Nashville Post Winter 2020

WINTER 2020

A NEED AND A WILLINGNESS

Meharry’s Main Man JAMES HILDRETH IS LEADING THROUGH THE PANDEMIC WHILE E Y E I N G B I G L O N G -T E R M G O A L S

RESTORING CONNECTIONS North Nashville’s infrastructure needs attention

Virtual reality makes health care inroads

Gifts not asked for 2020’s Most Powerful Women on disruption, career growth

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WINTER 2020

VITALS

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YOU SHOULD KNOW OhanaHealth’s Daniel Oppong brings health tech talent to town

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DATA BANK A look at telehealth’s surge, mental health services

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CHALLENGED YET OPPORTUNISTIC COVID has clarified strategies needed for long-term success

10 RUCKUS IN RUCO Big battle to grow in the ’Boro has one winner — for now

12 BUNDLE UP Providers eye package deals to grab market share

13 NOT ON THE AGENDA A timely reminder: You can’t cut your way to prosperity

16 MEHARRY’S MAIN MAN James Hildreth leads med school through pandemic, eyes long-term goals

20 WILLING TO ADOPT Pros discuss virtual reality’s rise in health care settings

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WINTER 2020 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

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TECHIE

24 HARDLY SLOWED Ncontracts’ growth plan remains on track

25 CHANGING COURSE Innovations lift golfers’ games, level playing field

26 LEADING IN THE NEW NORMAL Tech execs on being effective working remotely

LEADERS

28 GIFTS UNASKED FOR The Post’s Most Powerful Women talk truth finding, career building, and more

BOOM

37 DON’T FORGET NORTH NASHVILLE After the post-tornado support, will the promised revitalization follow?

40 POST-PANDEMIC STREET UPDATES Pilot projects prove their viability, value

FAVORITES

43 FAMILY ON ICE Deloitte’s John West and clan escape by puck watching

GIVING GUIDANCE Whiskey venture adds ‘flair’ to state liquor lineup PAGE 34

DANIEL MEIGS

OPEN

Cometh the hour There are times when events conspire to shine the spotlight on a person or small group of people. In Nashville in 2020, James Hildreth has often stepped center stage to enlighten, to encourage and when necessary — which has been too often — to cajole people locally, regionally and nationally on how to assess and respond to the threat of COVID-19. He has been, along with a few others, a man for the moment. For Meharry, he also is the man with a bold vision for the future, one that our Kara Hartnett sketches out in our cover story.

Sitting at the crossroads of higher education, health care and community development, Hildreth’s efforts will be a key story to watch in the coming years and his success will mean success for many, many others.

Elsewhere in this issue, you’ll find stories of big hospital names battling it out in the suburbs, the rise of virtual reality in health care and — a corollary to Hildreth’s plans for Meharry — an update on the lack of long-term investment in North Nashville. You’ll also hear from our Most Powerful Women and other female leaders on the lessons they’ve learned about staying on course during the pandemic. It’s encouraging to think about the knowledge and experience we’ve all accumulated during the pandemic being put to use now and especially once the dust settles. Smarter, more empathetic and sustainable growth that continues to place a more appropriate value on work-life balance? Sign us up.

Drawing good conclusions requires having good information. If you’re not yet subscribing to the Post’s twice-daily emails, you’re missing out on a lot of the information about how Nashville is dealing with and preparing to move on from the pandemic. Give us a call or drop us a note today to get more in the loop. We look forward to hearing from you.

Geert De Lombaerde, Editor gdelombaerde@nashvillepost.com

editorial EDITOR Geert De Lombaerde MANAGING EDITOR William Williams STAFF WRITERS Stephen Elliott, Michael Gallagher, Kara Hartnett CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Megan Seling, Shelley Smith

art & production ART DIRECTOR Christie Passarello STAFF PHOTOGRAPHERS Eric England, Daniel Meigs GRAPHIC DESIGNERS Mary Louise Meadors, Tracey Starck

publishing PUBLISHER Heather Cantrell Mullins ADVERTISING SOLUTIONS CONSULTANTS Maggie Bond, Sue Falls, Michael Jezewski, Carla Mathis, Will Shutes, Mike Smith, Stevan Steinhart, Jennifer Trsinar, Keith Wright SALES OPERATIONS MANAGER Chelon Hill Hasty ADVERTISING SOLUTIONS ASSOCIATES Aya Robinson, Price Waltman

events EVENTS DIRECTOR Olivia Moye PROMOTIONS COORDINATOR Caroline Poole

circulation CIRCUL ATION AND SUBSCRIPTION DIRECTOR Gary Minnis

business PRESIDENT Frank Daniels III CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER Todd Patton PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Elizabeth Jones IT DIRECTOR John Schaeffer SPECIAL PROJECTS COORDINATOR Susan Torregrossa

On the cover James Hildreth Photo by Daniel Meigs

FW Publishing, LLC OWNER Bill Freeman 210 12th Ave. S., Suite 100 Nashville, TN 37203 nashvillepost.com

Nashville Post is published quarterly by FW Publishing, LLC. Advertising deadline for the next issue is Wednesday, Feb. 10. For advertising information, call Heather Cantrell Mullins at 615844-9252. For subscription information, call 615844-9307. Copyright © 2020 FW Publishing, LLC.

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WINTER 2020 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

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VITALS

YOU SHOULD KNOW

Daniel Oppong The founder of OhanaHealth is helping bring tech talent to town

DANIEL OPPONG is a problem solver with a network.

A former recruitment director for health care seed-stage investment fund Jumpstart Foundry, Oppong used his experience working in the startup space to become an entrepreneur. He says he strives to create meaningful solutions for real people: “For me, it’s mostly about following my curiosity — doing things that I’m interested in with people that I enjoy.”

Oppong works his day job with a technology startup in Seattle, called Limeade, that focuses on employee wellness. When he’s not working on making the workforce happier and healthier, he’s striving to fill it with promising young adults.

His latest venture serves as a major professional development and recruiting tool needed in an industry destined for massive change: the intersection of health care and technology.

Oppong in 2017 founded OhanaHealth, a talent acquisition and job placement company, during his time at Jumpstart. His goal was to make tech positions at health care companies more attainable to young professionals by coupling job opportunities with workforce development and internal networking programs. The professional development part is key, Oppong says, due to the daunting nature of much of health care for non-clinical workers. It is a difficult assimilation he knows well.

“When I came to Jumpstart, I had never worked in venture, never worked in health care, never worked in tech. So I had a pretty massive learning curve as far as: What does it even mean to think entrepreneurially? What does it mean to work in health care? What are all these acronyms that I’m hearing all the time?” he says. “We wanted to create a meaningful way to support early-career candidates as they kind of transition into their first job.”

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ERIC ENGLAND

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OhanaHealth now recruits fellows from all over the country and places them in health IT roles within high-growth businesses that pay Ohana for new talent. Most of those companies are startups based in Nashville, which has long faced a large deficit of technologists that regularly causes promising area ventures to compete for the same local talent. This is a problem OhanaHealth aspires to solve.

“We have seen more students apply from outside of Nashville than we have in Nashville, which is interesting,” Oppong says. “We’ve had students from Stanford to Colombia to UPenn — all over the place — as well as HBCUs. So I think it’s a pretty broad spread. We’ve been able to bring in people from different parts of the country that are actually moving here for these jobs. So I think there is an economic impact opportunity.”

In their first year, Oppong and his five-person team collected applications from 170 students across six schools to join the program and partnered with Jumpstart to feed talent to the 10 to 15 early-stage businesses the fund

'There are other companies that play in the space, but there aren’t any other ones that focus exclusively on health and health innovation.' invests in annually. By this year, the talent pool had grown to 1,000 students from 120 universities and the company was filling job vacancies for a number of other fast-growing businesses, including some being cultivated at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center.

So far, the venture’s numbers aren’t large.

Of those 1,000 applicants from 2020, only 1 percent have been placed into a job opportunity. And after four years of fellowship programs, Ohana has placed only 36 candidates with partnering companies — although Oppong expects to grow that number by 50 percent just next year. He also is ready to add scale with OhanaConnect, a more self-serve jobs board geared to young professionals and companies that was launched in September.

Next on Oppong’s to-do list: Building new growth opportunities by integrating artificial intelligence and data analytics to the job board as a way to identify opportunities most compatible for users and build a subscription-based payment model for companies looking to hire Ohana fellows. He also wants to further grow his network of businesses and young professionals and provide services he says other job search platforms don’t. It’s the part of his job that — unlike those labyrinthine health care acronyms — comes naturally.

“There are other companies that play in the space, but there aren’t any other ones that focus exclusively on health and health innovation,” he says. “That’s one of our greatest dif> KARA HARTNETT ferentiators.”

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TELEHEALTH’S SURGE The pandemic has led to huge increases in the use of telehealth services. But based on these July numbers, the South’s growth trails national trends when it comes to the number of medical claim lines submitted to insurers.

REGION

Data Bank THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC has pushed health care leaders to change short-term processes and long-term priorities. It also has altered behaviors — see telehealth — and at least temporarily delayed growth in some areas of the ecosystem.

YOY GROWTH

% OF TOTAL CLAIM LINES

South

2,209%

4.6%

Northeast

8,987%

7.1%

Midwest

3,595%

4.2%

West

3,488%

8.3%

Source: Fair Health

MENTAL HEALTH’S TOP SPOT Also noteworthy when it comes to telehealth is that, while mental health services are now the top diagnosis group across the country, the South diverges from other regions.

PROMISE OF GROWTH COVID has disrupted many segments of the health care sector and its effects will last several years.

But growth will resume in some key subsectors, says one research firm.

40%

30%

35.3% $63.8B

Biometrics in health care

$670M

$2.7B

10%

0

Source: Fair Health

BUDGET BOOM

Providers

A recent study commissioned by Change Healthcare showed 66 percent of health care leaders say the pandemic has shuffled, added to or removed some of their strategic priorities.

Viewed as more important now are consumers’ experiences and having accessible points of care. Very often, that means beefing up IT budgets.

Increased significantly

Not changed

Increased slightly

Decreased

Source: Insight Dynamo, Health Care Executive Group

WINTER 2020 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

Payers

WEST

$43.0B

MIDWEST

‘24 FORECAST

20%

South

NORTHEAST

‘19 REVENUE

Clinical research organizations

Source: Frost & Sullivan

8

50%

SOUTH

INDUSTRY

Mental health share of total claim lines

Vendors/consultants

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The top challenges and opportunities facing health care COVID has made clearer some of the strategies for long-term success

BY VIN PHAN AND HERMAN WILLIAMS Vin Phan

he U.S. health care system unT derwent rapid change this year as the COVID-19 pandemic swept through the nation. As a result, challenges abound for providers, challenges that could worsen with a second COVID wave. As Dr. Jeff Balser from Vanderbilt University Medical Center recently wrote, another surge is headed for Tennessee. This surge could be greater and Middle Tennessee’s health care system could become overwhelmed.

Beyond the pandemic, the health care landscape is poised to further shift due to accelerated digital transformation, policy changes from the upcoming presidential election, the potential repeal of the Affordable Care Act, changing regulations and more. Accounting for these upcoming shifts while facing the challenges introduced by the pandemic is no small feat.

As health care organizations chart their paths forward, they must first understand the challenges the system is facing. Only then can they identify the opportunities available to optimize their organizations and withstand the oncoming winds of the next surge. We view the top three challenges as being: • Access — Lack of access to health care has been exacerbated during COVID. While telehealth implementation became the saving grace of many providers, areas without broadband internet access — such as many rural communities — weren’t able to capitalize on the benefits. In addition, concerns have arisen regarding equity of care, with certain demographic groups and regions having access to fewer resources than others.

• Patient safety — Ensuring patient safety during the pandemic is challenging, especially in facilities treating a significant number of COVID patients. Many patients have come to see health care facilities as potential hotbeds of infection. As a result, patient volumes have been lower, cutting into revenue. Remote care

solutions can also compromise patient safety when they increase the risk of misdiagnosis or are vulnerable to cybersecurity threats.

• Financial stability — The pandemic revealed significant financial vulnerabilities in the U.S. health care system. Federal funding served as the bastion keeping much of the system afloat during the worst of the shutdowns. It was a bandage solution to a serious wound. The pandemic also revealed how the fragmentation of the health care system threatens the financial viability of many organizations. Small, independent health care facilities struggled to access the same resources as larger health care systems.

As these challenges continue to increase in importance, they can feel overwhelming to health care leaders. However, they also give rise to opportunities that will eventually make our health care system stronger. There are three major opportunities that organizations can leverage to solve for the challenges introduced by the pandemic: • Telehealth — By partnering with internet providers to bring broadband access to rural areas, bolstering cybersecurity protections and hybridizing telehealth services with in-person visits, telehealth can make health care more accessible to the patient population while providing an additional revenue stream for providers. Payers will have to continue to reimburse these services so that this option remains viable for patients.

