Rallying Around a Common Vision: Meet the Co-Directors of the West Health Accelerator at Mass General Brigham
When Mass General Brigham’s Zara Cooper, MD, MSc, a trauma and acute care surgeon, and Rachelle Bernacki, MD, MS, a geriatrician and palliative care physician, first met at a conference in 2008, the two immediately hit it off. “We both had a lot of passion about improving the patient experience,” says Dr. Cooper, now the executive vice chair of the Department of Surgery. Since that time, their shared passion has continued to fuel their work—eventually leading to a partnership with the West Health Institute and the birth of the West Health Accelerator at Mass General Brigham in 2024. As co-directors of the Accelerator, Drs. Cooper and Bernacki are using their complementary expertise to develop a new model for how hospitals care for older adults.
Q&A
What role does West Health play in the Accelerator?
Dr. Cooper: West Health expressed interest about partnering with like-minded investigators who were not attached to the typical pace of academic change. They were looking for people who were willing to go fast, take risks and embrace the messiness of not always getting it right the first time. So, we met with West Health, and it's just been a tremendous opportunity. The funding, support, access and the opportunity to amplify what we're doing absolutely could not have happened without the kind of vision and partnership that West Health offers.
Dr. Bernacki: West Health hasbeen fantastic. Zara and I were really excited about the challenge of spreading this work across all our hospitals at Mass General Brigham, because we know that everywhere could use change. As a geriatrician, I get texts every day from friends telling me they have an older loved one in the hospital somewhere and the care isn’t what they would like it to be. So, for me, working with West Health was an opportunity to really change that narrative here, toward ensuring that every patient had safe medication and safe care plans from the get-go.
Why is the work of the Accelerator so important?
Dr. Cooper: I think the key driver of this partnership with West Health is the possibility to create a movement, which is desperately needed in our healthcare system. We know that the population is aging, and yet, we have not changed the way we are providing care. I often say that if we knew 20% of the population was going to be under age 5 in a few years, think of the infrastructural changes we would need to transform everything to accommodate that patient population. Yet we're not thinking in that way for older adults. Our goal with the Accelerator is for all of us to get there—to make sure that the system is safer for older adults and more person-centered and tailored to the needs of a patient population that becomes more vulnerable when they're in the hospital. I think the West Health Accelerator is the seed of that movement.
Dr. Bernacki: This work requires both education and a culture change, and I think we're making real change across all our hospitals by empowering our frontline staff to do what’s best for patients. Our nursing colleagues are so key in this work, and I’ve learned a lot from them. Nurses are always trying to do the right thing for their patients, and by making our systems better, we are making it easier for them to do the right thing.
How do you work together as co-directors?
Dr.Bernacki: Someone once described us as yin and yang, which I think is true. I’m an extrovert—I am someone who really enjoys people and teams, and I get my energy from being around people. And I don't mind when there are problems, I think that means we have something to solve. And I like to dig in and do that kind of messy work. Zara is a great listener and is incredibly decisive. She comes in and says, “Here's the situation…let's do this.” And I find that very important, because sometimes I get caught up in thinking there are so many different paths, and she says, “No, it's clear this is what we're going to do.” So, it's been a lot of fun. I've learned so much, and I continue to learn, and that's something I'm really grateful for.
Dr. Cooper: The yin and yang is exactly right, and I would echo Rachelle's perspective from the opposite direction. As a trauma surgeon, I'm used to making decisions without a ton of information, and I feel very comfortable in that space, and Rachelle has helped me to see that sometimes you can actually take the time to get more information. And so that's been incredible. I think Rachelle has also taught me a great deal of empathy in thinking about perspectives and various team members. Our partnership is really rooted in trust and respect and recognizing that we do bring different strengths and that our weaknesses are opportunities. We know that we share the same values, and so that makes it really easy to have hard conversations and to be very forthright about the things that excite us and the things we're most passionate about. As an example, Rachelle is deeply invested in education and culture change and is an internationally recognized educator. I am not. So, I can say, “I am going to learn from you. I agree this is important, and that's a great way to do this.”
What do you love most about this work?
Dr. Bernacki: I love our team. One of the things I really care about is building high-functioning teams, by bringing people with different skills to work together to solve a problem. It means that people need to trust each other and argue from different perspectives to get at the core of the problem. I think we've built an amazing team, and it's been a lot of fun doing that. And I think that teams are the way we solve the healthcare problems that we have—where everyone is looking at it from a different perspective, and all of them have a voice.
Dr. Cooper: Building the team has been one of the most fun things about this project, and the opportunity to build it with Rachelle. As she said earlier, these is so much noise in healthcare, and I findthis is incredibly grounding work. I appreciate that when we go into a meeting and start talking about these issues, people focus because they care—and those are people from all walks of our organization. This work resonates with everybody, because it gets back to the core of what we want for patients. It has been incredibly gratifying and humbling to rally around a common vision.