna Navigator on our various mobile devices and off we went to scavenge!

By Friday I was definitely nervous about making it home. I had a 3:25pm flight from Cleveland to Baltimore connecting to a 5:45pm flight to Hartford. Before we left Cleveland, we knew the connecting flight was delayed. That couldn't be a good sign! Somehow we had picked up more friends heading home and now there were 20 of us hanging out at gate B6 in Baltimore waiting for news that we'd be able to actually get home. We managed to entertain ourselves and each other and the delay ended up being less than an hour, so by about 6:30pm we were headed home! Yay!

The descent into Hartford was as the sun was setting and the view was so pretty. I was glad to be home, and I was glad to have gone to the forum, even if it wasn't exactly a smooth trip.

Josh picked me up at the airport and the kids cheered my homecoming and chattered away about their week, each getting progressively louder so as to be heard over the other. Such a comforting noise!

As I reflect on the trip out, I realize that I was really happy not to be alone. I am not often categorized as a "people-person", yet being in a group of people with which I was only mildly acquainted made the whole situation tolerable. Had I been alone, I'm quite sure the stress level would have been exponentially larger. And had I not had Sheila on the other end of the phone saying don't worry, I'll find someone to take care of you, well that I can't even imagine.

Don't worry, I'll find someone to take care of you.

That's a powerful sentence, and it's something that Aetna does every day. Nurses reach out to patients that may be scared or not knowing what to do or alone or all three of these things and more, and they say "Don't worry, I'll find someone to take care of you."

At the Cleveland Clinic, on every employee's badge, it says "Caregiver". Every employee, from the janitors to the surgeons to the CEO. Every employee is a caregiver.

Before this week, I thought of providers as very different from payers, perhaps even enemies of each other.

I don't think that any more.

I hope everyone is having a fantastic weekend!
Rhonda