"More Guts Than Brains" — Resilience, Reinvention, and Lifelong Learning with MGMA Fellow Pat Kroken
Download MP3Well, hi, everyone. I'm Daniel Williams, senior editor at MGMA and host of the MGMA Podcast Network. We are back today with another MGMA Insights Podcast, and I am so thrilled to bring our guest on here. Our guest is Pat Kroken. And Pat and I have gotten to know each other for the last few years.
Daniel Williams:We are members of the MGMA Book Club. If you don't know about that, we're gonna be sure and talk about the book club. We're going to give you some links so you can join if you want to. But Pat and I have gotten to know through that book club. I just always love getting to hear Pat's insights on the books we read and also the way she brings in the healthcare world to some of the rules and goals and other themes that are brought up in these particular books, and how she's applied them to life.
Daniel Williams:We're going to talk about that as well. So without further ado, I want to bring Pat on to the show. Pat, welcome to the MGMA Insights.
Pat Kroken:Thank you. It's good to be here.
Daniel Williams:Yeah, it is so good to get to talk to you. We're going to bring up a lot of things, both on the professional side, the career side, and the personal side. So right now let's just start. Our viewers, if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see an awesome bookshelf behind Pat. We talk books all the time together, Pat and I do.
Daniel Williams:So Pat, just tell us first, where did this love for books start?
Pat Kroken:It started when I was a child. My mother read for recreation, and I was just brought up with a love for books. I had an illegal library card because you weren't supposed to get one till third grade and I had one when I was in about second grade. So I love libraries. I love books.
Pat Kroken:I am kind of a book junkie. I I consider it a relatively harmless addiction to have because you're okay unless all your books fall over on you and kill you.
Daniel Williams:That is so true. And I believe that is a plot point of one of E. M. Forster's books, where the bookshelf just falls on top of the book lover. So you and I were talking offline, and you were telling me you have passed on this love of reading to your daughter as well.
Daniel Williams:Tell us about that. She's a school teacher, right?
Pat Kroken:Yes, I have one daughter that's a school teacher and one daughter that actually works in health care as well. Both of them are rabid readers, and so we don't really profess to competing with each other every year, but we have a certain number of books we set out to read. Book recommendations from either of them are guaranteed to give me a good book.
Daniel Williams:Okay. Now our listeners and you, Pat, know that I'll get lost talking about books the whole time, so we're going to pause the book discussion and we're going to go into health care a bit, and then we'll bring the discussion back to books eventually. So tell us where you are in your career right now. You have had an incredible healthcare career. Tell us about the kind of things you're working on now.
Pat Kroken:Well, I am cruising on my healthcare career now, truly enjoying the phase that I'm in. I traveled as a consultant and practice manager for so many years that I no longer travel, but I work for a large billing company, and I handle their external communications. So I get to do a lot of writing. I write with the different companies, write things for physicians, explaining regulations, and do the same internally. I get to write for a living.
Daniel Williams:That is so cool. Now bring us up to date. When did you first get, as you called it, pulled into health care? When did that connection make itself known to you? Did you seek out working in health care or did that come about at some point during the career?
Pat Kroken:It sought me out. I was teaching my after school job was teaching advertising at the University of New Mexico. And I got a call one day from a practice manager who was looking for a marketing person, and he said he'd interviewed about 100 people and couldn't find anyone and my name kept cropping up. So he wondered if I was interested. At the time, I told him I wasn't, but I stayed in touch with a lot of students.
Pat Kroken:So I said I would go meet with him and see if I had some students that might be good for the job. And then after I met with him, it turned out he would pay me about the same amount of money and I didn't have to travel as much. Marketing is marketing. So, I got the job.
Daniel Williams:I love how those things come together. You have had a relationship with MGMA for many years. Who introduced you to the organization and what has that relationship meant to you?
Pat Kroken:The practice manager I worked with, this is a radiology practice in Albuquerque, definitely recommended getting involved in MGMA. I had the skills in marketing to know how to go in and learn a business and what made it tick. But he wanted to help me get a better background in healthcare. So I joined MGMA as a way to fast track my education, which is why I also pursued fellowship so that I could get a better background of what I was going to be doing. So I worked a lot at the state level.
Pat Kroken:The group wouldn't pay for two people to be at National. So I worked at the state level. It was eventually the state president for New Mexico MGMA, and then got involved at the national level too.
Daniel Williams:Tell us about being that president at the state level. What does that mean? For anybody who's listening that may want to be involved in their state's MGMA affiliate, what was your role focused on as president there at New Mexico?
Pat Kroken:Probably the biggest thing we did is I think we held one meeting a year at the state level. And so you're really involved in meeting planning. I got to work with some other terrific practice managers that ended up being great allies throughout the years. And so, that was probably the main thing that we focused on. So, We actually developed a little program and put together a notebook so that whoever followed us had a roadmap for doing meeting planning.
Pat Kroken:And that's probably the main thing that we did.
Daniel Williams:Well, we may have to get that notebook out so we can share it with others as well. Did you get involved at all with our government affairs team? I've heard people say that at the state level where the laws, the rules, the regulations can differ state to state. And so they'll often call on Anders and our other government affairs folks and ask them to help them understand what those rules and regulations are.
Pat Kroken:I think this was probably in the early phases of that aspect of MGMA. I did attend one of the national meetings where the state presidents all went to DC, and we met with our representatives, our congressional representatives, while we were in DC, and that was very, very helpful. So, that was kind of the extent of what was offered. I watched that area grow and mature over the years. It looks terrific now.
Pat Kroken:But yes, there's big variation in state regulations.
Daniel Williams:Okay. Thanks for sharing that. Let's go back to that fellowship that you mentioned. That's our FACMPE. Inspired you to get that, and how have you seen that help you in your career?
Pat Kroken:What inspired me was finding out or validating that I was working in an area that I knew nothing about. Other than the fact my mother was a nurse. So, you know, to me, healthcare was part of the family. But I needed to ramp up and get basic skills early in my career. So while that appears, if you look at chronology and age wise, it looks like it happened late career.
Pat Kroken:It was in fact early career, and that's because I had another career before I ever went into healthcare. And so, I was fairly new in healthcare. I needed to ramp up very, very quickly. And I thought, this gives me not only an avenue to do that, kind of a disciplined curriculum, But it also gave me the letters behind my name because I did not have an advanced degree. I was teaching instead of going to school, and teaching at the university.
Pat Kroken:So I needed to have some kind of credentials, I felt, because doctors respect education.
Daniel Williams:Every time I talk to you, seems like I learn something new about you. So healthcare wasn't that first career. The first one, it sounds like, was teaching. Talk about that role and then what were you teaching?
Pat Kroken:The first career was more of communications. I worked as a newspaper reporter. I worked in radio and TV. I worked in an ad agency, actually a couple of ad agencies, and I went to it being an in house marketing director. I picked up the teaching advertising as a hobby job because I had taken on a couple of interns at an ad agency and was talking to the man who supervised it at the university and said, Hey, if you ever need to replace somebody there, I'm very interested in the job.
Pat Kroken:And he said, Well, it doesn't pay much. And I said, I'm not doing it for the money. So they hired me out at the university as an adjunct. So I did that after I finished my day job.
Daniel Williams:Wow. Okay. So you've piqued my interest yet again. What were you doing in the TV side? Were you a broadcaster?
Daniel Williams:Were you selling something? What were you doing on TV?
Pat Kroken:I was in broadcast sales, which meant you also had to write and produce those really terrible local commercials that you see. So, like my first week there, they said, Oh, by the way, you have production on Friday. And I had no clue where to start. But I'm very good at finding out who my resource people are in any organization. Who knows what I need to know?
Pat Kroken:So, I went down to the production department and said, I have no idea what I'm doing. Can you help me? And they did.
Daniel Williams:Wow. Okay. What was your favorite terrible local TV ad that you were part of? And did you appear in them as well or did you write the scripts? What was your role?
