Diana Glasser

My first job in high school was as a receptionist at a community clinic, and I've only worked in medicine my entire life. I consider that I started my medical career in 2009 when I began residency. I completed a residency program for OBGYN in the Bronx, which was a very unique and different experience from Los Angeles. After that, I did a fellowship in minimally invasive GYN and robotics surgery at the Center for Minimally Invasive Surgery out of Stanford Hospital. I then moved back to Southern California where I'm from and practiced privately at Shriners for a couple of years, doing mostly GYN surgery. I didn't miss the OB part of my field, so I joined a company called OB Hospitalist Group, and they immediately put me into leadership. I got called for a director role at Huntington Hospital, and even though I questioned if I was ready, my boss told me I had to do it and that I was the one they thought should do it. After I became a director, I never had planned on going into administrative work - I very much enjoyed being a surgeon. But I really enjoyed leadership. It was easy for me to build relationships and get the team going in the right direction, and doing that for so long allowed me to continue to get promoted. My preferences changed as I realized I had a bigger impact than just one patient at a time. Writing policies for the hospitals had more of an impact than treating one single patient, so I ended up enjoying this work more than clinical work. I became a regional medical director, which meant I would start labor and delivery programs in all of Southern California, hire all the OBGYNs, hire a director, train them, and continue to check in with them to ensure the program was delivering. Now as Chief Medical Officer, my typical day includes a daily huddle with all the directors and managers of the hospital for 30 minutes at the beginning of the day to talk over operations. I have regular meetings with the quality department, risk manager department, pharmacy, and different physician leaders including the medical executive committee. I do a monthly operating review internally with other executives. I round on the floor, checking in with patients to make sure their stay has been going the way they expected, and I round on staff in different units, usually the ER, ICU, and labor and delivery. I have one-on-one meetings with folks who report to me once a week, and I spend a lot of time doing care coordination, ensuring that patients who are ready to go home go and that we're not creating internal delays preventing them from going to their next level of care.