Anne: Hi, everybody. It's Anne Duffy and welcome to the Just Do It podcast. I'm so happy that you're here with us today and I'm very excited to share my dear friend with you, Miss Linda Harvey. Hi, Linda. How are you?
Linda: And I'm fine. I'm so happy
Anne: to be here as well. Oh, it's so lovely. And before we get started, I'm going to tell our listeners a little bit more about you because most people know Linda Harvey for her OSHA and HIPAA training courses.
What you might not know is that she has extensive corporate risk management experience as well. This led her down the path to being recognized as a Distinguished Fellow In the American Society of Healthcare Risk Management, Linda brings a unique perspective when working with practices and organizations and a fun fact, Linda and her husband are avid birders.
They love to watch birds and due to the location of their home, they can enjoy the hobby from most any window of their home and Linda recently took up. Weightlifting. So my goodness, you are strong and you're powerful. You inspire me. Linda Harvey.
Linda: Welcome. Thank you. And it's fun to be here. I just weightlifting is a whole new thing.
And that's a health topic, but we can get into whatever you'd like to talk about today.
Anne: You and I discovered recently that we're both just about the exact age. think I'm a month ahead of you. And the fact that you're doing weightlifting has just inspired me to pull out the old weights and just like, start slow.
Do you start with, Lightweights and then go to heavier weights or what's that what I'm doing and I got inspired
Linda: because I'm always on this health journey. And as part of my health journey, I know we have to do some kind of bodybuilding
and it's not that we're going to be a bodybuilder at
any age, you don't have to be that's not the goal necessarily.
and I know that when I go to the gym in our neighborhood. The real bodybuilders are going
to be with all the weights, you know, they're going to look at me like, what is this girl on this 10 pound or
five pound weight, maybe a three pound weight, right? I'll get left out. So I do it from home right now, but I have some weights at home.
I'm just starting slow. It's just a matter of building muscle. And that's what I read that inspired
me. You can build muscle at any age.
So does
it matter,
you know, think about the elderly people that we've known that have gone into rehab from a broken hip or whatever the situation, and they build them back up to be able to walk or use their arms or shoulders, whatever, again, and you can build muscle just have to keep using it.
Anne: That's the challenge. that is the challenge. And, like I love yoga, so I do yoga three times a week, which is like using my, body as a weight, I really feel like I'm kind of missing a little bit of that. But I used to do that with pure bar and. I'm not as strong as I used to be.
really can see that, especially with, I've got this sack of potatoes grandbaby I think he's probably 16 pounds now. He's just a little, huggy muffin. And, when I've got him on my, Shoulders or my chest and I stand up from the couch is like, you know, and you need to like do some more keep you strong and healthy because he's going to be running around pretty soon.
So I'm inspired. I'm going to look at that. So happy to have you today because, like many of us, you have been in dentistry for a long time give us an idea before we get started, of your career
Linda: journey.
Sure, I'm happy to. I look at my career journey in three distinct chapters, Anne, and kind of like raising a family. You know, You have baby stage, you have the childhood stage, and then you have the teenage stage. And there's life after teenagers for anybody listening that has teenagers. And so that's how my career was. The first part of my career was the clinical practice and I did some teaching along the way. And then I got to the stage where I took more, education for different reasons, you know, just downsizing, changing, first recession early on in my career and looking for other avenues besides the four walls of practice.
And I was doing this very early in my career. I don't think clinical hygiene was ever my first passion, like it is for many of our peers. I always had the sense of heart conscious and obligation to do the best that I could always do. So that was always part of my personal philosophy and patient care.
And so as opportunities presented themselves to do something different, I was jumping on it. So in the early 90s with my master's degree, I went to work for the Nemours Foundation. They're affiliated with the Alfred I. DuPont Children's Hospital in Delaware. And they have three clinics in Florida at the time they didn't have the hospital in Orlando like they have now.
So I started off in research there, then took my risk management course, got credentialed in Florida, and then stepped right into the risk management role because I was the only internal candidate. So, you know, Sometimes doors open and you don't know what's going to happen. And I had responsibility for two outpatient clinics with about 85, 90 specialty physicians, all different tertiary care for children.
And, four or five hundred employees and I was the risk manager. So it was just a great learning experience. then I then began my next leg when I decided to leave from there and really exercise more risk management skills and develop more risk management skills. I began working as a consultant for a medical consulting firm in Tampa that worked with ambulatory surgery centers.
So that's where I learned everything about. ASC licensors and risk management and things in Florida because there's some special requirements in Florida for these surgery centers to have a risk manager. And I still work with a few surgery centers, then that led me to my own company by just being out on my own and getting asked by friends at the time, because they knew of my risk management knowledge and experience to where you write this article here, where you give a talk here, we do this, we do that.
And then it just developed into a full blown consulting. So I love what I do. That
video1242009989: is
Anne: so cool, Linda. I mean, Honestly, I didn't realize, I knew that you were into OSHA and HIPAA, but I always thought it was all dental. And I thought that you were also maybe consulting with dental practice on practice management and all of those things.
And here you are you,you stepped out of dentistry, which I think is lovely because it really gives you that extra experience to come back in and really help our profession from a different viewpoint.
Linda: And, you know, it certainly does now, particularly, Anne, when we talk about the medical dental integration and the healthcare, total health for patients that we're finally doing something and talking to our medical partners and integrating with those folks that didn't happen when we first started using those phrases 10 or so years ago. there's just a lot of change and I bring my knowledge there to help my dental clients. Everything I've learned in the inventory surgery world, I can use with oral surgery clients or my general clients who are providing sedation. And then we also do some work with DSO. So with my corporate risk management experience, I can pretty much speak the language of whatever practice needs.
It's not just ocean HIPAA. That's the core foundation of compliance, but it's not just that. Yeah, I love
Anne: the idea that you've got the corporate experience that's very valuable to the DSO world when in, dental service organization is, you know, growing rapidly in the United States and across the world, actually.
So to be able to bring that corporate knowledge and how those systems work and the people work and the messages are received. That really makes you an expert, extraordinary, risk management and bringing to dentistry. I know I see why you're like so successful and so highly sought after, because I know that you're working with some DSOs and also some consultants that would consult with DSOs and different companies, which,
Linda: it's really good.
What a
Anne: full, lovely career you've had starting out in hygiene. Wow. And you're teaching now? So, I mean, I just think you were teaching way back in the day of the early days of your hygiene career. They must have seen something in you that, lended itself to education.
Linda: Can I tell you a secret? I think just because I like to be in control. Oh, is that it? It's because when I taught, it was clinical role only. And I only taught one didactic course. So when Cody came through for the accreditation, I was kind of behind the scenes. We all called. You look referred to my role as the full time part timer because I had more clinic hours than any of the full time people.
But it just didn't work out for me to teach full time. So as far as formal education and how to do teaching and training, it's really been on the job training for me and learning from our other friends that are in, training and facilitation and, and being a member of the National Speakers Association has really helped as well.
No,
Anne: that is so cool. So, What made you want to get into the consulting then? because you're teaching, right? So that's teaching as well.
Linda: I wasn't teaching full time. It was only part time. And I was looking for to do more because I just wanted to be more expansive than that.
So I was able to leverage my master's degree, which at the time, and, you think about that, this was the late eighties. There was hardly anybody with a master's degree, back then there was probably no such thing as a master's degree in dental hygiene.
Anne: That was a pivotal point for me because having that master's degree didn't open the doors and dentistry because there were no doors to open back then. When you think about all the, say just the members in due and all the different areas that they're all working in.
Linda: Many of those types of positions and wonderful opportunities weren't there at the time. so went into medicine. Oh my gosh. Somebody took a chance on me and I turned out to be a really good project manager for his NIH grants.
Anne: That's so cool. See, I thought when you said you got your master's, I thought it was master's in education for some reason.
Linda: health administration.
Anne: Oh, and health administration. Okay. you've got quite the pedigree. So thank God dues don't retire because, you know, both ofus are like, I guess we're just going to skid into heaven someday.
And who knows? Hopefully we'll, still be walking when we, make that skid. you know, it's so funny because dues are, I always think we're spiritual organization, but we believe in every religion. I don't really care. You and I were talking about this earlier.
Like, you know, Who is your higher power? it doesn't matter to me. I know what my higher power is and it works for me. And I just, champion everyone's belief. Right. so. something came to you and this is the most beautiful article. I just reread it. So anyone that's listening here, please go back to do D E W dot life and go to our spring edition 2023 and and read Linda's article and the title is Buen Camino which means good walk her story of the Camino walk.
And I remember Mark LeBlanc was a dear, you know, I'm sure you know, Mark, I remember he's big on the Camino and I've got friends that have gone on the Camino. And so I just loved your article. It was so from the beginning to the end, such a beautiful description of your journey in so many ways.
And so you took, yeah. another journey last year this is the journey you're talking about you took to Spain. Tell us about how did that make your bucket list and how did you finally say yes, it's time. And it was not
Linda: anywhere near my bucket list, okay. I was at a phase in life where I wasn't exercising a lot.
And I joke with a lot of folks because many people I won't say enjoy because none of us enjoyed the COVID crisis, right? But they had this retreat from work because they didn't go to work. But at the same time, I'm sure they were worried about, do I have a job? Where's my income coming from?
