Heroes in Health: At the Forefront of Health and Wellness
The standard definition of a hero is someone admired for demonstrating courage. But there’s more to the definition: It also applies to someone admired for noble qualities. So it’s no misuse of the term to bestow that title on the 21 individuals you will meet in this, our 10th installment of Heroes in Healthcare. More than 200 health-care professionals have now been recognized in this annual feature, and in each case, without exception, we at Ingram’s ask ourselves: Where do they come from? How is a metropolitan area of Kansas City’s size able to produce so many dedicated, skilled and compassionate people—enough to easily fill these positions of honor year after year?
The answers to that can be found in the personal accounts you’ll read for each of these people working in the fields of administration, professional services, nursing, auxiliary services, lifetime achievement and volunteer roles. Their examples, indeed, mark them as Heroes in Healthcare.
In 2009, we added another twist to our health-care awards recognition with coverage of the Fittest Execs and Fittest Companies Challenge. Some who participate in this workplace wellness program produced by Ingram’s and its corporate sponsoring partners are health-care professionals, but most aren’t. Yet their efforts to take command of their own fitness levels, with a broader goal of attacking the rising costs of health insurance, are in their own way heroic, and in some cases, truly inspirational.
The 2013 Health Care Special Report, then, will introduce you to a broad spectrum of people who are working hard in the interrelated fields of health-care delivery, personal fitness and workplace wellness. We salute each of them for their contributions to those efforts.
Administration
Bob Finuf
Children's Mercy Hospital
Some in the health-care sector will work their entire careers without ever laying hands on a patient—but they still touch untold thousands of lives. That’s a place familiar to Bob Finuf, executive director of Children’s Mercy Pediatric Care Network.
With more than two decades of service as an administrator in both insurance and provider settings, Finuf has a rare perspective on the complex dynamics of health-care delivery. “Health care and health insurance are very inter-related,” says Finuf, who previously served as executive director of Coventry Health Care in Wichita. “The delivery and financing of health care are very local, and very relational. In my work within managed care, I had close relationships with the local provider community and by necessity had a good understanding of the challenges.”
He’s dealt with those challenges with Children’s Mercy since 2002, drawn here, he says, “because of the depth of the mission and the quality of the leadership” at the region’s leading pediatric hospital network. “I have the pleasure of serving within an organization that is very focused on its mission to serve kids,” Finuf says. “The great thing about a place like Children’s Mercy is that you only need to take a walk through the halls to understand the importance of the mission and the impact that is being made on the lives of kids.”
Before taking on his current role, Finuf was CEO of Children’s Mercy Family Health Partners, a safety-net health plan that the hospital sold last year. He has also held roles in network development, provider relations and marketing with other managed-care organizations in the two-state region. But his duties at Children’s Mercy are special. The best thing about his role, he says, is “being able to play a small part in a big mission to serve kids and their families. It is a blessing to hear so many stories from families regarding their experiences at Children’s Mercy. I am very cognizant of how special it is.”
Lee Norman
University of Kansas Hospital
There’s no mistaking the source of Lee Norman’s inspiration from his role as chief medical officer at the University of Kansas Hospital: “It’s the resilience of the human spirit, in patients and care-givers alike—every day there is an occurrence that amazes me and inspires me,” he says. “That might be demonstrated in the patients and their families, or in a time-pressed physician at midnight at the bedside or in the ‘nail-biting’ we collectively do as we watch and wait as somebody gets better.” But people, he says, “have a remarkable capacity to heal,” and he finds satisfaction in being part of that process.
A native of Iowa, a former Air Force flight surgeon who served in Desert Storm and a 20-year resident of Seattle, he scratched an itch to get back to the Midwest in 2007 and eventually crossed paths with Bob Page, the hospital’s chief executive who was then its chief operating officer. Not long afterward, Norman had a new job at 39th and Rainbow. His role there is a hand-in-surgical-glove fit with his view of effective health-care delivery: “The best and most difficult work is done in teams, be they formal or informal,” Norman says. But teamwork is not yet effectively taught or readily learned in the helping professions, he says, so “one of my greatest joys—and occasionally, frustrations—is to lead and be a part of a well-functioning team. I think I learned the essence of teamwork when I was in the military, and the foundations have stuck with me my whole life.”