Pat Kroken:I had to write the scripts. My daughters appeared in one. I hid from the camera. For much of my life, my goal was to have no photographic record that I existed. So, no, I did not appear, but I wrote the scripts, definitely learned broadcast copywriting.
Pat Kroken:And you had to hustle your talent from wherever.
Daniel Williams:Right. Now, when I was researching you, I came across an article, a blog that you wrote a few years back. Sort of the theme was, What would you tell your younger self? So we won't read it verbatim, but I would love for you to share with us, first of all, what inspired you to write an article like that, that looking back, that nostalgic look at what you would tell yourself. And then what did you end up telling yourself?
Pat Kroken:Well, I'm hoping I can remember because I write a lot of articles and sometimes I don't remember all of them. Probably what inspired me was having a deadline and an overall editorial theme for that issue. Now I have to come up with the topic. But a lot of what I would tell my younger self, for one, is learn your resources. I mean, really work at it, and learn the people that can help you.
Pat Kroken:You're also going to go through a lot of very trying times. So, you do need to know how to recover. How to learn your industry and how to recover. Those are probably the main things.
Daniel Williams:Okay. So, you're talking about gathering those resources, you're talking about learning lessons, and when I've talked to you about books and about the book club that we are both a part of, you've talked about that before, life lessons, book lessons, all of those things. So talk about that. What does learning in community give you that learning alone doesn't? That community gathering that we have.
Daniel Williams:And just for everybody's knowledge here, this isn't an after hours book club where we're all virtually drinking wine as we dissect a book. It's in the middle of the day, it's at lunch, I don't know what people are we drinking. It's not a wine club book club. We're there with healthcare professionals and really having a great time getting to know each other, getting to share the insights we learn from these books. So when you're in there in community, what does that mean to you as opposed to sitting down and reading a book by yourself, putting it on a shelf, and then starting the next book?
Pat Kroken:Well, I think one of the big benefits of it is the book club in particular has a cross section of people from around the country. Again, I'm working up-- I live up in Northern Michigan. I am isolated. I'm a strictly remote employee. So, I don't get to communicate a whole lot with a lot of other people in healthcare on a regular basis.
Pat Kroken:But the book club brings together people from different medical specialties, different levels of experience, different jobs and backgrounds. I'm very interested in their perspectives because we each can look at the books a little bit differently. And especially if I didn't like a book, or if I didn't like it and somebody else did, I'm very interested in why they liked it. Or if I loved one and somebody else hated it and I want to know why. So it gives you just a different perspective and a different way of learning because, you know, we're all going to absorb information differently.
Daniel Williams:Yeah, we really are. And a lot of times in the book club, we will even help just offer suggestions for people. If they are, they'll learn something in a book, and they'll talk about how they're attempting to or have thought about applying it to their jobs, then we'll help problem solve a little bit, right? Mean that's some of the things we do, which is so much fun.
Pat Kroken:I'm I'm one of the notorious ones that say, okay. As I'm reading this book, I'm thinking about the fact I'm struggling with this issue.
Daniel Williams:That's right.
Pat Kroken:And then I'm very interested in what the input is.
Daniel Williams:Yeah. Let's talk about favorite books then. What's a favorite book or two that you have? It can be from the book club or on that shelf behind you as well, if you just have some that you just love.
Pat Kroken:Actually, I have another shelf bigger than this one downstairs in I my
Daniel Williams:love it.
Pat Kroken:And that one's full of books. This one's not doesn't have quite as many. That's a Daniel, that's a tough question for me to think of right off the top of my head here about what's my favorite book.
Daniel Williams:Do you have an author that comes to mind when you think about you just love a particular author when you're reading their words or the kind of stories they tell? It can be fiction, nonfiction, any of those things.
Pat Kroken:Barry Eisler.
Daniel Williams:Okay. Tell us
Pat Kroken:about Barry Eisler wrote a series of books. I like to read books about assassins.
Daniel Williams:Nice.
Pat Kroken:So Barry Eisler is one. There are a couple of really good writers right now. I'm kind of working my way through Vince Flynn's books.
Daniel Williams:Okay.
Pat Kroken:I think I'm on number 12 right now.
Daniel Williams:And Vince Flynn, are those like political intrigue? Haven't read any of them. What's the genre or topic there?
Pat Kroken:Political intrigue to the degree that somebody is going to get killed.
Daniel Williams:Okay. We're back to assassinations or killings or murders.
Pat Kroken:I don't know. I'm quite fascinated with the characters that represent these assassins because they have to be very nondescript looking but highly skilled and lethal.
Daniel Williams:Right. I was doing kind of a nostalgic tour about the seventies. The seventies, both in film and in books, really centered on paranoia, distrust of institutions, distrust of organizations, etc. And so a lot of the movies and books of that era reflected that. So I spent about six months to almost a year going through and watching a lot of those movies, Three Days of the Condor.
Daniel Williams:The book was called Six Days of the Condor, but I guess they felt like six days of Robert Redford trying to stay safe was too long, so they made the movie Three Days of the Condor. Another one was The Day of the Jackal. I started thinking about that when you were talking about assassinations, and so it's a great movie but also a wonderful book as well. Are you familiar with either of those that I just brought up?
Pat Kroken:I'm familiar. I have heard of them. I don't believe I've read them, but I probably will now. Yeah, it was kind of interesting because I think I live with a healthy sense of paranoia. My daughters were both born in the 70s, so I was definitely involved in that era.
Pat Kroken:And I kind of think paranoia to a certain degree is a healthy thing to have.
Daniel Williams:Yeah, healthy skepticism about what might be in front of us. Alright. I want to turn the page then. Pardon the pun everyone, I couldn't resist. But recently we read a book on resilience.
Daniel Williams:It was The Resilience Factor, correct? Is that the book we read and talked about last week? When we were talking about that, you shared an amazing story that I was not familiar about you even though I've known you for a couple of years now. If you don't mind sharing that about your own resilience story that took place in my own Colorado here. I wish that hadn't happened at all, and especially in the state I call home now.
Daniel Williams:So tell us about your resilience story.
Pat Kroken:Well, I will try to give you the abbreviated version because it can get kind of long and convoluted. But, basically, I fell off a mountain in Colorado. Now, don't picture thousands of feet or anything. I fell from where I was to below where I was and landed on a rock wall. And so, I had a fractured ankle and a fractured arm, two non weight bearing fractures, and so I had been in a rehab hospital for eight weeks.
Pat Kroken:I lived in New Mexico, so being in the hospital in Colorado was quite an adventure.
Daniel Williams:Yeah. You talked about the resilience that it helped teach you. You brought it out when we were talking about this book, Resilience Factor. Talk about your own resilience where in that recovery program that you had to go through with physical therapy and everything else on your road to recovery.
Pat Kroken:Well, the thing that I did daily and sometimes several times a day was say trust the process. It wasn't a process I was familiar with, but I had been a competitive power lifter for a number of years. And one of the things that the coaches would typically tell me, like if I was questioning something we were doing as we're going into a new phase of training, was trust the process. So, long as I trusted the process, I knew they were going to roll the next thing out and get me to the next level. And so, all I could do was trust the process.
Pat Kroken:I was incredibly reliant on people I had never met before. I have to say that almost without fail, they were incredibly kind and gracious. It was a difficult time for me because I couldn't even get up to go to the bathroom. So, I'm used to being very independent, and I was totally dependent. So I just had to trust that I had to be dependent for a while to get through that and that there was something at the end I was going to get there.
Daniel Williams:Well, we are so glad you're recovered and doing so much better now. And I'll pause for a second because I hope everybody was listening closely. You're a competitive power lifter. And so you just dropped that with a deadpan delivery and you did the same thing in the book club. And I went, Wait a minute.