There's a lot. But there were some of us, including our practice owners, our clients, that never worked harder in our entire life. For me, I did a lot of service, not just to my clients, but goodwill, helping many of our friends that we all know in the industry with live Facebook events and different groups, you know, free webinars, just to get consistent word out about what we should be doing during this crisis for PPE and coming back to work and how long do we have to be quarantined and just trying to make sense of the CDC and OSHA guidance.
Right? Everybody was, I think we were burned out and we just didn't know it. Yeah. Yeah, it's And then along the way, my mother had health issues. She passed before the end of that year of 2020. So, you know, The challenges that all of us that knew and experienced a loved one and a facility that you could not get in to see them and she was in memory care.
So it was a particularly hard time, you know, personally. And so, although the passing was beautiful, everything, that's another story in itself, but We all went through our own walk is what I want to say, you know, everybody's was different. I was burned out and I didn't know it. And then one Sunday at church when my pastor said, we're going to take this walk, we're going to do this retreat, know, people could you come and I thought, I'm going, how do I tell my husband I'm going to go to Spain, I'm going to go on this walk, I don't know how I'm going to do this.
so we talked and he was fine with it. But it was 12 day trip to Spain, and we did the Camino de Francis, which was the walk of St. Francis. And we started on the north. East portion, northern portion of Spain and walk all the way over to Santiago, which is on the northeast corner, like going from figuratively speaking, like going from New York City to up in Washington State, when you think about the geography of Spain, like I said, not that many miles as we only walked 125 miles, but it was just the most beautiful experience.
it was so beautiful. Nice because you literally unplugged. I did listen to music in my headsets because a lot of days I walked by myself because a lot of folks walk faster than I did. other than that I took every single work app, email, text, or anything else and pushed them to another page on my phone so I didn't even look at that.
It was just wonderful because you were right there in the moment immersing yourself in this whole Spanish culture. And, And I've, had friends say to me, if I'm going to spend 12 days going to Europe, I'm going to go to more than one little area, but what we did was so deep as far as walking through the villages, seeing the people there that would wave us on or wish us Wayne Camino, which means have a good walk.
And then the people that we met along the journey. Just passing us by or maybe we see them a little cafe at lunch for their brain Camino from all over the world. And I'll tell you one special thing. The closer you get to Santiago, the crowd or the past get, not everybody starts so far off.
Some people can only do a few days, maybe from health reasons or just timeframes. so I passed more than three or four small groups of women. Who were maybe 50 or 60 years old and they were walking with their like 80 year old mother. Wow. And I was like, blown away.
It's like, Oh my gosh, this is so fabulous to have this experience with your mother. So just besides being out in nature and walking, you know, on these paths through the cow pastures or walking over some hills or just in some woods, it was just phenomenal to be in that great escape. there's not many places in our country you could go and walk that much, you know, and enjoy the scenery for that length of time.
Oh my
Anne: gosh, I love how intentional you were though to move your apps, and also your article, Linda you, you let go, didn't you? Because, you know, you know, that I've heard the blisters I've heard, get the shoes, you've got to train for this. And what happened? I know there was a little hiccup there you had.
Linda: There was because I hadn't trained as much as I wanted to, I put an emphasis on and I started getting a shim splint. And my massage therapist who's outstanding, she used to be a dancer and does a lot of massage therapy on dancers. And she said, my advice to you, of is not to walk the next two weeks before you go.
So I couldn't finish training. And I knew I was starting off on a little slower. So I had to let go because I had to rethink my goal, give myself the grace to be what my body could do. And so with that, I told myself The goal is to go for the experience. I don't have to finish 125 miles. We were on a small tour, so we had a bus following us the whole way.
They met us every three to five kilometers, so we could refill our water bottles or ride the bus if we needed to. We had cell phones from our tour guides, so if we needed to contact them, you know, we probably could have used our personal cell phone, but they just went to great lengths to care for our safety and comfort.
So I took advantage of that some, but I had to redirect my goal. And that happens to us in life, in work and personal life, professional life, we have to redirect sometimes because. I'll give you an analogy and when I started my business, I used to try to go for every light. Oh, I think I could work with this person.
I think this is going to work or whatever. then I realized after a while I wasn't looking for the green lights. I was just following any light. And then when the green lights would come, you realize this is an open door that's meant to be, but sometimes we're looking to forge a relationship or business partnership or something and the green lights aren't there.
So we have to notice that and then make a turn. So I did that on the Camino.
Anne: Wow. that inspires me to, know, we say let go and let God and you made the most of it. I mean, Some people would have been like so bummed out. They might've even canceled their trip.
Oh, I've got a I can't make it. It's really not what happens to us. It's always what, how we react to that. Exactly. And you did a great job. You had a full, beautiful trip. And I hear that you're going to. You know, Maybe go back again
Linda: next year. Hopefully Portugal. I'll keep you all posted.