As a health-care administrator, Norman has one eye on medical operations at the hospital, and another on policy-making in a time of profound change. “Health-care economics and population demographics are on a collision course,” Norman notes. “Medical care is expensive and the thirst for it, particularly in an aging population, is endless.” The innovation that we need, he says, is not happening fast enough, but he finds some reassurance in that the nation and the profession are addressing two key issues: population health overall, and the need to replenish a caregiver pipeline to serve in the decades ahead.
Debbie White
Saint Luke's Hospital
Top-notch medical care is in Debbie White’s DNA. That’s not hyperbole; her father, Fred Hahn, was one of those honored when Ingram’s introduced its Top Doctors awards in 1998. “I grew up seeing his dedication to sevice, his care and compassion for patients—he truly was a servant-leader,” a model she strives to repeat as chief nursing officer for Saint Luke’s Hospital. She’s been with Saint Luke’s since 1998, and has steadily increased her reach during her rise through the ranks, influencing the levels of care provided by nearly 800 nurses there. “I tell my staff that I work for them,” White says. “I am here to support them however I can so they can serve their patients and families. I truly believe that the work done at the bedside is the most important work.” So her mission is to remove barriers to the best care, foster innovative thought and processes, and give those nurses the tools they need to be better hands-on caregivers. “I truly feel I make a difference because of that,” White says. She has a deep record of achievement: In 2009, she led the organziation’s efforts to receive Magnet re-designation by the American Nurses Credentialing Center—an honor that goes to just 2 percent of all hospitals in the United States—and is leading the team seeking a third Magnet designation later this year. In 2010, she was a part of the executive team responsible for the system’s Missouri Quality Award achievement, and Saint Luke’s was also among the few health-care organizations nationwide to receive a site visit for consideration in the prestigious Baldrige Awards. A year later, White was honored as outstanding alumna for the School of Nursing by UMKC, where she earned her master’s in nursing. And last year, she was just one of 20 nursing executives in the nation—and only four west of the Mississippi—honored as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Executive Nurse Fellow. That elite group of executives participates in a three-year, world-class leadership development program to enhance their effectiveness in improving the nation’s health-care system.
Professional Services
Mike Aldridge
Kansas Foundation for Medical Care / Synovim
If better tools will indeed help wring inefficiencies out of the nation’s health-care system, somebody has to make them. And the toolmakers with the highest profile these days are in health-care information technology. Mike Aldridge is one of them. “I absolutely love helping design IT solutions to real-world problems,” says Aldridge, vice president for technology at the Kansas Foundation for Medical Care in Topeka. There, he and his team provide hands-on IT assistance to more than 1,500 providers and 95 critical-access rural hospitals throughout Kansas—the vast majority of institutions in the state. “We estimate that the providers we have been helping provide care to about 1.4 million people in Kansas,” he said.
His career track, in some ways, seemed predestined: “I loved IT from an early age, leaving little doubt that I would work with technology in some way,” Aldridge says. Sealing that deal was the additional influence of his maternal grandmother, “who instilled in me a desire to help others,” so health-care IT “became a perfect career choice for me.”
Before advancing up the ranks of IT administration, Aldridge worked for eight years at Lawrence Memorial Hospital, where he was able to make a tangible difference: “One of the fun, smaller projects there was helping design and implement an Infant Security System in the Mother/Baby Unit,” a project that carried added significance because all four of his own children were born there. These days, he balances his role at the foundation with duties as chief executive for an IT consulting firm, Synovim, which exemplifies both the challenges and opportunities currently at work in health-care.
“Entrepreneurship will undoubtedly continue to play a key role in the health-care transformation,” Aldridge says. “The reality is that even though we know what our destination is, we still need to figure out how to get there. Congress obviously agrees, as it created and continues to fund ideas through the CMS Innovation Center, and there are some really great pilot projects going on across the U.S.”
James Piontek
Liberty Hospital
“I am lucky,” says James Piontek, “to work at the hospital I work at.” That would be Liberty Hospital, where he started fresh out of medical training in 1978. Three years later, he became director of the anesthesiology division, and has been held there by a workplace culture he has a hard time describing. “I’ve had the chance to work with some really great people, see great people every day, and some of them, for years—cleaning staff, nursing staff, the people in the cafeteria,” he says. “There’s an overall attitude, that caring about somebody who’s not a relative or a friend, but a stranger you’re there to help.” After having trained at St. John’s Mercy in St. Louis, Piontek says, “This is a close as it gets to a Catholic hospital for a secular institution.”
Inspired by an orthopedist he met after suffering a sports injury in high school, Piontek became fascinated with medicine, and eventually chose anesthesiology over cardiology and an early run in internal medicine. Even today, he applies some of that background in assessing patients—“or, as I like to say, the internist of last resort,” he jests. Anesthesiology afforded an opportunity to be in a fast-paced track that was “reasonably stressful.” Exciting, but not exhausting.
His is a specialty that has undergone profound change, in a practice area that has become profoundly safer. “Of all the different drugs commonly used when I finished training, only one is still used today,” he said. But the tools and processes have taken it from high-risk to well below moderate in terms of patient injury or death—from one case in 10,000 to roughly one in 300,000 to 400,000.
He still draws satisfaction in being there as a birthing woman’s agony turns to a satisfied smile with a newborn in her arms. Or seeing a critically ill patient come out of the operating room and begin his recovery. And applying what he calls “the art part, listening to people, trying to answer their questions in a way that reassures them.” For most, “surgery a is a threatening experience,” he says. “Sometimes, you need to let them talk a little bit; they just need somebody to listen.”
Sara Baker
Rehabilitation Institute of Kansas City
Sara Baker’s fascination with the human brain starts with how things can go wrong. What she’s really into, though, are the ways that things go right again. “To me, it’s a very complex issue, very stimulating,” she says, “I’ve always wanted to know how that happened when someone is injured, how you fix it and how they overcome it.” That kind of innate curiosity, stoked during childhood by dinner-table discussions with parents who worked in health-care settings, steered her into a career as a speech pathologist. And ultimately, into her current role as director of community integration for the institute, where she’s worked for nearly 27 years.
That work largely focuses on those who have had a concussion, mild brain injury or stroke. “They tend to be those who have returned to work or who will, and who are often pretty high-functioning people,” she said. Helping them overcome their physical challenges is just one facet of her duties. She also has to help restore the confidence they need to succeed after rehabilitation. “A lot of times when patients come to me, they are really struggling,” Baker says. “They may have lost a job, are at risk of losing a job, their families may be struggling financially. To be able to keep a person employed, to help them figure out how to do their job at the same level as before and keep them employed and keep their family together—that’s very rewarding.”
Her impact on their lives can be gauged by the occasional knock on the door of her office at the Midtown hospital. Baker might not immediately recall their name, but she knows the faces of those she’s helped. They routinely stop by to thank her, tell her that they’re in college now, or married now, or are parents now, because she’s helped them make it back. “When people come back like that, we know we’ve had an impact,” Baker says. “When you keep somebody in their job, you affect the whole economy.”
Auxiliary Staff
Mary Houston
Heartland Health
As a nation, we eat too many things that taste good, but are bad for us. Mary Houston is out to change that calculus, one meal at a time. She’s the dietary team leader at Heartland Health, where every day is a battle to make sure food that’s good for you tastes great, too. And here’s how she knows she’s winning that battle: “People come in after church on Sunday to eat here,” she beams. That’s hard to achieve at a restaurant, let alone a hospital dining room. But Houston’s staff of more than 100 pulls it off consistently—even without deep-fat fryers (they’ve been yanked; even the French fries are baked), sodas (drinks are low-cal or no-cal, save for the milk and reduced-size juice servings) and other preparations that most restaurateurs take for granted. “We’ve had some initiatives that were a little tough to implement, but it’s the right thing to do in the long run,” Houston says.
She’s been with Heartland for 22 years, and in a manager’s role for much of that, building a staff that matches her vision for quality and efficiency. One hire in particular made a big difference, because “we have to be creative not only to make the food taste good, but meet medical needs, and still offer a variety of popular foods like pizza,” she says. “So one of the best things we did was get a chef on staff, with his creativity in flavor profiles, knowing that yes, you have to eliminate butter in this, but you can still have success coming up with a healthy plate every day.”
Perhaps the biggest challenge of all is serving it up on a budget. As a dietician, she knows that some of the cheapest foods are some of the least healthy, so she has to work a bit harder to offset the costs of salmon entrees, for example, with other dishes. Helping with the cost control has been her ability to generate revenues from the cafeteria, with take-out dishes and offerings available for order on-line.
Her personal favorite on the menu? “Our low-sodium herbed chicken with bread crumbs and seasoning,” she says. “When we sell it in the cafeteria, a lot of it goes out. It’s a recipe I brought with me, and I’ve been serving it ever since.”
Faye Peterson
Lee's Summit Medical Center
If you have to wake up in a hospital bed, and if you have to start your day on the business end of a needle, you want the person on the other end to be just like Faye Peterson. She’s a phlebotomist at
Lee’s Summit Medical Center, where she’s worked since 1968. In the decades since she started at what was then Lee’s Summit Hospital, she has become, hospital officials say, a favorite among patients—well-known not just for her ready smile and refined sense of humor, but for her deft touch with the needle.
In addition to making the rounds for morning blood draws, she’s called on to do outpatient blood draws—and often is asked for by name when repeat patients come in.
“Phlebotomy is not an easy job,” Peterson says. “Some people think ‘Oh! They are just drawing blood,’ but no, there’s more to it than that.”
There are also aspects of training and teaching, plus the challenges of setting up phlebotomy sites at different locations and office buildings. And—point of personal pride here—Peterson says some of the most rewarding duties she has involve “tackling the most difficult patients.”
From a staff perspective, hospital officals credit Peterson with being unfailingly positive and committed, with exhibiting the medical center’s core values in her daily work and with always having a kind word or message of encouragement for her colleagues. Compassion, they say, can be exhibited with an act as simple as remembering the name of a patient, and Peterson has a reputation not only for that, but for details about their lives.
After more than 40 years in that role, Peterson has had opportunities to interact with thousands of patients. One, whose story continues to resonate with her today, was just 8 months old when she first saw him at the old hospital site. His was a life-and-death case that involved a liver transplant at that early age. But the patient is now 13 years old, Peterson says, and “has continued to do remarkably well—and that’s reward enough for me.”
Cheryl Woolery
Saint John Hospital
A lot of folks may not appreciate the difference between “clean” and “hospital clean.” Cheryl Woolery
lives that difference every day, and it’s a crucial one: The Centers for Disease Control attributes more
than 100,000 deaths a year to infections contracted in U.S. hospitals.
Woolery is the lead tech for the environmental services unit at Saint John Hospital, where she leads the team responsible for keeping patient rooms and treatment areas in pristine shape. After nearly a decade in that unit, this transplant from South Carolina has found a home not just in Leavenworth, but at the hospital. “As team leader, I have a specific area I have to clean and take care of, which is the emergency room, and I make sure things go smoothly and that everything’s getting properly cleaned,” she says. “I also answer questions patients might have about their rooms, how we clean and what chemicals we use.”
The tools used may change as newer, more effective compounds come into use, but their application hasn’t, Woolery says: “Out of the 10 years I’ve been here, the only thing that’s changed was the chemicals—how we clean hasn’t changed. We start from the baseboards and work our way to the ceiling. We do what we know best, and we don’t miss anything in between.”
When her work is done, you can tell the impact this mother of three has made just by using your nose. “After we went from bleach-based chemicals to what we use now, it makes the whole hospital smell fresh,” she says. “And patients really know the difference. Even after I go and mop a room, they’ll tell me, ‘Oh, that smells nice.’”
Patients, though, are less aware of the standards of cleanliness that must be maintained. “There are only five of us, but if you’d see us working, you’d think there are more of us,” Woolery says. “People don’t know exactly what we go through to get the job done.”
