This perspective has helped enormously as I have pivoted in my career.   

I received my promotion to Associate Professor in Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School at the beginning of 2025. As proud as I am of my accomplishments in the Emergency Medicine, I am even more steeled by the guts and hard work it takes to pivot professionally, especially in the face of profound personal loss and growth. 

When my father received his cancer diagnosis, I spent as much time as possible with him. He lived 364 days before passing on 1/14/14—the same day I found out that I received my promotion to Assistant Professor at Harvard. Additionally, when I returned home to Boston after his funeral, I found out I was expecting twins, who subsequently arrived nine weeks early. 

Prior to these “life-changing events,” as referred to by human resources, I spent the decade after my Emergency Medicine residency adventuring in healthcare simulation. This career leap landed me in an environment rich with resources. Teaching at Harvard Medical School, I refined my skills as an experiential educator. Earning my master’s degree and launching an educational research career kept me busy and happy initially. I was innovating and being a change agent. That perspective changed when my father’s illness and death, and the almost reciprocal life-giving pregnancy and arrival of my twins, gave me the space and time away from the academic world to realize that my useful time in the healthcare simulation field was coming to an end. It was time to move on. 

I translated many of my skills from the education world into the new field of telehealth. Just as healthcare simulation was a new way of using technology to augment and improve healthcare education delivery, telehealth was a new way of using technology to deliver healthcare.

My world opened even more in 2018 to a new way of thinking thanks to my decision to try a business seminar not directly related to healthcare. I intended for the course to help me think more innovatively about the telehealth programs I wanted to develop. 

The course, led by the teaching and consulting arm of the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses in Ann Arbor, Michigan, did much more than that. I took more courses. The concepts of “good work,” “open book management,” and “stewardship” all were the clearest practical examples of progressive organizations that I found inspirational, similar to the educational practices I enjoyed at the Harvard Macy Institute in the beginning of my academic career. I discovered similar zeal with the ideas from Zingerman’s CEO Ari Weinzweig, including his metaphor of organizations as natural ecosystems. Specifically, how generative and healthy organizations include attention to positive culture (soil), hope (sunlight), biodiversity, and interconnectedness of all interactions. I found myself looking towards nature and agriculture to find more similarities and lessons to apply to organizations. More influence came from the works of the Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall-Kimmerer, author and CEO Biomimicry 3.9 Janine Benyus, community leader and author Peter Block, and activist and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

During an unexpected break from academic and clinical work in 2023, this time due to an injury, I again had the time and space to reflect on my career. I connected the ecosystem metaphor to my work environment, with a new perspective of exploitative and extractive characteristics of many businesses in general, as well as how it applies to healthcare and academics. 

Using my time during the recovery from the injury, I went down rabbit holes reading about biomimicry and permaculture. The more I read, the more I saw links to my current work and felt inklings of potential solutions. Most of the biomimicry used in business related to the use of natural processes or materials for engineering and textiles. I was more excited about the system-ness of ecosystems, agriculture, and permaculture. As I closed in on my promotion to Associate Professor, I leaned into using the ecosystem metaphor to be a change agent for others. 

From healthcare simulation and telehealth, I know that systems and culture can be quite difficult to change. My focus now is to explore the ecosystem metaphor with others, to affect healthy change within individuals, and provide care within larger ecosystems—care in a broader sense than the medical care of patients in an Emergency Department. 

In my prior healthcare simulation role, I enjoyed the energy of a room when working with like-minded individuals and witnessing a-ha moments. Similarly, with the Career Restoration Retreats, I look forward to using my experience from the past twenty years in academics, melding it with my seven years studying progressive business practices, to help you gain new insights into your careers and how you can restore your love of your work. 

My hope is to work with like-minded individuals, together witnessing aha moments and filling the room with positive energy.  

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For a more academic bio, Emily M. Hayden, MD, MHPE is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School, attending physician and Director of Telehealth in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Director of the Emergency Medicine Telehealth Research Lab in the Mass General Brigham Division of Health Services Research. She co-founded the Mobile Response Program and Virtual Observation Unit which utilized telehealth and community paramedicine to provide acute, unscheduled care to patients in their homes. Dr. Hayden is the founding Chair of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) Telehealth Interest Group, Chair of the SAEM 2020 Consensus Conference on Telehealth in Emergency Medicine, and the Chair of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) Health Innovations Technology Committee and Immediate Past-chair of the ACEP Emergency Telehealth Section. She is a member of the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) Telehealth Advisory Committee that developed the AAMC Telehealth Competencies. She is the Course Director for a self-paced online interprofessional telehealth course, “Telehealth Foundations: Applications Across the Professions”. Dr. Hayden has authored over 50 peer-reviewed articles. Her research focuses on telehealth in emergency medicine, including the use of telehealth nationally for transfer coordination to the comparison of telehealth to in-person physical examinations. Prior to her work in telehealth, Dr. Hayden spent a decade in healthcare simulation and developed the TeleSimulation program at MGH Learning Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital.