By founding CWIM, CEP America’s Women in Medicine group, Tiffany Hackett, MD is helping build a community to learn and share best practices for personal growth, maintaining a work-life balance, and other topics that are unique to female providers.

In a recent FemInEM post, Nikki Braxley, MD, an emergency physician partner and mom of 2 described CEP America’s exciting new parental leave stipend. In the article she credits Dr. Tiffany Hackett, CEP America’s Director of Leadership Development, with championing this program. Hackett has developed many notable programs at CEP, especially for female partners and young leaders. We wanted to know more about this innovative leader and other plans she might have.

Dr. Hackett works at the same hospital where she was born. In speaking with her, she uses words like “family” and “my community” to describe her practice environment. Raised on the west coast, she moved east for college and medical school. After undergraduate studies at Yale, she received an MD/ MBA from University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School of Business. Her MBA was focused on health care administration and physician leadership. Dr. Hackett moved back to the west coast for residency at UCLA/ Olive View and and completed an education fellowship at LA County + USC.

After fellowship graduation, with children and a husband in tow, Hackett set out to find a job in the Bay Area, returning to where she was raised. She didn’t pay much attention to specific employers, instead concentrating on locations and hospitals. She quickly realized CEP staffed many of her desired hospitals, including Good Samaritan, the hospital in which she was born.

Hackett joined CEP America in 2007. She has worked at 4 different sites but always remained dedicated to “Good Sam” and now works there exclusively. She has had multiple leadership roles within the organization, serving as a departmental Medical Director, Director of the CEP Clinical Education Committee and even spent 3 years as member of CalACEP’s Board of Directors.

Hackett currently serves as the Director of Leadership Development for all CEP America sites. She sees this role as an opportunity to develop a robust physician development program for all physician partners. She helps oversee leaders in education, administration and clinical care. She says that this role “combines a lot of the things I love — helping the other partners of the organization and trying to provide them with the tools and resources and support that they need to be successful at their jobs.”

After realizing that CEP (like many organizations) lost talented female physicians on the path to leadership, Dr. Hackett founded CEP Women in Medicine (CWIM, pronounced swim).

This workgroup’s mission statement is simple:

The purpose of CEP Women in Medicine is to promote and support the advancement of women in CEP.

This is achieved by supporting both the personal and professional growth of women providers. CWIM provides leadership development, mentorship, and expertise for women interested in leadership. CWIM also serves as a community to learn and share best practices for personal growth, maintaining a work-life balance, and other topics that are unique to female providers.

Dr. Hackett’s goal, and the goal of all CEP leadership, is to provide an “extremely supportive environment for all physicians, especially women.” She thinks that the open and transparent partnership structure facilitates this, but that targeted programs to the needs of women physicians will raise things to a whole new level. Although a relatively new workgroup, Dr. Hackett is excited about programs the CWIM group will conceive. With full support from CEP executive leadership, there’s no doubt they will succeed. As she put it: “We called the group CWIM, we are trying to make the talent pool deeper.”

 Dr. Hackett credits much of her success to mentorship. She says “I am super happy and feel so lucky that I ended joining CEP. I have had great mentors along the way, including our incoming president, Theo Koury, MD and incoming COO, David Birdsall, MD, who have mentored and encouraged me and helped create opportunities and opened doors.”

In her role as a physician leader at CEP America and founder of CWIM, it seems like Dr. Hackett is an incredible mentor and champion herself.