Charlotte Wu, MD ’07, MSc, Finds Balance Through Purpose-Driven Work

I chose Yale School of Medicine because I was looking for a place that also had people like me who came to medicine through different pathways. After graduating college at Stanford, I worked with my undergraduate thesis mentor to start a nonprofit organization, the Asian Liver Center that advocated for early screening and education about hepatitis B and liver cancer. Through my experience building and managing this organization, I became interested in medicine as a path to improve the health of individuals and populations. Coming to medical school from the working world, I appreciated that the YSM curriculum treated us as adult learners and included training in the art of medicine, such as patient-physician communication.

I really appreciated that both the curriculum and faculty supported my diverse interests and ideas. I was given the freedom and flexibility to pursue international opportunities through clinical rotations and research. Pairing that flexibility with focused and dedicated support helped me shape my career. Colleagues I met during my time at Yale continue to be lifelong friends, and they’re the people I’ve drawn upon and collaborated with throughout my career. I think building that network has made an enormous difference. My work at Harness Health Global in London now centers on supporting health innovation in organizations worldwide—from healthcare systems to digital health startups—to improve patient experience and health outcomes through design thinking, integration of healthcare technology and system innovation, and strategic leadership.

I had always been working with underserved communities, and for a while, during and after medical school I did that globally by working in Asia, Africa, and South America. When I started my residency in Boston, I realized how much need there is right here in our backyard. I became passionate about strengthening primary care and creating high-functioning teams.

While I was the director of Adult Primary Care at Boston Medical Center, I led primary care transformation efforts at the largest safety-net hospital in Boston. One of my proudest moments was at our annual full practice meeting several years after I had started as the director. The practice was made up of 180 physicians in six different primary care teams across two floors of the hospital. When I had started in my role, the clinic had a more hierarchical and siloed structure where physicians, nurses, and staff all held separate team meetings. During my time, I worked hard to implement a more integrated and collaborative approach. Witnessing team members who previously had never spoken up in meetings stand up front to lead presentations of their team-based innovation projects made me zoom out and realize how far we had come. We went from individuals working in relative isolation to a big family with lots of empowered voices contributing as care team members, the foundation for delivering excellent patient care.

During my time at YSM, Nancy Angoff, MD, MPH, MEd, was a trusted career advisor. She was someone I could count on to help me put things together and move in the right direction.

Take time to understand what your core values are and what work makes you light up. Do you enjoy having conversations with people and hearing their stories? Do you like working in teams? Do you prefer being in your zone and working on something technical? Think about the way you like to work, the people you want to be around, and the values you want your work to embody. Throughout your journey, make time to pause and reflect. How are you feeling about where you are now? Are there areas to change or adjustments to make? It might take some courage to veer off a well-trodden path, but what lies on the other end might be even more exciting. Sometimes the most interesting and innovative work lies at the intersection of typical roles.

One person who comes to mind is David Coleman, MD, who is now the director of Yale Center for Clinical Investigation and director of clinical research at Yale New Haven Health. He was particularly invested in faculty mentoring when we worked together at Boston Medical Center, and his commitment helped me and many others grow our leadership skills.

When I was at Mass General Brigham, we implemented a new population health cancer-screening program within primary care. I was told that it would be challenging because many similar programs had failed. We thought carefully about how to integrate change management principles and technology to support workflows. I had individual conversations with my physician colleagues who were thought leaders and with those who were hesitant to adopt the changes. Ultimately, I think these trust-building conversations helped lead to a successful program and our model for population health management was expanded and scaled across the whole hospital system.

I have drawn from experiences such as this to highlight key principles for effective innovation in my current role leading executive education programs at University College London's Global Business School for Health. Hearing stories about how health leaders from around the world use the strategies we teach from these cases in their own health transformation initiatives gives a great sense of accomplishment.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the potential of emerging technology to bring the human element back into clinical practice. I want to acknowledge that there is a lot of fear and frustration around technology, but I believe it can also be used to offload tasks that do not require a highly trained clinician to execute, which would allow clinicians to spend more time on the higher complexity and meaningful aspects of clinical medicine that drew them to the field. I have worked with many health organizations and digital health companies where key decisions are made by non-clinician leaders. I believe physicians need to continuously develop a diverse set of skills in order to lead and have a voice in how technology is applied in healthcare and how the field of medicine evolves in this changing world.