• Strategic partnerships — Joint ventures can expand areas of access and resources. Mergers and acquisitions can also consolidate a fragmented health care system, allowing smaller organizations access to greater resources and financial stability. Mental and behavioral health facilities, hospitals and physician practices are ripe for investment and partnership opportunities.

• Value-based care models — These approaches can improve patient safety and quality of care while bolstering the financial stabil-

Herman Williams

ity of health care facilities. Organizations that employed value-based care models were better positioned to survive the strains of the pandemic than those that relied on fee-for-service reimbursement models, which are dependent on high patient volumes. Moving forward, value-based care models will be an integral part of building a financially secure, high-performing facility.

These opportunities are not perfect solutions. Telehealth implementation may be challenged by limited provider adoption and continued payer support after the pandemic.

Shifting reimbursement regulations may complicate the adoption of value-based care models. And increased consolidation of the health care industry could reduce competition. They are, however, vital tools to help stabilize health care organizations and position them to outlast the impact of the pandemic.

Vin Phan is a partner in BDO’s Healthcare Transaction Advisory Services group. Herman Williams is a managing director and chief physician executive of BDO Healthcare Advisory. vphan@bdo.com and hjwilliams@bdo.com

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VITALS

Ruckus in RuCo A big-name battle to grow in the ‘Boro has just one winner for now

BY KARA HARTNETT

n April, amid lockdowns from the emerging COVID-19 pandemic, Ascension Saint Thomas executives sought permission from the state to build a neighborhood hospital at the intersection of Veterans Parkway and Shores Road near rising development on the west side of Murfreesboro.

The nonprofit health system wanted to invest $24.6 million in a 32,000-square-foot facility that would host eight inpatient beds and eight emergency treatment rooms transferred from an existing hospital and create imaging and lab services and medical offices. Dubbed Westlawn Satellite Hospital, the space would serve as an extension of the 286-bed Saint Thomas Rutherford Hospital for the fast-growing neighborhood.

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Days later, Vanderbilt University Medical Center leaders filed a bolder plan — nearly five times Westlawn’s size — for a property just two blocks away.

The Vanderbilt application proposed a 48-bed, 154,000-square-foot hospital at the intersection of Veterans Parkway and Interstate 840, on a plot of land the medical center purchased in 2017. The facility would cost $134 million and include eight observation beds, diagnostic and therapeutic cardiac catheterization services and neonatal intensive care services.

And so commenced the bureaucratic battle — funded by $190,000 in filing fees — mediated by the Health Services and Development Agency, a branch of Tennessee government that manages growth in health care services by considering market needs.

Rutherford County is the fifth-most populous county in the state, and the surrounding region is projected to grow by more than 10 percent in the next four years. Researchers from the Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Tennessee predict that by the end of this decade, Rutherford’s growth will have taken it past Hamilton County. By 2050, it is expected to be larger than Knox County.

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According to the study, the county’s senior population is also expected to grow by nearly 47 percent in the next 20 years — bringing with it the need for more medical services. In 2018, however, total staffed bed occupancy in Rutherford County averaged below 80 percent, the state’s “need standard” for counties.

Ascension and Vanderbilt have both had their eye on the burgeoning corridor — and for several years have been expanding their services in the area. Ascension in October 2010 opened the $268 million Saint Thomas Rutherford near Thompson Lane, replacing an aging downtown campus. Its planned satellite facility, which was approved by the state in August, will be an extension of that hospital. The faith-based health system also runs wellness centers, medical offices and other ancillary services in the area.

Most recently, the leaders at Saint Thomas have been building relationships with local government to provide on-site care to individuals covered under the Rutherford County municipal health plan and are breaking ground on a new surgery center on New Salem Highway.

For its part, VUMC offers various clinics and outpatient services in Murfreesboro, including cardiology, ophthalmology, weight loss, women’s health and urgent care.

In 2018, the medical center broke ground to build a $27.6 million, 37,500-square-foot expansion of Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital in Murfreesboro. That came a year after Vanderbilt officials paid $8 million for the 82 acres of land on which their proposed hospital would sit. The plan was denied.

The nonprofit health system is the only big name in Middle Tennessee without a full-service hospital in Rutherford County. Despite this, Vanderbilt is the second-largest provider of inpatient care to residents in the area. According to census data reported to the state, in 2019, more than 58,000 residents in Rutherford, Bedford, Cannon and Warren counties traveled to Vanderbilt’s main campus in Nashville to receive care. The new facility was meant to give those patients a closer access point to Vanderbilt services while easing occupancy at the Nashville campus, which regularly runs at or near capacity.

HCA Healthcare’s TriStar Stonecrest Medical Center and Williamson Medical Center opposed both VUMC’s and Ascension Saint Thomas’ plans, arguing that the projected emergency department and inpatient censuses for the area did not support

the need for either plan. Ascension opposed the Vanderbilt project because it “failed to offer any new services that are not already sufficiently available in Rutherford County.”

Vanderbilt representatives said they supported both projects and argued that the satellite hospital proposed by Ascension did not eliminate the need for their larger facility two streets away, citing a different patient population and service lines. Local elected officials agreed — writing letters of support for each. State Sen. Shane Reeves, a former health care executive who represents the neighborhood where both projects were proposed, said he did not view Vanderbilt’s certificate-of-need application as a threat to the existing market.

In the last legislative session, Reeves co-sponsored a bill to reform the certificate-of-need process “that had a heavy emphasis on simplifying the front end application process, making it faster and more affordable,” he said then. The bill failed after the House and Senate could not agree on the scope of reform — some representatives wanted to remove the requirement entirely, calling the process “overly cumbersome” — and as the General Assembly’s major priorities took a backseat to the COVID pandemic. Reeves hopes to return to the matter next year.

Meanwhile, his constituents have expressed frustration to the state about the decision to deny Vanderbilt’s hospital plan.

“As a resident of Murfreesboro, I can tell you we often make the trek to Nashville on the highly congested I-24 for care,” Rena Goins, a Murfreesboro resident, wrote in an email to HSDA after the denial.

“The board who denied Vanderbilt’s application to build a new hospital here is hurting patients, families and the environment in creating more congestion.”

Evan Cox, a paramedic in the region, told HSDA that Vanderbilt’s facilities are “much needed to alleviate the strain on the Murfreesboro health care system.”

“It would also bring much-needed competition into Murfreesboro’s health care system, which would incentivize both Vanderbilt and Saint Thomas to continue to provide better and more comprehensive care to the citizens of Murfreesboro and the surrounding area. Put simply, it is a win-win for patients in Murfreesboro,” he said.

Representatives with Vanderbilt University Medical Center have appealed the decision to the state.

They declined to comment for this story until that process is complete.

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VITALS

Bundle up Health systems turn to package deals to grab market share

BY KARA HARTNETT

s health care costs continue to rise and hospitals explore new avenues to attract new patients, an alternative billing structure focused on a streamlined patient and payment experience is gaining ground locally.

Bundles are a care package for a set of treatments or procedures that have a predetermined cost. Their design was inspired by the adoption of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2010 and gained momentum in 2018 when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services launched a series of bundling pilot programs across the country.

The rates for services in a bundling payment structure are discounted compared to those of standard fee-for-service models, and hospitals and physicians are willing to provide those discounted rates as a path to growing market share in specialized areas.

“For me, it’s all about the patient experience, but I’ve got to make it work for the CFO,” says C.J. Stimpson, assistant professor of urology and medical director of episodes of care at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “The way you do that, I call it the Costco model.”

That means hospitals create care plans that are consistent and cost-effective for the patient — and that they can provide in large numbers.

Having established costs for an entire care cycle incentivizes physicians to focus on quality while the cost burden for adverse health events falls back on the hospital.

“I’m a cancer surgeon so I get paid every time I do something to a patient, whether it’s a clinic visit or I take them to the operating room or do some sort of diagnostic test.

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Whether that patient has a good outcome, a bad outcome or a good experience or a bad experience or if what I’m doing is right or wrong or otherwise, it really doesn’t matter,” Stimpson says. “I still get paid.”

“The issue with that is that the person who maybe has the most control over what your experience is like as a patient has the least incentive from a financial standpoint to ensure that experience is as good as possible. The bundle […] brings all the people who are involved in that treatment together in one payment. It creates an incentive for all of us to work together, to create the best possible scenario.”

A JAMA Network study in 2017 found that bundling payments for nearly 4,000 joint replacements between 2009 and 2015 lowered Medicare costs 20.8 percent — while they rose 5 percent nationwide. Claims data from those procedures showed there were no changes in patient risk scores or readmissions and that emergency room visit rates were consistent with national trends, indicating savings didn’t come at the cost of care quality.

The reason bundles work is because the price of an individual service varies greatly based on the hospital that provides it. Claims data collected by local price transparency company Healthcare Bluebook show that the cost of a knee replacement in Nashville ranges from $15,000 to $75,000. That disparity stems in large part from facility fees, not from costs associated with physician payments or anesthesia. These costs vary regardless of quality

metrics, says Bluebook founder Bill Kampine, which means an employer or patient may end up spending more money on a lower-quality procedure without knowing of a cheaper yet higher-quality option.

“You are paying $55,000 for something that’s actually worth $25,000 [but] none of this is revealed to you as an employer or consumer,” Kampine says, noting that hospitals will market discounted rates on procedures to attract more patients. “The hospital is doing this because they want a larger share of the cases, so they’re willing to take a haircut on price.”

Having launched a new slate of bundling initiatives, dubbed MyHealth Bundles, in August, Vanderbilt leaders are looking to do just that in five areas: maternity care, spine surgery, cochlear implants, weight loss and orthodontics work. A major component of these packages is a concierge service that coordinates scheduling, billing and other elements of the complex inner workings of health care.

The nonprofit medical center piloted its MyMaternity Health bundle model with Metro Nashville Public Schools last year and recorded promising results. While Vanderbilt had historically handled only 10 percent of all child deliveries among MNPS families, it has conducted more than 50 percent of them in the past year.

“Even though we gave a discount on every unit, having five times as much market share makes it more than worth it for us,” Stimpson says.

VITALS

The one thing that HCA and Walmart never do A timely reminder that you can’t cut your way to prosperity

BY HAL ANDREWS

020 has been full of unpleasant surprises, especially for hospitals and health care providers. One thing, however, is unfortunately not a surprise: the number of health systems reporting that they have “cut back” or “eliminated” (gasp) their strategy budgets.

Clichés are clichés because they are true, and this one comes to mind: “You can’t cut your way to prosperity.”

Logic suggests that failing to invest in growth strategies will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The reason that there are no case studies at Harvard Business School about companies that succeeded by eliminating their strategy executives and analytics budgets is because that has never happened.

HCA knows this, which is why they never stop investing in growth, even in challenging times. Do they delay capital expenditures? Yes, in some cases. Are they willing to reallocate investment dollars intended for one market to another market based on new information?

Yes. Do they reduce spending with consultants?

Sometimes, but they already spend less on consultants than most health systems. Do they ever stop thinking about growth? Never. Do they ever stop seeking better data and more data to enable them to develop better strategic plans?

Never. Do they ever stop competing for the hearts and minds of physicians? Never.

HCA’s success is largely attributable to strategic decisions made in the 1980s, particularly real estate decisions. Time and time again, in Nashville and Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Austin and many other markets, HCA made extraordinary decisions about markets and sub-markets and site selection. Most

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health systems have some basic understanding of how it feels to compete with HCA, and we can quantify it simply: HCA is winning. How health systems believe that they can compete with HCA by cutting strategy budgets brings to mind what Sir Winston Churchill said about Russia: “ It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.” Perhaps…

If any company is better than HCA at site selection and data-driven decision-making, then Walmart is that company. Most health systems have no understanding of what competing with Walmart will be like, but we predicted it in 2007. Most people, including a few Walmart executives, did not believe us in 2007, but last month’s announcement has a lot of people trying to get up to speed. In summary: • By the end of 2020, Walmart Health will have 13 locations in Georgia, two locations in Chicago, and one in Arkansas. In 2021, they plan to expand quickly into the Florida market targeting Jacksonville, Tampa, Orlando.

With 90 percent of the American population living within 10 miles of a Walmart, their expansion will likely impact every single health system in the country.

• Walmart has partnered with Clover to offer Medicare Advantage plans beginning in Georgia.

• All of the services offered have transparent pricing and they accept all major insurance products.

• The United States has 3,141 counties and 4,753 Walmart locations.

Peter Drucker wrote that the purpose of strategy is to enable an organization to achieve its desired results in an unpredictable environment. Walmart’s entrance into primary care and the Medicare Advantage market will radically change the health care industry. 2021 promises to be the first year ever, and perhaps the first of many years to come, when health systems are confronted with the smallest number of commercially insured patients in a decade, a dominant urban competitor in the most attractive markets, and the largest company in America entering both urban and rural markets. Maybe strategy is not the place to cut…

‘Most health systems have no understanding of what competing with Walmart will be like.’

HAL ANDREWS, TRILLIANT

Hal Andrews is president and CEO of Trilliant, a Nashville-based data and analytics venture focused on patient acquisition. trillianthealth.com

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Their goal? “To put patients at the center of our universe,” according to MIMIT Health Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Dr. Parajmit “Romi” Chopra. He believes that the right technology solutions can enable healthcare to achieve world-class customer service for its patients, on par with the most successful retail brands in the U.S. EHR Integration to Prioritize Patients Over Paperwork Since its inception, MIMIT Health has leveraged a wide range of technology solutions to increase efficiency for staff and physicians, so they can reinvest those savings into patient care. They implemented Salesforce Health Cloud alongside Medstreaming, their electronic health record (EHR), but they needed these systems to be integrated. After attempting to build the integrations internally, twice without success, they enlisted Bridge Connector’s help.

“It was clear from the onset that Bridge Connector had a unique approach,” said Dr. Chopra. “They already knew all of the nuances and the codes. Everything was on-time and under-budget.”

Manish Goomar, Director of Systems Solutions at MIMIT Health, also plays a key role in finding the best tech tools for the organization.

“You have to have more than just an EHR to be able to

grow 10X or 100X,” said Manish. “You have to connect your EHR to all of the other systems to create that 360-degree holistic view of the patient.”

Through Bridge Connector integrations, MIMIT has been able to establish Salesforce as their main source of truth, which achieves this holistic view. Not to mention, the integrations make it easier for MIMIT to continually add new technologies more flexibly, such as WhatsApp, Box, Evernote, DocuSign, Taskray, and more.

Savings Add Value to Patients, Bolster Growth Once Bridge Connector took MIMIT’s bidirectional Salesforce and Medstreaming integration live, there was immediate time savings: over two hours a day — per patient. This has resulted in a 50% increase in productivity with their patient engagement and care coordination processes, according to MIMIT, and has saved them more than $250,000 since their integrations went live with an estimated yearly savings of $385,000.

As an example of just one of these streamlined processes: when primary and secondary insurance information goes from the EHR into Salesforce, instead of taking 20 minutes to verify insurance benefits, this process can now happen on a variety of devices and occurs within 30 seconds.

“Bridge Connector’s integrations provided a missing link that, once achieved, we knew could help us deliver more value to more patients,” said Dr. Chopra. “Our ambitious growth goals have become more attainable, and we tend to forget that not everyone can move this quickly.

Bridge Connector’s integrations give us the opportunity and the engine that empowers us to grow rapidly while never losing sight that we are in this business to take care of people.”

Locations: Nashville, TN Palm Beach Gardens, FL Website: Bridgeconnector.com Twitter: twitter.com/bridgeconnectus Facebook: facebook.com/ bridgeconnectus Instagram: instagram.com/ bridgeconnector LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/ bridgeconnector

S PE C I A LT IE S Integrating with the Largest Vendors in Healthcare for: Digital Health Vendors Hospitals and Health Systems Payers Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Specialty Hospital and Behavioral Healthcare

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M E H A R R Y ’S MAIN MAN James Hildreth is leading the med school through the pandemic without taking his eye off ambitious longer-team goals

BY KARA HARTN E T T

n Camden, Arkansas, in 1968, where a railroad track separated the Black neighborhood from the rest of town, James Hildreth watched his father die from renal cancer without being admitted to a hospital for proper medical care.

“The bottom line is that we were Black and poor, so my dad didn’t get a lot of medical attention, and that made me really angry,” says Hildreth, now a world-renowned infectious disease expert, president of Meharry Medical College and a crusader for a health care industry that more equitably serves the needs of minority communities. “For a long time, I didn’t talk to another human being. I mean, literally, I couldn’t. But my mother, God bless her, she talked me out of that and into doing something about it. So I decided to become a doctor.”

Seven years later, Hildreth graduated top of his class at Camden High School, which had desegregated when he was in the ninth grade, and was accepted to Harvard University with multiple scholarships. There, he used the carpentry skills he learned from his father and uncles to earn the remainder of his tuition by building walls in classmates’ dorm rooms.

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DANIEL MEIGS

“One lasted for at least 20 years,” says Hildreth, who has a knack for woodwork to this day.

Three years in, he decided to apply to become a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University — one day before the application was due.

But with the help of a roommate who worked at the Post Office, Hildreth secured an envelope stamped with the due date and submitted his paperwork a week later. Through what he calls divine providence, Hildreth became the first African-American man from Arkansas to receive the prestigious scholarship. He was off to England.

He received his doctorate in immunology in 1982, then attended John Hopkins School of Medicine, where he began to study how viruses usurp the human immune system.

Upon graduation, he began teaching at Johns Hopkins full-time; he was the first African American in its 125-year history to become a tenured professor of sciences.

Peers hailed Hildreth as a “scientific hero” for the research he conducted on HIV. He and his team were the first to discover the link between cholesterol and HIV’s entrance into cells, paving the way for prevention mecha-

nisms and therapeutics that would help contain the epidemic and transform AIDS into a manageable chronic illness. In that pursuit, Hildreth obtained more than 15 patents and wrote scores of articles for academic journals.

In 2004, Meharry leaders tried to recruit Hildreth to open an HIV research center on their Nashville campus. He declined the offer but then Meharry did something “kinda spooky,” Hildreth says: “They called my wife, Phyllis.”

Phyllis Hildreth — a prominent community member herself, now vice president for instructional advancement and strategic partnerships at American Baptist College and a member of Nashville’s Community Oversight Board — encouraged him, along with his mentor, to reconsider and at least visit Nashville.

“I had never expected it to be quite like it was. From the students, the faculty and the staff just buying into the mission of the place and its commitment to serving the underserved and giving opportunities to people,” Hildreth says. “I had been at some of the best institutions in the world — Harvard, John Hopkins, Oxford — but I had never experienced anything quite like that.”

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After returning from his visit, Hildreth says he decided to move to Nashville and accept the position on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday while singing in the choir at his church.

“My seat was right next to the pulpit, and the reverend got up and read the scripture where Christ was out walking on water. He read that scripture and looked at me — and I had not talked to the man about the decision I was trying to make — and said ‘The title of my talk today is It’s Time to Get Out of The Boat.’”

“This feeling came over me that God had sent a message through him that it was time for me to leave Hopkins and go to the place where my work would be more impactful,” Hildreth says.

Within months, he was leading the Center for AIDS Health Disparities Research, an initiative launched by Meharry and funded by the National Institutes of Health that sought to understand and eliminate the factors responsible for the disproportionate burden of AIDS minority populations face in the United States. He has been president and CEO of 144-year old Meharry since 2016, when he unveiled a 10-year vision for the institution that aims to dramatically grow the school’s enrollment and bring in resources to level the playing field for students at the historically underfunded Black medical college while pushing forward its mission: eliminating health disparities and providing care and opportunities to minority communities.

Hildreth and his team have worked to reimagine how they educate young doctors, set up a data science institute that has a research deal with the United States military, launched a program for physician assistants and begun to expand Meharry’s technology infrastructure to support independent clinical learning options for students.

Hildreth’s primary educational goal with Meharry 2026 is to step away from what he calls the “sage on a stage” teaching model and use emerging software to build a more handson experience.

“Walk into any lecture hall in the country, close your eyes and imagine that the lecturer was speaking Greek or Latin. That’s what teaching was like 1,000 years ago,” he chuckles. “It’s a great way to teach but a terrible way to learn.

So we have to change that. And that means technology and getting the campus ready to do things in a new way.”

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Hildreth wants to double enrollment for the medical and dental schools to 125 and 210 students, respectively. That process will begin in earnest after Meharry’s reaccreditation in 2022, but the school has already launched strategies that will recruit a greater number of diverse candidates. One recruits a class of about 10 from several nations in Africa to train to become dentists in their home countries. And a fledgling partnership with Middle Tennessee State University, called Three-for-Three, puts eligible students on track to finish both their undergraduate studies and medical school in just six years. Tuition is paid for by the state. In exchange, residents commit to practicing in Tennessee for at least two years after training, with priority given to rural areas where hospitals are struggling to remain open and health care services are dwindling.

Tackling a pandemic On March 6 of last year, Hildreth stood alongside Meharry colleagues and unveiled a proposal to launch a safety-net health system that would expand across Nashville’s largest health organizations — Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Ascension Saint Thomas, TriStar Health and Nashville General Hospital — for the city’s underinsured residents. Called BetterHealth Nashville, the initiative would establish for indigent patients a care management program that centralizes their medical history and makes it easier for physicians to manage chronic conditions and provide appropriate treatments. The clinical records would create the largest repository of data on underserved communities in the nation and, managed by Meharry’s data scientists, spur research into health disparities.

Hildreth called it “a model for the nation” but, by the end of 2019, public momentum to invest in the proposal had fizzled out.

Exactly a year after the program was announced, the first case of COVID-19 was recorded in Tennessee. It took only weeks for the novel coronavirus to wreak havoc throughout the country and make it clear that the underserved communities BetterHealth Nashville had looked to lift up face a heavier burden of sickness and death. That imparity continues today: Black people account for 24 percent of the state’s overall death toll despite making up 17 percent of the population.

“If we had a system in place like the one that we proposed, we probably could have

helped those communities heavily burdened

by COVID-19,” Hildreth says. “The pandemic just threw back the cover on a problem that has existed for a long time.”

As the virus has gone global, so has Hildreth: • He regularly reminds local, state and national governments of the importance of protecting vulnerable populations — those with chronic health conditions, who live in congregate care settings, are older or live in rural areas — and advocates for enhanced testing and contact tracing.

• He has tapped into lessons retained from his research on AIDS to help lead the Middle Tennessee COVID response and lobby Congress to invest in new infrastructure that would help identify the full extent of health disparities.

• He has helped write legislation that commits the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to collect and publish racial and ethnic data — like the comparative death rates — alongside health outcomes.

• He was named this fall to a 20-person U.S. Food and Drug Administration committee that will evaluate the efficacy of COVID vaccine candidates.

• In addition to his work with the FDA, Hildreth testified before Congress on behalf of the need for $5 billion in funding to establish the Consortium of Black Medical Schools to provide a network of testing and contact tracing among the nation’s historically black colleges and universities. Those organizations would serve as testing hubs in communities hard hit by the virus and provide surveillance and resources within local outbreaks. The initiative would transcend testing and tackle vaccine outreach and administration and seek to improve social determinants of health while establishing trust among populations long underserved by the medical industry.

“I just felt like the four black medical schools, having engendered a reasonable amount of trust in communities of color, that we would be best suited to establish a national network of testing and contact tracing that might be much more effective than any other organization that could do it,” he says.

Hildreth, his faculty and Meharry students went to work on the project at home. In February, Meharry began to set up a drive-thru site to ensure testing was available for everyone in the community, regardless of their abil-

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Shared plans

‘He is able to deal with the proverbial kings and queens but he has never lost the common touch.’

NELSON ADAMS

ity to pay. Launched with limited resources and on an entirely voluntary basis, this small institution’s work quickly evolved into a citywide effort, running three drive-thru assessment centers for Metro, coordinating testing at neighborhood churches and employing pop-up COVID assessments in high-risk immigrant communities.

In May, reports that state and Metro officials were sharing patient information of individuals who tested positive for COVID to the police department and first responders threw a wrench in testing in minority neighborhoods, where outbreaks were persisting. Metro Coronavirus Task Force Lead and Chairman of the Board of Health Alex Jahangir, a trauma surgeon at Vanderbilt, says Meharry was invaluable in regaining that trust to restart virus surveillance in those areas.

“The fact that Meharry was willing to serve as the vendor to run assessment sites when we decided to bring this on … I mean, how great is that. Meharry has done it well,” Jahangir says. “There were legitimate concerns and trust issues in the community that I think Meharry’s knowledge, experience and community trust helped us overcome.”

Meharrians’ mission didn’t stop there. Researchers started creating breastfeeding guide-

lines for Black mothers who have been infected with COVID to pass on natural immunity through their breast milk until babies can receive a vaccination. Clinics run by Meharry received $719,000 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human and Services to establish a telehealth infrastructure that monitors patients with chronic illnesses from their homes. And labs paused international research into antivirals and treatments for Ebola, HIV and the Zika virus to pivot to COVID work.

The Meharry team’s next big move related to the pandemic is to recruit people of color and those with chronic health conditions into multiple vaccine trials. Hildreth says that work will help account for subtle differences in the genes that control immune responses across different groups.

Meharry has tackled these issues as students and faculty members have navigated the pandemic. Like most other institutions, the medical college took a financial hit as the virus spread across the globe. Hildreth and his team have had to refinance debt, tap into deferred maintenance funds and cut staff significantly to address the costs of a safe return to in-person learning.

“It was bad, and it still is,” Hildreth sighs.

“But we are going to make it.”

Longer term, the pandemic has in some ways fast-forwarded many of the plans laid out in Meharry 2026 — namely the expansion of broadband and igniting new research partnerships — and given the local HBCU a higher profile than ever before. That stature was boosted further in early September, when Bloomberg Philanthropies announced a $34 million donation to Meharry that will provide scholarships of up to $100,000 over four years for Black medical students. It was the largest gift in school history and was soon after followed by contributions from Thermo Fischer and The Gates Foundation to expand the institution’s testing capacity.

As multimillion-dollar charities continue to identify Meharry as a worthwhile investment and public awareness of the school’s priorities rises, the chair of the school’s board of trustees, Nelson Adams, credits the school’s momentum to Hildreth’s COVID response plan and the team’s execution.

“Meharry has stepped up to the plate in no short order because of the pedigree of the president,” Adams says. “He is a person who is able to deal with the proverbial kings and queens as president, but he has never lost the common touch. I think it’s that last point that makes him an effective communicator, a trusted voice. Not only in the Nashville community but beyond, on an international scale.”

A visible sign of Meharry’s local growth and the role partnerships will play in its future is the building of a mixed-use, 125-unit living-learning space (pictured on this page) planned for 21st Avenue North. The facility will be the beginning of a village campus shared by Meharry, Tennessee State University and Fisk University.

Students studying similar programs will live among each other and be able to attend classes together. In addition to dorm rooms, the project will feature two classrooms, a fitness center, outdoor terraces and possibly retail spaces.

Hildreth says he hopes the three HBCUs that sit close to each other along Jefferson Street can over time merge their campuses and resources to provide an enhanced learning experience for students while creating a prestigious academic corridor in North Nashville.

“We have the making to create this dynamic and amazing part of town where you feel like you are in an academic village — and we would like to pursue that,” he says.

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A need and a willingness to adopt Three pros discuss the rise of virtual reality in health care settings few years after first being floated as a A game-changer for some elements of health care, virtual reality technologies are coming into their own. To take stock of the landscape and trends, the Post in October convened a panel featuring HealthStream Senior Vice President Trisha Coady, BehaVR founder and CEO Aaron Gani and Jumpstart Foundry Managing Director Eller Mallchok.

Here are some excerpts, edited for clarity and brevity, from that conversation, which was moderated by Editor Geert De Lombaerde.

DE LOMBAERDE: Aaron, tell us a little bit about BehaVR, its origins and where things have come from in the last couple years.

GANI: Happy to do it. So I founded BehaVR in 2016. At the time, I was in the Nashville Health Care Council Fellows program, a great program led by Senator Bill Frist and Larry Van Horn from Vanderbilt. At the time, I was the CTO at Humana and had been harboring this desire to start my own business.

I had come to believe through my Humana years that we have huge gaps in how behavioral health care is accessed and delivered in the U.S. and globally. I also knew that, in 2016,

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virtual reality was going from being something that had been in largely lab and research settings and was coming out of that setting to be practical in a real-world sense.

And what we have is a company that delivers general wellness programs and digital therapeutics programs in the future that focus on stress, anxiety and fear extinction. We have two main products in the market today: one around chronic pain and then our just-launched NurtureVR Program for maternal mental health.

DE LOMBAERDE: Trisha, HealthStream made news earlier this year with a partnership with another big local health care name, Community Health Systems, to work on VR in resuscitation training. Can you walk us through that and what you’ve learned in the months since?

COADY: Yes, so we’ve been providing resuscitation or CPR programs to our health care organization customers for 10-plus years and we launched a second resuscitation program with the American Red Cross last year. And knowing that there was a 42-percent disparity in post-cardiac arrest survival across the U.S., we wanted to address that through innovation and experiential learning. As a consumer, I want to know that if I went into cardiac arrest, my chances of survival are just as good in Tennessee as they are in California or Idaho.

One of the key goals of the health care team during a cardiac arrest is that of a team leader who effectively coordinates all care provided to the patient. It’s a pretty vital role if we want to improve outcomes. With CHS, we spent a few days there with a number of clinicians, piloting our VR scenarios and received really great feedback. One was, “It really felt like I was in the room with the patient and as close as I’ve gotten to a real-life scenario. It really helped me to master the coordination of care.”

So with a certain number of things, VR is extremely powerful.

DE LOMBAERDE: Eller, in terms of repre-

senting investors but also looking at the end markets that these technologies can go to, how have you seen VR grow into the market?

MALLCHOK: A few years ago, there was so

much hype and so much excitement about it.

And really, over the last year — and particularly with COVID — [there has emerged] a big need for virtual training and virtual learning.

There’s no question people are struggling with behavioral health and mental health issues.

And I think any sort of virtual experience can help alleviate some of the isolation that people are feeling through COVID, through all this time quarantining and being at home. So there is not just a need for it, but there is now more of a willingness to adopt it. The pandemic has forced us to adopt virtual engagement.

DE LOMBAERDE: What are the objections

from patients as well as from users? Aaron, have you seen those walls break down? Have attitudes changed?

GANI: Definitely, they are changing — and have changed a lot even since 2016. Probably the most frequently mentioned thing is, “Well, I’ve heard that some people can get nauseous or there can be some sort of simulator sickness in VR.” And the short response to that is that, with the technology that has come to market in the last few years, you have the processing power on board these headsets to keep the refresh rates well beyond the point where they cause that discomfort.

The other major concern that gets voiced is more on the operational side. How do I deploy headsets? It’s one thing if you’re doing it in an enterprise setting, in offices or hospitals. That’s relatively straightforward these days. What if you want to go out to thousands or hundreds of thousands of homes, as we do? That has gotten a lot better in the last 18 months or so. Now we can ship a headset to a patient’s home, you unbox it. It’s completely managed: You power it on, it’s in our application, you cannot screw it up.

We can say to a sponsor of care: For a simple per-member-per-month fee, we’ll put a headset in a patient’s home. They can control it from their own smart phone and off they go.

It’s getting better by leaps and bounds every six-to-12 months.

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DE LOMBAERDE: Trisha, are you seeing a

similar dynamic?

COADY: I definitely agree with Aaron. And I think with the recent onset of Oculus Quest and its untethered devices, we’ve seen it dramatically improve in terms of the user experience and the ability to deploy. A lot of our health care organization leaders are really excited about VR — largely because they either can’t afford to set up a sim center or they have a sim center but are thinking about how to scale experiential learning.

DE LOMBAERDE: Eller, where do you get the

sense that VR is in terms of adoption in terms of the classic baseball innings analogy?

‘Headsets are going to continue to change rapidly over the next few years.’

AARON GANI, BEHAVR

MALLCHOK: I still think we’re in early in-

nings. That said, we’re not in the first inning anymore. We’re well beyond that, maybe the fourth inning if I really had to pick one. I think it’s off the ground. As Aaron mentioned, the delivery to individuals en masse is definitely taking place. COVID probably accelerated the adoption of that; the current environment in our world is accelerating people.

DE LOMBAERDE: Trisha, what’s your answer

in terms of baseball innings?

COADY: I would say the second or third inning, maybe. We’re really beyond the very introductory phase of VR applications but there is still a lot of discovery that we’d like to do.

We’re seeing a lot of VR technology evolve at a fairly rapid pace. And we’re still learning, testing, getting feedback as we go.

We really set out to make sure that we were leveraging the modality purposely and where it’s beneficial. Some people think, “Well, I’m just going try this new technology and apply it to everything.” And I don’t think that’s true.

I think there’s a very specific purpose to VR.

DE LOMBAERDE: You mentioned the up-

front costs, especially in the hardware. Is that an obstacle that you found that has kept some people away?

COADY: No. I don’t think it’s an issue at all.

Now, with the portability of it, it’s extremely cost-efficient. I’m replacing not only a course development — a piece of knowledge that I have to run through — but I’m also replicating or enhancing this live simulation experience. We have a lot of peer-to-peer tech learning in the field.

GANI: Let me nerd out for a second on this question of what inning we’re in. This is a PECO G2 headset. There are a couple of things related to this headset that are really going to continue to change rapidly over the next few years.

One is the bulk of this unit. The reason it’s so thick is mainly about the optics. There is a thin digital display in there but you still need some

depth in the optics to expand the visual field.

There are advances being made all the time that will make that thickness shrink so it will be much lighter-weight and more comfortable.

The other thing is all of the computing power to render those graphics and do that real-time calculation of changing visuals. With 5G and edge computing, we aren’t so far away from the graphics rendering moving to the edge of the cloud. We’ll have something that feels much more like a regular pair of glasses. The optics are going to allow the lenses to be much thinner and we can offload the graphics processing.

DE LOMBAERDE: Here’s a question that has come in: What is the experience like for the patient and the provider? How good is the quality?

COADY: The pilot testing that we did with the nurses and physicians that we worked with at CHS said that it was as close to real-life as you can get. And you really were able to get or to generate emotion. It feels very immersive. It really helps you to feel like you’re in a three-dimensional universe and that you’re getting all this information, the sounds, all the stimulation.

And that’s where situational awareness is very, very key in health care, in terms of reacting and dealing with multiple scenarios. In the one that we’re working with for cardiac arrest, I’m seeing the beds and I’m seeing the five different nurses and EMTs and physicians around me. And I’m able to look at the monitor out to the side, and then able to react to all of these stimuli.

GANI: What’s the experience like? Virtual reality is extremely hard to describe. You have to experience it. I have shown 2-D videos of our experiences to investors and prospective clients many times and they never get it. You have to go inside because what happens in

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VR is a multi-sensory simulation. Generally, it’s audio and visual and the way that we experience that is, of course, through the same sensory pathways that we experience real life.

So our brains don’t distinguish it from reality.

The other thing I’ll say about it is in terms of what kind of content you experience. It’s as varied as real life. There can be gamification. You can move around virtual spaces and engage with things. You can be more passive and watch an educational segment or you can watch real-world, 360-degree video. We do that for patient stories and narratives. That’s really all about building empathy and belief, and self-efficacy.

DE LOMBAERDE: One thing that I see VR contributing to that we’ve written about a lot at the Post is care becoming decreasingly decentralized. That one hospital campus is no longer the place you go. If this technology becomes increasingly good and increasingly affordable, we’re going to enable a lot of people to treat themselves better at home.

MALLCHOK: Yeah. And think of in-person

treatments like group therapy and benefits of having other people around you while you’re doing the hard work. Can you do that in a virtual setting? Absolutely. And I think people in some ways are getting used to that and are encouraged by it.

DE LOMBAERDE: And then you’re solving access problems, right? In rural areas and for folks who aren’t as mobile, you’re bringing the care to them the way that the system has really tried to do in a lot of different ways in recent years.

MALLCHOK: Exactly.

DE LOMBAERDE: Thinking about the pan-

demic speeding up the adoption of a lot of technologies, how are you as investors think-

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you’re very quickly going to need to raise a lot more capital to deploy that technology — whether through a health system or direct consumer routes.

DE LOMBAERDE: Trisha, in terms of investing and budgeting in VR technologies, how are you all at HealthStream thinking about the next couple of years?

‘It’s going to take bigger rounds of funding to get really successful VR and AR companies stood up and competing.’

ELLER MALLCHOK, JUMPSTART FOUNDRY

ing about the amount of money that might need to go to this to really take advantage of this demand?

MALLCHOK: We are really early-stage in-

vestors, coming in right as entrepreneurs and innovators are getting products to market.

There’s going to be a lot of money, particularly in Series A, being poured into VR and AR. We were talking before we went live about the cost to develop and deploy the actual technology.

That’s falling but the cost to develop the virtual settings is very capital-intensive — which is why I think it’s going to take bigger rounds of funding to get really successful VR and AR companies stood up and competing.

Where I see Jumpstart Foundry really playing a role is with early-stage entrepreneurs coming up with different applications. But once you have that application stood up,

COADY: I think we’re probably in a heavier investment mode. Learning and development is really our space so we need to go deep, right?

We were [focused on] AI last year and had been working on that for four years in a particular application with IBM Watson. Moving forward, AR might be great in anatomy and physiology or when you’re about to do a surgery. But where VR is much more ready for and useful is experiential learning. We’re going to continue to invest pretty heavily in this type of technology.

It takes a certain expertise to get to the right content, to get the right outcome. And so we’ve been talking with a lot of different organizations like Aaron’s to really try and drive at where that expertise is.

GANI: That’s a great point, Trisha, that I’ll sort of build on. At some level, we are certainly a VR company. We kind of baked it into our name, right? But that was really a function of the newness and makes it really clear to people what you’re trying to accomplish. But in fact, we’re not really a VR company. We are a behavioral health company. We’re using the medium of virtual reality in certain ways. And health care is still health care. You still have the multi-stakeholder landscape of payers versus providers versus consumers. And they all have sometimes aligned and sometimes misaligned incentives and interests.

And so to your question about capital: Certainly, some of it is in building the technological frameworks and underpinnings so we’ve definitely invested a lot of time in our cloud platform that allows us to connect clinicians to consumers in real time. We’re now in our Series A raise and the next stage of our

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‘There is still a lot of discovery that we’d like to do.’

TRISHA COADY, HEALTHSTREAM

company, and most of our capital will go into proving the efficacy and safety of these programs with clinical studies. From an FDA perspective, we’re very careful about saying this is education and engagement and skill-building. We’re not making claims about treating, curing or preventing. But for at least some of our products, that is in fact where we expect and hope to go. And that takes significantly more capital.

imbursable benefit category. That will be a big deal.

MALLCHOK: And the push for

policy on that is happening right now. Once they can tie breakthrough technologies to CMS reimbursement, that’s going to be the big-ticket item. People are going to adopt it because they know they are going to be reimbursed for it. So follow the money on that one.

DE LOMBAERDE: Trisha, did

you want to jump in?

DE LOMBAERDE: My last question is about benchmarks and milestones. What’s a headline you want to see in the next year for VR in health care?

GANI: What I’d like to see — and

I think we will see — is digital therapeutics recognized as a re-

COADY: Yeah. For me and the health systems, I think COVID has really helped us in many ways to be more creative. We think about all the telehealth adoption that has been going on. The systems getting ready for that kind of virtualization of care are going to really benefit us to the point that we can start expanding in a number of areas that will benefit with VR.

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TECHIE

Hardly slowed

by COVID-19 The growth plan remains on track for ambitious financial software firm Ncontracts

BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT

nlike much of the rest of the economy, Nashville-based Ncontracts experienced only a slight hiccup as COVID-19 began its spread across the country earlier this year.

Sure, some deals the company had in the pipeline were delayed, but only for a month or two. And though one of Ncontracts’ best sources of new business — trade shows — has disappeared, the company is growing in new ways, and has no plans to slow that momentum.

Ncontracts founder Michael Berman previously served as general counsel for a fintech company, dealing with a lot of compliance and regulatory work. Working largely in basic spreadsheets was “super painful.”

“So I started looking for a different way to do it, and I didn’t find anything in the market,” he says.

When the company sold, Berman turned his proceeds into seed money for Ncontracts, which the “recovering attorney turned entrepreneur” foresaw as a solution to the problems he’d encountered working on fintech compliance.

“I really wanted to create a solution to help with third-party risk management,” he says.

The difficult work of diligence, information technology reports and contract review “was typically not anybody’s full-time role” at the time, and firms “really struggled to deal with the volume of information that was available,” he says.

And thus was born Ncontracts.

In August, Ncontracts acquired Johnson City, Tennessee-based Banc Intranets, adding

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about 60 people to its staff and beefing up its communications offerings in the process. In July, Ncontracts launched its own internal audit tool built from scratch. And the hiring was not limited to the acquisition of Banc Intranets.

The company’s arc can be traced, of course, to its founding in 2009. But the firm truly started growing in 2015, when San Francisco-based Mainsail Partners came onboard as Ncontracts’ main backer. Until then, Ncontracts was funded by Berman, who also serves as CEO, and his close contacts, an arrangement that hindered the company’s ability to grow. Earlier this year, another San Francisco firm, Gryphon Investors, took over from Mainsail, but Berman says the trajectory has not changed.

“They wanted to get on the growth train with us, and we’re happy to have them,” he says of Gryphon. “COVID slowed us down, but we’re still growing this year by most measures very aggressively.”

That means hiring tech talent at “a pretty good clip,” but unlike other firms in years past, Berman says he has no trouble hiring developers and other talent in the Nashville market.

“We do not have problems finding great talent,” Berman says. “Nashville’s a great place to find talent.”

Ncontracts’ founder believes the company would be growing whether or not a pandemic was disrupting the economy — if anything, because he feels the company’s products make complicated work easier. But he also sees a silver lining in the workforce transitions forced by coronavirus.

“Because it’s a SaaS-based platform, you can access it from anywhere,” he says. “If they were using Excel spreadsheets, which is typically what we replace, having access to these things in a web-based software where they can access it and collaborate is a lot easier using our type of technology, versus manual processes.

Those might have worked pretty well if we’re all working in the office but not so well when we have a distributed workforce.”

With the backing of its “very sophisticated investors,” Ncontracts has plans for continued growth in the next five years.

“We are going to be growing both by acquisition and organically — very aggressively,” Berman says. “We think there’s a huge opportunity, all within the financial services space.

We’re super excited about the future for us.”

‘We think there’s a huge opportunity, all within the financial services space.’

MICHAEL BERMAN, NCONTRACTS

TECHIE

Changing course Technology innovations lift golfers’ games, level playing field

BY MICHAEL GALLAGHER

he sports landscape has undergone an analytical and data-driven revolution for the better part of the last two decades. Professional and amateur athletes alike have never had more knowledge and technology readily available at the click of a button than they do presently.

Specifically, golf is at the forefront of the technological uprising, embracing development in data and technology with open arms as the new analytical advancements have helped bridge the gap between seasoned veteran and novice golfer.

“When I first got on tour in 2006, golf didn’t really rely on data; it was more feel,” Nashville native and former FedEx Cup champion Brandt Snedeker says. “Now, we know all the ways we can track every shot digitally.”

Snedeker knows all about embracing and incorporating an analytical approach to the green. The 39-year-old hired a full-time statistician during the 2011 season and won the FedEx Cup championship the following year.

“Data tells you where you rank on tour in every possible category imaginable,” Snedeker continues. “So, you’re able to kind of tailor your gameplan, the way you practice and the way you prepare for tournaments based on that. That’s not even getting into the equipment side of it with TrackMan, with FlightScope (launch monitors), with ball fittings and driver fittings and all those kinds of things that the tour has been doing for 10-12 years.

Now, there’s a whole industry based on that.”

Golf is uniquely positioned to use both analytics and technology to not only appeal to but also connect with casual fans or recreational golfers in a way that other professional individual sports simply can’t, according to those interviewed for this article.

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“Understanding those technologies makes a more enjoyable experience for me, for my brothers, for fathers and grandfathers and people that can continue to keep playing because the technology is there to help them,” says Nick Pietruszkiewicz, who oversees all ESPN digital and print golf coverage. “Even on a level in terms of a good amateur, the technology is comforting. Because if you have it in your mind, ‘a range finder can help me because I’m not guessing,’ or if you’ve maximized as much as you can through the use of these technologies — through understanding things you’ve never considered before like launch angles and spin rate — it brings the game to more people because they can play it a little bit better. Playing a little bit better, as we all know, will be the reason it brings us back next time.”

Real-life examples of this can be found at any local Topgolf. Each hitting bay comes equipped with Toptracer, a program that tracks the flight path of every golf shot and displays it on each bay’s HD screen, branding it as “Topgolf like a Pro.” Also, Topgolf has virtually pre-loaded courses — such as Pebble Beach, St. Andrews and Spyglass Hill — in each bay so that guests can play against their friends at some of the world’s top golf courses, set handicaps and have a professional golf experience at their fingertips, brought to them courtesy of modern technology.

“Understanding where I hit it, distances, where I can improve, launch angles and spin rates … it’s important,” Pietruszkiewicz adds.

“Toptracer is [found] at driving ranges now.”

As such, he says, the casual golfer who might plan to go hit balls for an hour has no choice but to take notice. “[The technology is] right behind him,” Pietruszkiewicz says, adding that proximity and accessibility spurs golfers to be curious who might not otherwise.

Golf apps, range finders, swing simulators and analyzers, smart caddie sensors, swing maps and layout maps, vector mats and so on are just a few examples of the data-producing technology to which all golfers, and not just professionals, have access.

Other sports such as football and basketball attract fans and recreational players based on popularity; they’re the flashy sports that always get plenty of airtime on ESPN’s SportsCenter.

But what golf has that those sports do not, its backers contend, is the ability to allow fans to use the same technology and the same equipment at home that the pros use on tour.

It’s worth noting that golf technology is not inexpensive. For example, a range finder can cost approximately $250. Swing simulators can command a similar price. Even the relatively lesser expensive vector mat can carry a price tag of $150.

Still, golfers seemingly are willing to pay for the opportunity to have their games improve.

“I don’t think we’ve reached our peak yet,” Snedeker says. “We’re kind of getting into the sweet spot of using all the technology we have available to us.”

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SMITH-BARTLEY: It’s imperative that you

have an entire support network. A mentor is one component of that. But I think you also have to have what I call the “real” group. Those are the folks that are going to give you the good, the bad and the ugly truth. You know you can always go to them and they’ll be completely authentic. With the mentor, it’s a lot of what Kristin said: It can be someone within the workplace or external, someone who is where you are now or in a position where you want to be in the future.

The other layer of that is the sponsor. That’s the person who has the influence and authority within the organization to help you get to that next level. So you want to supplement your mentors with your “real” group as well as your sponsors.

Leading through the new normal Tech execs on being intentional and effective in a remote work environment

he Leadership Panel is one of the biggest events Women in Technology of Tennessee organizes each year and, barring the shift to a virtual setting, 2020 was no different. Brought together in late October to discuss various leadership and management topics were: • Envision Healthcare Enterprise CIO Kristin Darby • Trinisys COO Beth Hoeg • Asurion Chief Diversity and Talent Strategy Officer Yanika Smith-Bartley • Nashville General Hospital Chief Business Development and Information Officer Melanie Thomas • Tractor Supply Senior Vice President Letitia Webster Here are some of their thoughts from the chat, which was moderated by Post Editor Geert De Lombaerde.

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How do you make the mentorship ask?

DARBY: The

approaches have changed throughout my career based on where I’ve been from a development perspective and what my specific needs or challenges have been. I think that’s a good approach for individuals throughout their career. Ideally, they should have many mentors if they’re lucky.

You may have multiple mentors simultaneously that are helping you become well rounded in a way that makes you a more competent professional. You just have to be very, very strategic about who you’re selecting and why you’re selecting them and making sure you’re communicating that effectively.

The other element is you have to seek constructive feedback. Many individuals get feedback or ask for mentorship but don’t necessarily really self-reflect on that feedback. If you’re not seeking that and going through those difficult situations, you’re not going to get better.

The mentor needs to know that you’re getting value out of the time that they’re investing so that it’s a two-way relationship.

HOEG: Finding people who are just truthful with you regardless of how uncomfortable it is is really important so you don’t go down paths where everyone is just saying nice things. Nobody needs that. If I just want someone to say nice things, my husband can do that for me.

I would add that I’ve found volunteering and board work is a great opportunity to meet a lot of people from a lot of different companies. WiTT is an excellent example of this.

You get to know people you can have those relationships with who are not necessarily in your company but who can be great mentors for who you are and who you want to be.

How have you adapted to the COVID work environment — how you interact with your teams, with your fellow leaders?

THOMAS: I took advantage of it completely!

I’ve been trying to make the shift to more digital meetings, more utilization of Teams and Zoom. It allows us to be a little more productive because then, when you end one meeting, you don’t have that walk to the elevator and wait then you have that 15-minute transition.

TECHIE

You have to be a lot more intentional in this digital environment. You’ve got people who are working everywhere now — throughout the city and the United States. You have to be very intentional about how you’re communicating with them, how you are working with them and how you take for granted some of the things you would pick up because your colleague was on a conference call right next to you. You now have to go seek out that information. You have to be a lot more intentional about gaining that knowledge and information and closing the loop on some things that just happened naturally before.

WEBSTER: We’ve been 100-percent remote since early March. For an organization that struggled a little bit with learning to be remote and work from home, that changed very quickly. And Melanie is right; we’ve had to be very deliberate about how we do meetings. Some of the things we’ve learned: Instead of having an hour-long meeting with some of my team members every week, we’ve started having smaller snippets. We can connect faster and we just touch base on topics here or there. That makes it easier than sitting down for an hour.

We’ve also introduced a couple of thoughts on the fatigue that’s going on with everyone being in front of screens all the time. We’ve had some sessions on taking a break and being deliberate and having a schedule, getting up and walking around for a few minutes.

I will say we’ve been incredibly productive.

We haven’t missed a beat but it has come with a set of challenges. We also start things, instead of at the top of the hour, five minutes in and end five minutes early to give people breaks. Because it kind of runs together when you’re doing all this.

I think it’s going to be a good thing going forward. When we get back to some balance of in-person and remote, it’ll give us some more flexibility. We’ve also been able to acquire talent. We now have people we’ve brought on who are in other cities.

Yanika Smith-Bartley

Melanie Thomas

What are you doing to accommodate the needs people have at home beyond the work that they put in?

SMITH-BARTLEY: Three words come to

mind as it relates to this new normal that I need in order to lead effectively. They are grace, flexibility and empathy. Realizing that everybody is juggling something, whether it’s homeschooling your children, dealing with COVID in your own home or with your family members. Yes, as leaders, we have to keep the business running but you also have to care for your people and understand that they will be facing challenges.

You model it for them by doing it yourself. I am conscious and intentional in saying, “Look, it’s been a rough week for me. I’m taking Friday off because I need a massage in order to be re-energized on Monday.” You have to model that for

your employees if you want to them to model self-care. That has been a big thing for me.

HOEG: Everyone’s situation is different, their home life is different. You can’t treat them the same. Some people have two working parents at home with little kids and they have to have some flexibility in their day. We expect that they can plan their day so it works best for their specific situation.

A lot of what we’ve tried to do is listen to our employees, hear what they need and make sure that they have what they need to be successful at home. We’ve always worked remotely with our clients but our team was in the office and very collaborative. When we went home in March, I was really excited about how well our team did in embracing technology.

We’re actually operating as well or better with our clients across the nation.

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he teams at the Post and Nfocus teamed up again this year to organize Most Powerful Women, convening a group of outstanding leaders to tell their stories of leadership, entrepreneurship and career growth. This year’s event — which was presented by PNC Bank and also sponsored by Thistle Farms and Postmates — featured Nashville Entrepreneur Center CEO Jane Allen, The Cupcake Collection founder Mignon Francois, Nashville State Community College President Shanna Jackson and Thistle Farms founder Becca Stevens.

The quartet gathered at the LA Jackson bar atop the Thompson Hotel in The Gulch to share their experiences, insights and advice with each other and more than 100 video attendees. On the following pages are excerpts, edited for brevity and clarity, from their chat, which was moderated by Kelly Sutton and delivered to those watching from their homes and offices by Bright Event Productions.

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‘Gifts we never would have asked for’ The 2020 Most Powerful Women talk about finding their truths, building careers and accepting the ‘in spite of’ people in our lives

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DANIEL MEIGS

LEADERS

SUTTON: Mignon, what was that first step

SUTTON: Becca, let’s talk about Thistle Farms

SUTTON: Shanna, Becca mentioned com-

FRANCOIS: What people need to know is

STEVENS: I’m probably surprised it’s not bigger. Because I think it’s a really good idea.

And I totally relate to the idea of ‘Just start where you are and you keep going.’ For us, that meant one house in Sylvan Park and opening this bath and body care company because women weren’t getting hired. There was no Entrepreneur Center; there was none of that going on. So what we wanted to do was just starting making it so we made candles in a pot. They’re not that hard to make — but ours are the highest-quality not-hardto-make products.

I also think community is the whole thing.

It’s the entity that holds us up, the entity that holds us accountable.

JACKSON: When I was a little girl, I intended to be the first black female president of the United States. So I’ve always aspired to be a leader.

I moved to Nashville to work for the Pillsbury company in Murfreesboro. So being a college president at the age of 20 was not a thought.

I had an opportunity to teach and the community part really came in because I saw the power of education in action. Being with students who weren’t raised in a two-parent home with college-educated parents really changed things for me. So when I got into the community college system in 2000, I realized I wanted to be a president. I didn’t see many women — there

like for you in 2008 building The Cupcake Collection?

that you’re not going to have everything and you don’t need to have everything. You start where you are and that’s enough for right now.

It’s about having just enough light for the step that I’m on.

Yeah, I was going to need a big, gigantic mixer and a giant walk-in freezer and all that other stuff. But it was a dorm-sized fridge and a KitchenAid mixer that I opened my store with. And that was 12 years ago.

Start where you are with what you have.

And that’s enough to serve just today. Tomorrow, we’ll think about something different. Today, we’re going to worry about just a dorm-sized refrigerator.

and where you’ve come from. Did you ever imagine it would become what it is today?

munity and especially women. There are not many women in the position you’re in. How did you find a community in being the president of a college?

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were no African-American women presidents — but I desired to be that and had a lot of wonderful sponsors and mentors in my life to make that possible. I don’t have a traditional journey. A lot of people go faculty, then dean, vice president of academic affairs. I did a really crazy journey and I think that’s because I led with what was really important to me: Our community and making it better through education.

‘All you need is somebody to believe, to give you some of their faith currency.’

MIGNON FRANCOIS

SUTTON: It seems like that common thread

is that sense of community, the idea that no one super successful got there without someone helping them along. Is there somebody that you remember for that or an instance when someone whispered something in your ear and it clicked and it all came together?

ALLEN: For me, it’s a lot of people. After I

graduated law school, I had the benefit of clerking for an amazing human being, Edward Johnstone, who was a federal court judge in Western Kentucky. He was probably my first professional mentor. He really talked to me about keeping the playing field level, access for all, and just doing something that you love and feel really good about.

And then I’m blessed to be married to a man who is probably one of the brightest people I know and who helps keep me in line.

I’ll have ideas and he’ll say, “Really, Jane?” But then when I was thinking about Counsel On Call, it was him coming to me saying, “You’re doing something that really can transform the legal profession. Why not now?” And I’d say, “Well, we have three little kids under 3 years old.” He gave me the courage and, quite frankly, maybe pushed me out there a little bit and has continued to do so each day.

Even with the Entrepreneur Center, it was me saying, “I know I’m going to be ‘retired’…”

And he said, “Are you kidding me? Go do it.

Make an impact. Have a positive impact.”

SUTTON: Mignon, what about you?

FRANCOIS: I agree with you, Jane. How do

you say it’s just one person? You have to look at the journey and see where you’re going to pick that from. But if I was going to pick one, I think it would be my neighbor, Joanie Dixon. She was like the mayor of our town, of Germantown. She had come over to my house and said, “Listen, those cupcakes that you’re making? I’m going to give them to all my

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clients. So just get in there and start making them and when you get some, I’ll pay you.”

But I didn’t have any money. As a matter of fact: The day she knocked on my door and asked me for them, I was sitting in my house with no electricity because I couldn’t afford it.

Now, Joanie has this way about her that makes you feel like you have to do what she says. And so I accepted her “order,” closed the door and had a conversation with the Lord. “How are you giving me this opportunity when I have no money to take it?” And I heard God say, “But I feed birds and they don’t toil for anything.”

So I put on my shoes, took the only five dollars I had, walked to the store and started working on that order. And I had enough to give her something that she could pay me for. And I turned that $5 into $60 that day. And then to $600 by the end of the week. That’s the same money I’ve been flipping for the last 12 years.

That’s why I want people to know you don’t have to have everything. You just have to have enough faith to believe. All you need is somebody to believe, to give you some of their faith currency.

JACKSON: I just want to say this for our leaders: One of the things we do on our journeys is thinking that we have to check every box. When I went to Columbia State, there was a president there — she’s still there, Dr. Janet Smith — who pushed me. And sometimes you need people to push you.

I kept thinking I need to go from this position to that position. There was a presidency open — not Nashville State — and she said, “You should apply.” And I said, “Oh no, I don’t want to apply for that. I’m not ready yet.” And she let it go. But she eventually took me to lunch — which she never did. And she got in my face and told me, “You said you

wanted to be a president. You need to put your name in the hat.” And I was actually a finalist.

I wasn’t selected but that gave me the sense of confidence that I was ready for the next step.

So I just want to encourage everyone out there that, sometimes we look at a list of 10 things and, as women, we think we have to check every box. Men see two, they check it off and they apply. So apply! Whatever it is you’re thinking about doing right now, if you have a few things checked off that list, you should put your name in the hat.

STEVENS: What I would say, too, is that

there are also people “in spite of.” There are mentors and people who propel you but there are also some people that, because of the brokenness you experienced, helped propel you, too. I do believe that brokenness can be transformative in our lives, into something that is about compassion and generosity and leadership. The closer we can get to seeing those as gifts in our lives — gifts we never would have asked for... But I know part of the reason I’m doing what I’m doing is not because people were so nice. It’s that some people were so abusive and I understood the need for sanctuary and safety for folks.

FRANCOIS: I agree. I always like to encour-

age people to know that what’s happening to you is actually happening for you. Because if the biblical principle is true that all things work together for your good, then that means all things. Not just some things at some times.

When you ever ask successful people about their journeys, you never hear them say, “Oh, I wouldn’t have gone through that.” The biggest thing about this is that it’s hard. If it wasn’t hard, everybody would do it!

ALLEN: That’s one thing I’ve been saying with

everything going on with the pandemic. There’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur.

Difficult times are where problems need to be solved and people are open for disruption.

Difficult times make you tougher and they make you sharper. Living through Sept. 11 and living through 2008, it made us a better company and it made me a better leader. And you’re right: Sometimes, you have to listen to the haters a little bit, too. Because there are going to be people who put you in a box or try to tell you what you can’t do instead of pushing you forward.

LEADERS

my. You had the tornado right on your back porch and then the pandemic. How has your business survived and what have you had to do?

FRANCOIS: It was a blessing for me that the

On disruption and regrets SUTTON: Let’s talk some more about what it

looks like to run a business, to be successful, in the age of COVID. What have you had to change and what do you feel is going to come out of this?

ALLEN: Innovation is going to drive us out of

this — and that’s what we’re seeing. Yesterday, we had our first team meeting in person to talk about the last six months and what we’re going to do moving forward. And one of the people said, “We’re a better organization.” Through difficult times, you’re able to do some self-reflecting instead of run, run, run. And you’re able to look at what’s really important.

What are the resources entrepreneurs need that we can surround them with to increase their probability of success? Let’s get to that.

And let’s make sure we’re there for the entire entrepreneurial community and that we really are leveling the playing field. As an organization, yes, we’ve had to make some hard choices. Yes, we have budgetary issues. But we’re doing exactly what our entrepreneurs are doing.

We are living it side by side, day by day.

SUTTON: Mignon, you had the double wham-

‘You have to listen to the haters a little bit, too. Because there are going to be people who put you in a box or try to tell you what you can’t do instead of pushing you forward.’

JANE ALLEN

tornado came first. We were already disrupted before the pandemic came to Nashville.

We had four major trees laying on our house.

We had probably the oldest magnolia in the neighborhood on our porch and it stopped anyone from coming down Sixth Avenue North — except for the people who needed cupcakes. Because they were crawling over the trees and saying, “Is there anything inside?” I knew we had to get a way to get the store up and running.

So I jumped on social media and said, “We need a place.” And other bakers and other caterers started offering me their kitchens. And someone had seen how I had been helping other people during the tornado got on the phone with his company and Taziki’s and said, “How can we help Mignon do pop-ups?”

I just wanted five pop-up shops. They turned it into nine locations. I think there was only one in the area that we weren’t in. Had the tornado not happened, there would’ve been so much red tape that would’ve caused us not to do it. “Oh, that would be great if we could figure it out.” Well, people are figuring out things that they normally wouldn’t take the time to figure out.

It kept us in business. We were trying to figure out after the world started coming back if we would be able to continue to do this. And we were going over the financials and my CFO said, “You’re crazy if you stop. I don’t care if you have to bring them, Mignon Francois. You will continue to have cupcakes in other cafes.”

It’s like you said, Jane: This has been the mother of innovation and invention. People are opening doors that might have otherwise been shut. I’m so grateful that it took a tornado for us to realize that we needed to partner.

SUTTON: Because the world looks do differ-

ent right now, Becca, how does that impact what you’re seeing?

STEVENS: I’ve been thinking about the word

“disruption.” It comes from the word “ruption,” something that’s already broken. So disruption is basically a time to put stuff back together.

Interpreting what’s going on around us is one of our jobs as leaders. We don’t have to

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understand what COVID is. We don’t have to understand the fires. We don’t have to understand the tornadoes and all that. But we get to interpret what is happening around that in our communities and helping people through that. And if you are doing that well and you’re not grieving, you’re not paying attention.

There’s plenty to grieve — whether it’s the loss of lives or the loss of property.

So for us to interpret and re-interpret and put things back together through a disruption is critical. It’s also being a voice saying, “We’re not just pivoting. We are digging deep to our roots and we are growing something and we are going to get through it. The pandemic is no time to quit.” And you’re that voice helping people go through that.

SUTTON: Before we get to our audience’s

questions, I have one more for you all. I believe that everything everyone does comes from a place of their truth, that you have to find your truth before you go on on your journey and know what’s out there for you. How did you all find your truth? Shanna?

JACKSON: Really, in that classroom. I can

tell you that it was never a thought that I would have a career in education. I married my husband and we moved to Knoxville and I didn’t have a job. I answered that ad and it forever changed my life.

I truly always wanted to be a leader and make a difference but never knew in what area that might be. That’s when I discovered education is powerful. My dad was part of a big family and he was the first to go to college. Education meant everything to him and I wanted to mean everything to the students. They may not finish to get a degree but if they come to Nashville State and I can make a difference in their lives… And it’s not just the student. I like to say it changes their family. It changes their community.

SUTTON: Jane, how did you find your truth?

ALLEN: That’s a great question and I don’t

know that I’ve found my truth. I think the truth continues to evolve and sometimes, you find your truth by looking backwards. And like you, Shanna, I had a mother that made me believe I could be anything in the world. I re-

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member saying I wanted to drop out of college to be Joan Jett. And she was like, “OK, girlfriend. What do we need to do make that happen?” She didn’t tell me I was a terrible singer.

I remember going to Byron Trauger and saying to him, “I’ve got this little seed inside of me.

And I keep covering it up with dirt but it keeps sprouting. And I think that, if I don’t follow up on that, in five to 10 years, I’m going to regret it. But would you hire me back if I fail?” And he said yes, so that gave me the confidence. And I will say that, when I had the company, every day I felt like I was living out the purpose. I started my day with a prayer and I felt that I was living out a purpose. And then I sell the company and, all of a sudden, I’m in the wilderness and I keep waiting for the burning bush.

Then, when the EC knocked, I started waking up at night thinking, “Oh, I wondered if they’ve tried this or if they’ve tried that.” And then I went from “they” to “we,” and I said, “OK, I think this is part of it.” So what is my truth? It keeps evolving and I hope I keep being a better person and I keep being more compassionate and empathetic and kind and walking people to the table.

SUTTON: Mignon, how did you find your

truth?

‘If you’re setting yourself on a timeline — “In three years, I want to be here and in five years, I ought to be there” — I think you’re setting yourself up for failure.

It happens organically.’

SHANNA JACKSON

LEADERS

FRANCOIS: I think I found it in trying. I didn’t

know how to bake — not even out of a box. All the recipes are mine and they’re award-winning — and I didn’t know how to bake.

You know how people say listen to your heart? Your heart really exists right here around your gut. And I began to learn that it’s a muscle and that when you exercise it, it’s just like any other muscle. It gets stronger and it speaks louder. And if you just try it, you will realize that that’s the voice that’s leading you.

That was the voice that said, “Get your shoes on.” That’s why I want people to know you don’t have to have enough. You don’t have to have a computer; you can use a tablet. You don’t have to have a tablet; you can use your phone.

You don’t have to have a phone; you can still use paper. I had to learn that I had to go through something and I had to listen to that voice.

SUTTON: OK, so we’re going to get to the questions. Here’s one: What is the one regret that you have?

STEVENS: Mine is easy. I wish I had dreamed bigger sooner. I was never afraid of success. I was held back by fear of failure sometimes.

I didn’t want to jeopardize what was already there to grow.

What we have is a big idea around a global movement for women’s freedom. And it took me a long time to be willing to dream bigger and I wish I had done that sooner. I don’t think it’s a regret but looking back at the exponential growth we’ve had, that growth could have started a little bit sooner and more women could’ve come and been a part of the community.

JACKSON: I don’t think mine is professional;

it’s more personal. I think all of us have that mother’s guilt. I wish I could have spent more time having lunch with my son when he was in elementary school. He would say, “Everybody else’s mom comes to have lunch with them.” I worked a little too far away and would literally have to take half a day to have lunch with him.

I tried to make every ball game and I still do. He’s in college and we’ve been driving eight hours to go to games. So I don’t think he had a life without his mom because I was always there. But a few more lunches during elementary school… I have some regrets over that.

‘Interpreting what’s going on around us is one of our jobs as leaders.’

BECCA STEVENS

SUTTON: That just went to my heart because

mine just started middle school and last year was the last chance to do that. So I understand that. Jane, what about you?

ALLEN: I’ve tried to live with the motto, “Don’t

live with regrets.” When my mother fell ill, I jumped on a plane to get to my mom. But in doing so, you’re leaving behind your husband and children. I say I have five children in my life and the whiniest and the neediest was the company. And so while I think that our children and my husband have been a priority in my life, I don’t know that I’ve always shown that.

FRANCOIS: I heard Fantasia sing a song. She

said, “It was necessary.” What I have decided and understand is that there are no mistakes, that we don’t know the plan for our lives anyway. We go about our lives making plans for things that we have no clue of. We think that we’re doing things wrong but they’re all just a part of the ultimate plan for us to get from where we are to where we’re supposed to be.

So it’s hard for me to say what are regrets because I see it all as necessary.

SUTTON: I love that. A question I have is:

How do you know when it’s time to take that next step? How do you know when it’s time to hire someone or open another location?

ALLEN: That’s what we do at the Entrepre-

neur Center. Part of that is through the programming and part of it is through mentoring and advising. We have a group of successful entrepreneurs who have all exited and who give their time to help the next generation and it creates this circle of giving. We’ve all been in their shoes — whether you’re at $100,000 trying to get to $500,000 or $500,000 to $1 million or $1 million to $5 million.

It really is about connecting them so that they hear more than one voice [and] surrounding them with people that are not just going to be “yes” people. They’re people who will ask you difficult questions and push you and make you feel uncomfortable.

STEVENS: At Thistle Farms, it is that but it’s a little bit different. When Forbes put out an article on us not that long ago, they said the reason we’re successful is that we’re a mission with a business, not a business with a mission.

I’ve started really talking about the way we do stuff and the organizations we are partnered with that it’s a justice enterprise and not a social enterprise. And when we say “justice enterprise,” the mission is the workforce.

I didn’t start by saying, “I want to hire some women because I really want to make these candles.” The women were there and it happened that candles or essential oils were the products that we were offering. When the mission is the driving force for the business, those questions get answered kind of organically.

JACKSON: I want to take it from the perspective of leadership and professional development and growth and not being the entrepreneur. Both of you have hit on something I think is important. I’m sure you all have been asked, “Will you mentor me?” And because I have been mentored and still have sponsors, I always say yes and try to make myself available. But I’m always telling them to let the work drive them, not the money.

Some people will say, “I have this degree and that degree so I should be making X by now.” And I’ll say, ”But you’re focused on the title and the money. You’re not focused on the work. So let’s get the work right. Let’s get the passion and the mission and all those other things will come.” I was always focused on that. It was never about the paycheck.

So I want people to know that if you’re setting yourself on a timeline — “In three years, I want to be here and in five years, I ought to be there” — I think you’re setting yourself up for failure. It happens organically and I feel like that’s been my career. It was always about the work and what I was contributing to the mission and not about how much did the next job pay.

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LEADERS

YOU SHOULD KNOW

Jason Ridgel Distiller of Guidance creates whiskey to add ‘flair’ to state liquor lineup

NASHVILLE BUSINESSMAN and distiller Jason Ridgel takes a distinctive approach to how he views competition from fellow whiskey makers.

“I measure success by how many other brands I can help get in the market,” he says.

The owner of Guidance, a whiskey brand that continues to draw positive attention with recently accelerated sales, knows that a tight-knit local community of makers of spirits is helpful to all involved.

And many will sip on a double to that.

“My goal by 2021 is to be drinking only my friends' liquor,” Ridgel says.

“When I walk into a place and I see the brands from people I know on the back bar, then I will have done my job.”

DANIEL MEIGS

LEADERS

Ridgel (pronounced Rih-GEL) launched Guidance in 2018. He still has no employees but notes his friends and family have been paramount in helping him grow the business.

When asked “Why whiskey?” he responds with a chuckle: “Because I couldn’t drink sake every day.”

As in many other parts of the economy, Black Americans aren't well represented in the ranks of distillers, vintners and brewers. In addition to the challenges of finding the capital to launch a business in the alcoholic beverage sector, cultural and social considerations can be used to explain the dearth. But Ridgel points to the future and not the past. He notes there is a movement involving Americans of color — often in prominent roles — working within the alcoholic beverage-making and distributing sectors.

In fact, Guidance recently finalized an agreement with Louisville-based distributor Legacy Wine and Spirits, which is African-American owned. Legacy has helped land Guidance whiskey into 10 retailers in Kentucky. Overall, Guidance is available in 50 retail locations in

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MA G N MI

multiple states courtesy of five other distributors. Today, and in addition to Tennessee and Kentucky, the whiskey is available in stores in California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa and New York. Consumers in 43 states can buy the beverage online.

It’s not surprising, in some respects, that Ridgel founded Guidance. The Alabama native and Tennessee State University graduate, now 41, has been entrepreneurial for some time. At 23, he founded his first business, a janitorial services company. He later owned Jusco Medical, a medical equipment sales business. However, Ridgel’s interest in whiskey was born in 2016, the point at which he realized there could be a chance to alter folks’ perceptions and definition of whiskey from the Volunteer State.

“Tennessee whiskey has always been respected but it needed some additional flair,” he says.

When Ridgel launched Guidance two years ago, he did so with his own money and no financial support. He selected the moniker “Guidance” to pay tribute to ancestors who have handed down positive contributions and support over generations.

And, of course, at that early point of his brand’s evolution, he needed to find a distillery partner, and did so with Iowa-based Dehner Distillery.

“I found out about Dehner from my friend Stacey Thomas, a wine broker,” he explains.

As to the whiskey itself, Guidance is a combination of three grains: 88 percent corn, 10 percent rye and 2 percent malted barley. Aged for 24 months, Guidance offers a flavor that is, as the brand’s website notes, “dominated by smooth front-end vanilla with a light and smooth experience in the middle” followed by a “long, smoky finish.”

Ridgel said he is encouraged that fellow Black-owned whiskey maker Nearest Green Distillery continues to make progress. In June, that operation and Jack Daniel’s Distillery announced the Nearest & Jack Advancement Initiative to increase diversity within the U.S. spirits making industry.

“The progress being made to diversify the spirits industry is encouraging,” he says. “I’m excited to see how the future unfolds.” > WILLIAM WILLIAMS

021 2 H RC

19 sectors, 400+ area leaders

Check out our extensive list of the region’s most influential business, political and civic leaders in our Spring magazine.

T H A N K Y O U F O R AT T E N D I N G

Thanks again to our terrific Most Powerful Women panelists — Jane Allen, Mignon Francois, Shanna Jackson and Becca Stevens — and our moderator, Kelly Sutton. We also want to send our congratulations again to this year’s Nfocus Model Behavior honorees.

Emerald Mitchell

Tina Doniger

Karen Moore

Martha Silva

Mary Flipse

Nancy Keil

Sara Morgan

Perri duGard Owens

Tara Scarlett

Julieanna Huddle

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BOOM

Don’t forget North Nashville The district received a flurry of support after the tornado.

Will the long-promised revitalization finally follow?

BY MEGAN SELING

t seemed as though North Nashville had the world’s attention in the weeks following the March 3 tornado.

Large plots of the area were destroyed. Homes and businesses were flattened, trees were torn from the ground and scattered across roads like piles of sticks. The power remained out for several nights of below-freezing weather as Nashville Electric Service struggled to make repairs on many streets blocked by debris.

So when grassroots organization Gideon’s Army put out the call for volunteers and dona-

I

DANIEL MEIGS

tions, hundreds of helpers flocked to the area to bring food, clothing, tents, sleeping bags, generators, tarps and rope. Others showed up with power tools, rakes and shovels, offering to help remove branches and debris from homes and yards. Community organizing group Hands on Nashville got so many volunteer signups they were turning folks away some days, and, at one point, Gideon’s Army received so many donations they were forced to pause intake so their team could catch up on sorting and distribution. (Gideon’s Army

has since used many of those remaining donations to found the pop-up shop Gids City, a by-appointment shopping experience that gives residents in the 37208 ZIP code the opportunity to shop for at no cost for new clothes, shoes and accessories.)

The historic, predominantly Black neighborhood and Nashville’s unifying efforts to begin to clean up its estimated $30 million to $50 million in damages were featured in The New York Times and on ABC News. But that incredible display of goodwill was only a small bandage —both for the storm damage and for the decades that Nashville has neglected the people of North Nashville. In the 1960s, the government designed Interstate 40 to cut directly through the neighborhood. After a long legal battle, the highway was approved and built, severing much of North Nashville from downtown and splitting its main artery, Jefferson Street.

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Developer Lee Molette II has lived in Nashville for 30 years — last fall he co-founded the Nashville Business Alliance Political Action Committee to advocate for minority- and women-owned businesses — and when he talks about just how badly the interstate negatively impacted North Nashville, he likens the area to a wounded body. There was a time when it was whole, healthy. Then I-40 cut through like a knife.

“To the naked eye, it doesn’t seem like a big deal,” Molette tells the Post. “But to the people living there, you essentially cut off the arteries.

Now there’s no real exit that drops you right on Jefferson Street. [Developers] cut into people’s land, people lost parts of their lots and were given pennies on the dollar. And when you cut off the blood flow, obviously the organs stop working. The businesses on Jefferson Street lost business. They weren’t able to thrive and compete like they used to.”

And while all the support in the spring was nice, Molette says he still hasn’t seen any effort to create lasting change from outside supporters.

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“The sad thing is, if you talk to various mayors, they’ll talk about, ‘Hey, we’re gonna do something over there, we’re gonna do something over there.’ But when the project comes, it’s so much BS and bureaucracy that nothing happens. And then they’ll focus in and say, ‘We’re only going to do one project.’

“No,” he adds with an exasperated laugh.

“You have a whole damn street to get to!”

Indeed, mayors have made attempts. In 2015, Karl Dean proposed relocating the Metro Nashville Police Department headquarters from downtown to Jefferson Street, but the tone-deaf proposal was rejected by Metro Council months later. Two years later, Megan Barry announced a partnership with the Nashville Civic Design Center to install a 0.35-acre pocket park at Jefferson Street and 16th Avenue North. At the time, she said, “I’m excited for the opportunity to reactivate Jefferson Street, a corridor that has so much historic and cultural significance to our city.” Earlier this year, it was announced the park would be named after Kossie Gardner Sr., but construction has not yet been completed.

‘To the people living there, you essentially cut off the arteries.

Now there’s no real exit that drops you right on Jefferson Street.’