Anne: So that's,
so cool. So one year post Camino, anything that you've continued to do since that,
Linda: journey? Well, I try to continue to let go of things I don't need to do. That I don't need to take on or that I don't need to say yes to. Sometimes we're all better than that at others.
And so you still come to some crazy stressful times, but just try to go back and center with that. And remember the intentions, the intentions is not to come back and continue to be a workaholic and get burned out again, but to remember and look out for yourself and give yourself permission to take care of yourself.
So that's, was one of the reasons I started the weightlifting.
Anne: Just for you.
Linda: I know we were joking before we started that I could weight lift while I'm watching the birds from the house. Oh,
Anne: I love it. That's so, that's so beautiful.
Birds are so, you know, and just to see them nest and have families and, I just love that.
That's a lovely, peaceful, opportunity for you and your husband to be able to take that on and, see that. eggs hatched and
Linda: all those things. It was just, very relaxing. There's a lot of joy in that. And I think we all need joy. We find joy in our habits.
We find joy with our families. We find joy in our relationships. And we have to remember that there's ups and downs, but work with the joy and follow the green lights.
Anne: and follow the green lights. I love that's a wonderful, thing to think about. What's next for you in the coming year? You've got a birthday coming up. where do you see your career going at this
Linda: point? Well, I'm interested in strategic partnerships. One of the things I'm working on and have three companies. So we have the Linda Harvey Consulting Group, which is the main company that I've had forever.
And then 10 years ago, I founded the Dental Compliance Institute, which was a passion of mine that resulted from being in the medical world. and taking courses and getting credentialed in some of those associations. As you mentioned, I'm a distinguished fellow in the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management.
There weren't those kinds of opportunities in dentistry and there still aren't really good opportunities in dentistry. So we created train the trainer courses in the core areas. Risk management, OSHA, HIPAA, we're going to add coding and billing zone just to help create more compliance talent at the grassroots level, whether it's private practice level or whether it's a regional level for a DSO or it's a C suite and they're trying to begin maybe a new DSO and they're formulating their compliance department.
So we need that kind of assistance. We are looking for partnerships there. That's what I'm looking for. Green lights in 2024. That's
Anne: I know some of the people that you're partnering with and they're stellar and that is something that we need. We need that expert status because I think sometimes at dentistry, we wing it.
Don't we? I think that brings an expertise. you know, we've got perfectionism and every other aspect of dentistry, except some of the things that are really important. The way the world is right now, right? I mean, Management and all of those things that you're teaching.
I love that you're, teaching others to teach. So that's bringing on keeping your legacy alive. Linda, something that you. Grown into and really it seems like you're the perfect person to do that. So Thank you I loved your article. I love getting to know you better when I see you now i'm
Linda: like, oh gosh, you know Maybe you'll consider the camino, you know I'm no,
Anne: I'm, I'm tempted. I really am. That's something I'd love to do. And I said something to my husband like, let's do it. And he goes, sure, let's do it. But I don't think he could make the walk the way that I could.
so I'm going to think about that. You give me those dates. That would be, so Yummy. And such isn't this terrible? Something so much for myself would feel so decadent. Like we're not used to that, right when you sign up and you say yes to that, you do have to let it go just let, the spirit take over for you.
So yeah. Send me those dates and tell me how people can get in touch with you. If they need your expertise and want to learn more about what you do, three companies, get in touch with you, Linda?
Linda: My office line is 904 573 2232. And they can email me at linda at lindaharvey.
net. Or you can check out if you're interested in the Dental Compliance Institute, dentalcomplianceinstitute. com. And I'll give a plug for the third company, our Compliance Divas with my three other compadres. We also do podcasts.
Anne: love those divas too. Leslie
Linda: and Leslie, Mary Gavone and Olivia one.
The birth of that came out of COVID. We came together to help each other figure out what was going on and give our respective clients. information. And then when we thought COVID was waning towards, you know, before the Delta came, we said, what are we going to do next?
And we said, let's do this podcast company. And wave of COVID wasn't over yet. So it was timely, very timely. Yeah. And I don't think it's
Anne: ever going to end. the waves are going to keep coming. Right. And what a fabulous group of divas that is.
Well, I bet you have some great laughs teach, with humor and honestly, true expertise in the industry. So wonderful, wonderful. Well, Thank you so much for being with me
Linda: today. Thanks for having me. And it's been a pleasure.
Anne: You're so welcome. And thanks for coming to the retreat that we had.
I look forward to seeing you next year. For all of those that are listening, most importantly, everyone, remember to keep doing you. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you next time. Maybe we'll see you on the Camino. Take care.