Daniel Williams:I already wanted to have Pat on the show. And then she said she was a competitive power lifter. Now I know she loves assassins, so there's just so many things about Pat. But you've got to tell us about this. How did this in competitive powerlifting come about?
Daniel Williams:And when did this happen?
Pat Kroken:Well, interestingly enough, it happened as part of the grieving process. My husband died very suddenly and unexpectedly. And I knew I was going to have to take care of myself. I wasn't in real good physical shape. Probably wasn't in good mental shape to go through that either.
Pat Kroken:And I was trying to just, I finally started going back to a gym just to get more fit than I was. And along the way, I was doing strength training. And then, I ran out of barbells. I was dead lifting barbells, and ran out of barbells because I dead lifted the 95 pound one. So, they moved me to the big bar.
Pat Kroken:And after I did that a couple times, that's all I wanted to do. So, then my trainer at the time was talking about his college roommate who was a power lifter who, you know, was lifting so much weight he would get nosebleeds. And so, I was absolutely fascinated. I want to be a competitive powerlifter. I never got a nosebleed.
Daniel Williams:Well, that was my follow-up question. So I will follow-up then and ask you about the competitions. Tell us about that. How does one prepare for a competition? And what does a competitive powerlifting competition even look like?
Pat Kroken:It looks like chaos. Okay. But if you're at a national competition, sometimes there are like 1,200 lifters. So, it's a pretty chaotic area. You aren't all lifting on the same day, but there are a lot of people there.
Pat Kroken:It's an opportunity for you to get on a platform in front of all kinds of people and take the risk of making a fool of yourself or passing out or screwing up or whatever. So, for some reason, that was attractive to me. And you do three lifts, you do squat, bench, and deadlift. You get three attempts at each lift. If you miss your lifts in one of those, you're disqualified from getting a total score.
Pat Kroken:So you want to make sure that you at least give yourself a lift you know you're going to get in each of the disciplines. And you train on a very specific program. That's why you need to trust your process, because your trainer has an idea in mind about where you're going to end up and what the trainer thinks you can lift in competition. And then you kind of phase back and you have usually like a twelve week program going into a competition where each week you lift a little bit more and you hit that one week where you're now afraid of your weights, but you lift them anyways. And, unfortunately, I got to lift.
Pat Kroken:I lifted all over the country. You you can do a lot of state meets. Texas always had a lot. They have a big powerlifting community. So I did a lot of meets in Texas.
Pat Kroken:But I lifted all over the country. And then I made the national team. You to win at the nationals in The US in order to make the national team. So I made the national team and got to lift in South Africa and Finland and Virgin Islands.
Daniel Williams:That is so incredible. Is it okay to say you're one of my heroes? Is that all right?
Pat Kroken:You need to set your standards higher.
Daniel Williams:If someone wants to do something in life like you've done, whether it's powerlifting, whether it's something they could not even imagine themselves doing, what advice would you give them? How do you switch the channel, so to speak, in our own minds to do something? Because obviously you weren't dreaming about being a competitive power lifter in South Africa prior to you eventually accomplishing that, right? How switch how do do you that gear or switch the mindset where you can do things that you could not have imagined previously?
Pat Kroken:I don't know if this is an affliction that I have, but I have a characteristic that I describe as more guts than brains. So, it's the same thing that let me think that I can walk in and manage what was, at the time, a good mid sized radiology practice without ever doing it before. So, unless you give me, unless you can stop me, I'm going to try things. And I like pushing to the limit. So, I kinda like seeing how far I can go before I fall apart.
Pat Kroken:So, all those things were attractive to me.
Daniel Williams:So Pat Kroken, MGMA fellow, competitive power lifter, assassin lover, just awesome person, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast.
Pat Kroken:Thank you for letting me be here.
Daniel Williams:Alright. Well, that's gonna do it for this episode, everyone. We are gonna have a very, very robust, MGMA show notes. We're gonna provide links to so many different things, the books and movies we've mentioned, the MGMA Book Club, competitive power lifting resources, anything else that we've brought up today. So until then, thank you all so much for being MGMA Podcast listeners.