LEE MOLET TE II, NASHVILLE BUSINESS ALLIANCE POLITICAL ACTION COMMIT TEE

DANIEL MEIGS

BOOM

More recently, in September, Mayor John Cooper released a draft of a $1.5 billion transit plan that includes, among other things, a new transit center in North Nashville as well as a “cap” over part of I-40 near Jefferson Street.

The latter is not a new idea: City leaders have discussed the possibility for years.

The cap, drawn up by the Nashville Civic Design Center, would be a land bridge that sits over the interstate. Traffic can flow below and the upper platform is reclaimed land that can be used in a variety of ways, from parks and playgrounds to business and residential space. Cooper’s transit proposal makes space for an eight-acre cap that “could create new affordable office or retail space, supply shared parking, or support affordable housing for parcels made undevelopable because they were narrowed by the construction of the highway.”

The Metro Council is expected to take up the broader package late this year or in early 2021.

Molette says land investments by corporations — as long as they offered landowners fair prices — could also be beneficial. He cites development in Kansas City as a good example of what’s possible.

“On Vine Street, where they have the [Negro Leagues Baseball Museum], Sprint moved viable office space there,” Molette says. “And the city had office space on that street, which meant [workers] went to lunch there. All those types of things help drive business [...] I think Nashville’s dropped the ball on a few opportunities like that.”

But even with the city’s newly sparked interest in supporting the North Nashville community — and Cooper’s hope for a Jefferson Street cap — Molette doesn’t expect much will change.

At least not soon. He has seen too many ideas and plans come and go and too many politicians focus on “fixing” problems that don’t exist. (A 0.35-acre park is nice but it doesn’t make a dent in the damage caused by decades of neglect.)

So what would be a good first step so this newly ignited flame of support doesn’t go to waste? Molette wants people to listen, for one, and for investors to see the neighborhood as a viable investment option as opposed to a quick cash grab.

“Investment dollars have to be made available, but through the community,” Molette says. “Instead of just say, giving it to a developer to come in and make a decision, I think

Mayor John Cooper’s large transit investment plan includes as options several stretches of highway caps in North Nashville. Here are the visions for caps north of Jefferson Street at D.B. Todd Boulevard and where Jefferson crosses over the northwestern part of the downtown interstate loop.

it really needs to funnel through the community, whether it’s JUMP (Jefferson Street United Merchants Partnership), New Level Community Development Corporation, Equity Alliance, Gideon’s Army — I think all those organizations have to be at the table.”

Rasheedat Fetuga, founder of Gideon’s Army, believes the highway cap included in Cooper’s transit plan is presented with good intentions, but she’s skeptical that it would ultimately benefit people who’ve lived in North Nashville for years, even generations.

Fetuga says what North Nashvillians need is

financial support, specifically, to be repaid for the land and businesses they lost decades ago.

“Nashville should pay reparations, a universal living wage, something to indigenous people of North Nashville because there were over 150 businesses that had to close, people had to relocate,” she says. “It’s not enough for people who come in and gentrify the community to pop up and buy a cup of coffee to support these businesses. The city has to make a commitment to repay what was taken from these people. Then we’ll know how serious Nashville leadership is about North Nashville.”

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BOOM

Adapting our streets for beyond the pandemic Pilot projects during what is essentially the world’s largest design charrette are proving their viability and value

BY SHELLEY SMITH

urating the intangible sense of place has long been considered integral to a community’s ability to attract and retain residents, entrepreneurs and businesses.

Good place management involves melding principles and practices from many different disciplines to enhance a sense of place, as well as protect the safety, health, happiness and well-being of all community members. Those ideals are now in the spotlight for their ability to also mitigate the negative economic effects of COVID-19, which looks likely to accelerate existing and already emerging initiatives in the built environment rather than create a sea change.

For years, place management professionals have argued that many streets in urban areas have unrealized potential to support a multitude of activities and function. They allow for the movement of vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists but also are places to gather, socialize, dine and play. Often comprising more than a quarter of a city’s landmass, streets’ right-ofway offer the space to mitigate their own pollution-generating, heat-retaining surfaces and to create connective ecological corridors via canopy and street-level vegetation.

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Right-of-way interventions that encourage active transportation and safe streets were game-changers as the pandemic unfolded, while bicycle sales and ridership skyrocketed as people were forced to stay home. Places that support walkability and bike-ability provide human health benefits while reducing congestion and carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles. Pedestrian and bicycle use in right-of-ways also calms traffic speeds and has proven to lower collision rates. An increase in pedestrian and bicycle use will no doubt be a lasting legacy of the pandemic.

In April of this year, Milan announced Europe’s most ambitious scheme to date to reduce car use. Janette Sadik-Khan, a former

transportation commissioner for New York City, began working with cities — including Bogota and Milan — on their transport recovery programs shortly after the pandemic began. These projects provide a measurable economic and social return on investment for both businesses and residents.

Sadik-Khan believes that Milan, which is at least one month ahead of other world cities in the trajectory of the pandemic, could provide a successful blueprint for other cities who hope to permanently reclaim their streets: “The Milan plan is so important because it lays out a good playbook for how you can reset your cities now. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take a fresh look at your streets

BEN JOHNSON

BOOM

Parklets, pilots and permanence

‘It has remained largely incumbent on the public sector to provide quick workarounds for red tape.’

and make sure that they are set to achieve the outcomes that we want to achieve: not just moving cars as fast as possible from point A to point B, but making it possible for everyone to get around safely.”

Street space, ranging from parking spaces to entire blocks, can serve a variety of functions.

The right-of-way can be adapted using many combinations of strategies to achieve more diverse uses. In addition to mobility, streets can be programmed as places to socialize. One major lesson of the pandemic has been that social interaction is a necessity. Adaptations to rightof-way that strengthen neighborhood interaction and invite people to stick around are vital to livable and dynamic neighborhoods.

The pandemic raised awareness of parklets as a creative and effective solution for transforming on-street parking spaces into small spaces for people to use and enjoy. They provide pedestrian amenities such as seating, landscaping and bike parking. Though the concept is nothing new, the need for parklets and similar spaces became evident as the economy began to reopen. The first parklet program began years before the pandemic in San Francisco in 2009 and the model has been adopted by many cities, with a sharp rise in their installation this year due to the pandemic.

Inspired by an annual international event called ‘PARK(ing) Day,’ parklets typically involve a public-private partnership between a city and a community sponsor. In Nashville, the Civic Design Center has led the local charge and enlisted dozens of businesses’ participation over the years. The sponsor is responsible for the design, construction and maintenance of the parklet, which is designed to be semi-permanent.

Proponents of parklets say there are innovative ways in which the spaces can be even be enjoyed effectively during the winter months as well, such as by installing heat lamps or semi-enclosing the spaces utilizing tent flaps.

In Long Beach, California, despite its ingrained car culture, Mayor Robert Garcia has proposed making parklets along Pine Avenue permanent. Other cities, such as Wilmington, North Carolina, and Los Angeles have extended their parklet and outdoor dining programs to help businesses survive the year.

Widening sidewalks in commercial areas could add space for businesses to continue to operate safely into the new year, especially in the hospitality outlets that provide café seating and street furniture. Sidewalk extensions can also work well on transit streets to safely accommodate pedestrians waiting for trolleys and buses.

Creating more space for landscaping and amenities also greatly improves the pedestrian experience by serving as a buffer from traffic.

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April 14, 2020

MORNING NEWS

N A S H V I L L E P O S T .CO M

Streets might need to be redesigned to meet other emerging needs besides social distancing.

Online shopping and home food delivery have taken off, creating a huge demand for drop-off and delivery spaces. This increase in demand for curbside space may force us to revisit our ideas about curbside street parking — not only to meet new delivery needs, but also to free up space for pedestrians.

Urban density places high demands on ecological systems and natural processes, which in turn directly impact human health and well-being. At the same time, density can support natural processes and ecological systems that have a direct relationship with human health.

Another trend given a boost by COVID is the idea of opening neighborhood streets by limiting through traffic to support more physical activity and community interaction. Play streets, farmers markets and festival streets are examples of street uses that transform streets on a recurring basis for block parties or other events. Several U.S. cities have play street programs underway that offer activities such as bicycle parades, relay races and musical performances.

We’re seeing movement locally, too. Metro Public Works officials this fall said they were expanding their Slow Street program. In October, the department installed barricades and signs and various points on 10 streets around Nashville, building on a pilot program started in the spring after the pandemic arrived. The projects spanned 15 miles, up from four and a half earlier this year.

Taking that concept a step further are street parks. Those involve the permanent transformation of a portion of a non-arterial street into a pocket park space. A street park permanently closes a portion of a street to cars

and reclaims this space for play, urban farming or community gathering. The street transformation strategy works well on quiet residential streets and may be suitable for streets that have been identified as neighborhood greenways. A street park can also provide safe bicycle connections.

Medians or center islands are generally used for traffic calming on wider segments of the right-ofway. In addition to slowing traffic speeds, medians can provide opportunities to increase so-called Green Stormwater Infrastructure and urban tree coverage. Where there is sufficient width, medians can also be transformed into linear parks. On some low-traffic streets, they can also provide opportunities for neighborhood amenities such as urban agriculture, playgrounds and seating.

As the economic impact of the pandemic continues to unfold, it has remained largely incumbent on the public sector to provide quick workarounds for much of the red tape that comes with adapting streets and other automobile-centric spaces for new uses. From parklets to play streets to pop-up greenways, the wake of COVID will see communities embracing creative uses of rightof-way for their residents.

In what might be considered the world’s largest design charrette, many of the strategies for transforming the urban right-ofway were implemented during the pandemic out of necessity.

But officials are finding out that the world didn’t end and community members have grown more likely to demand that temporary and tactical strategies become permanent solutions. Pilot projects during the pandemic have proven their viability and value in the short run. Look for many of them to become permanent amenities.

FAVORITES

My favorite family activity Deloitte’s local managing partner John West escapes by following the puck

WHEN I’M NOT WORKING, I am always doing something with my family — that’s where I spend all my free time. The challenge is that all five of us are type-A personalities so our schedules get pretty hectic. With my three kids very active in school and extracurricular activities and my wife and I balancing work and home, we’re always being pulled in multiple directions.

We’re on-the-go 24/7, running from meetings to soccer and lacrosse games to dance competitions and somehow finding time to eat dinner in the evening. One way or the other, we make it happen, but we also carve out time to disconnect from the day-to-day grind and focus on what matters most — each other.

Our favorite release from all of this is a Nashville Predators game. You may ask, why hockey? Well, we all like different things but a Predators game is the one thing we can always agree on unanimously. The team really embodies Nashville — a familyand community-oriented city. The games are action-packed and allow us to embrace the spirit of Nashville.

For us, it is nice to take a break from the constant motion in our lives and watch our favorite team take a turn.

For those 60 minutes they are on the ice, everything else in life seems to disappear and this is great medicine for the daily stresses and activities.

In many ways, I thank the Nashville Predators for not only being such a connecting point for our community, but also for giving me and my family 60 minutes of pure escape!

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INDEX

A-H Aaron Gani 20 Alex Jahangir 19 Ascension Saint Thomas Health 10 Asurion 26 Banc Intranets 24 Becca Stevens 28 BehaVR 20 Beth Hoeg 26 Bill Kampine 12 Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research 10 Brandt Snedeker 25 Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services 12 Change Healthcare 8 C.J. Stimpson 12 Daniel Oppong 6 Deloitte 51 Eller Mallchok 20 Envision Healthcare 26 Gideon’s Army 37 Guidance whiskey 34 Hal Andrews 13 HCA Healthcare 11 Healthcare Bluebook 12 Health Services and Development Agency 10 HealthStream 20

Michael Berman 24 Middle Tennessee State University 18 Mignon Francois 28 Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital 11 MyHealth Bundles 12 MyMaternity Health 12 Nashville Business Alliance Political Action Committee 38 Nashville Civic Design Center 38 Nashville Entrepreneur Center 7, 28 Nashville General Hospital 18, 26 Nashville State Community College 28 Ncontracts 24 Nelson Adams 19 Nick Pietruszkiewicz 25

O-Z OhanaHealth 6 Peter Drucker 13 Rasheedat Fetuga 39 Saint Thomas Rutherford Hospital 10 Shane Reeves 11 Shanna Jackson 28 The Cupcake Collection 28

J-N

Thistle Farms 28 Topgolf 25 Tractor Supply 26

James Hildreth 17 Jane Allen 28, 31 Jason Ridgel 34 Jeff Balser 9 John West 51 Jumpstart Foundry 6, 20 Kristin Darby 26 Lee Molette II 38 Letitia Webster 26 Mainsail Partners 24 Meharry Medical College 17 Melanie Thomas 26 Metro Nashville Public Schools 12 Metro Public Works Department 40

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Trilliant 13 Trinisys 26 Trisha Coady 20 TriStar Health 18 TriStar Stonecrest Medical Center 11 University of Tennessee 10 Vanderbilt University Medical Center 9, 10, 12, 18 Walmart Health 13 Westlawn Satellite Hospital 10 Williamson Medical Center 11 Women in Technology of Tennessee 26 Yanika Smith-Bartley 26

WINTER 2020 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM