Kansas City Health Care: Where Big Hearts Are Equalizers
In 2012, patient revenues at Excelsior Springs Hospital came to a little more than $50 million. That’s but a rounding error when compared with overall revenues of $3.53 billion at the region’s 800-pound health-care gorilla, the University of Kansas Hospital.
And yet, those two institutions are not so very far apart in one important category: The commitment to quality patient care that distinguishes this marketplace as a center of health-care excellence. From top-notch administrators to skilled professional staffers, from support staff to nursing specialists and volunteers, the hospitals in this region are staffed with people fiercely devoted to quality patient outcomes.
Why? In part, because those hospitals also are fiercely competitive. As a marketplace, Kansas City has a disproportionate share of hospital beds. If you’re going to fill them—or as many of them as can be filled—you’d best be good at what you do.
We cite the above example of Excelsior Springs Hospital and KU’s sprawling health-care complex because each is represented by Ingram’s Heroes in Healthcare for 2014. Truth be told, the top five hospitals and health-care systems in the metro area, with nearly 30,000 employees combined, could easily fill out our annual roster of administrators, nurses, health-care professionals, support staff, volunteers and lifetime-service honorees.
But each year, we comb the health-care landscape—including allied-health professionals in private practice, non-profit organizations and settings outside hospitals—to show just how broad and deep the commitment to patient care really is in this region.
We’re confident that the stories of this year’s Heroes in Healthcare will serve as powerful reminders of the blessings we all enjoy as a result of that commitment.
Administration
Gene Meyer
Lawrence Memorial Hospital
Effective hospital administration starts with delivering quality care in the short term. To succeed in the long term, you’d better know your market. As Gene Meyer, CEO of Lawrence Memorial Hospital, knows his. “Here are a couple of statistics that are mind-boggling,” he says. “Thirty-seven percent of those who live in Lawrence work outside, and 47 percent of the professionals who live in Lawrence work outside of town. The number of people who get up and drive to Kansas City or Topeka is a bit of a downer; we need more job growth. But from a health-care standpoint, the challenge for us is continuing to provide accessibility for commuters who aren’t here, and to educate and create an environment of service so people don’t feel like they have to go to Kansas City or Topeka for health care.”
Key to that, Meyer says, has been establishment of high-performing programs, particularly in oncology and cardiology. “Those have led the way to saying we’re not a Band-aid station, but a first-class community hospital.”
Meyer, a Wisconsin native who went to Oak Park High School and Rockhurst University, came to LMH 17 years ago after a long stretch at Saint Luke’s Health System in Kansas City, where he had roles in the expansion from a single site on the Country Club Plaza to a series of hospitals ringing the metro area. “I played different roles establishing all three, but they have become significant strategic organizations for Saint Luke’s Health System” he says.
His immediate challenge at LMH, he said, was a cultural one; annual turnover topped 35 percent. “Last year, it was 12 percent,” he says. “Now, that wasn’t me—I couldn’t have done that on my own. But fixing that set the foundation for us to move forward with other programs and services we were able to develop.”
The real credit for all that, he insists, goes to the hands-on caregivers. “We’re not the real heroes, we do the business of health care and facilitate the opportunities for the real heroes—the physicians, nursing staff and other care-givers.”
Chuck Robb
Saint Luke's Health System
When Chuck Robb left Ernst & Young to become chief financial officer at Saint Luke’s Hospital in 1991, it was something of a homecoming: Robb was born there. Today, he’s the senior vice president for finance and administration and chief financial officer for Saint Luke’s Health System, which owns the mother ship and nine other regional hospitals, and stands as one of the region’s 10 largest private companies.
A natural interest in the field led him to UMKC and what is now the Bloch School of Management, where he earned an accounting degree. He set his sights on becoming a certified public accountant and signed on with E&Y, work that would prepare him for a more challenging financial role in health care, not just in the 1990s, but even today. “I think this experience and variety prepared me for the rapid pace of change in health care these past several years,” Robb says. That pace of change has yielded no shortage of challenges for a health-care system with $4 billion in annual revenues. “One is working in the current economic system of fee for service,” Robb says, a challenge complicated by questions about how outcomes will be measured, and by a demographic swell of older Americans, who traditionally account for greater shares of health-care costs. “Another challenge,” Robb said, “is that the evolving health-care reimbursement model is based on meaningful Medicaid reform, which has not come to our two states yet.”
It’s hard, he says, to measure the impact of his own contributions—or any administrator’s—to his employer. “Accomplishments are almost always based on team efforts by a number of caregivers,” he says. “Those of us not in direct patient care contribute to supporting that care.”
And that’s where he finds the rewards, he says, in “the opportunity to help support the care of people.” “Taking care of people is really what we do, and those of us in finance get the chance to support that,” Robb says.
Dahnunjaya Lakkireddy
University of Kansas Hospital
Meet Dahnunjaya Lakkireddy, Revolutionary. “In the last two decades, the field of electrophysiology has seen a revolution that has changed our understanding, abilities and approach to the management of arrhythmia, and I wish to be a part of this revolution,” says the cardiologist at the University of Kansas Hospital. But he’s not just part of the uprising, he’s a ringleader. Though just 13 years out of medical school in his native Hyderabad, India, Lakkireddy is the director of the Center for Excellence in AF and Complex Arrhythmias at the hospital, and leads two medical education symposia every year. He’s considered an expert in cutting-edge technologies for treating heart maladies. “The heart is the epicenter of the human body,” Lakkireddy says. “It is simple in its design and functionality, yet plays a very critical role in the sustenance of life.” From the first time he laid hands on a patient for defibrillation in an emergency room setting, Lakkireddy has been fascinated by life-and-death consequences of that work.
The first physician in his family, Lakkireddy says he knew from middle school what he wanted to become. “There were no doctors in my whole family,” he says. “I was particularly fascinated by our family doctor who took care of my entire extended family for three generations” and demonstrated respect, optimism and compassion.
Technology has dramatically changed every facet of medical care, but perhaps nowhere more than cardiology. “Embracing new techniques and adapting disruptive technology is critical to advancing the quality and efficiency of patient care,” Lakkireddy says, “but at the end of the day, the patient comes first. Our ability to provide world-class care, having access to the latest tools, made us the institution we are,” and one ranked in the top 25 cardiology programs nationally by U.S. News and World Report. “This profession has made me a better individual on a personal level—to be humble, open, patient, empathetic and resilient,” Lakkireddy says.
Professional Services
Kevin Dennis
Southwest Boulevard Family Health Care Services
Forty years ago, Kevin Dennis was working on the grounds-keeping crew at the University of Kansas. That’s where he first met Sharon Lee, who would go on to become a physician and found the Southwest Boulevard Family Health Care Services. She brought Dennis on board to run the business side of an office with perhaps the most unusual compensation structure you’ll find in health-care today. As chief administrative officer for the clinic, Dennis makes the same wage everyone else employed there does—$14 an hour, which probably isn’t much more than he’d be making if he were still cutting grass in Lawrence today. “She likes to call me a co-founder of the clinic, and I guess that’s true,” Dennis says of Lee. “But I wouldn’t have founded anything by myself, and she would have done it without me. I do what I can to support her.”
Which, as it turns out, is a lot. Since the clinic’s inception as a tiny office with three employees in 1989, Dennis has been the operations and administration complement to Lee’s medical services. From that tiny seedling has grown a comprehensive health-care clinic with 58 employees. It found a niche early by treating patients who were HIV positive; many physicians in that era wouldn’t take those cases before more was known about the disease, Dennis said. Because anti-retroviral drugs hadn’t been discovered, AIDS was often a fatal diagnosis, but indicative of the clinic’s comprehensive approach to care, the leadership created a program to line up adoptive parents for children likely to be orphaned by the disease, and introduced them before that loss of that parent, helping ease the transition. Dennis has also assisted in the addition of a dental clinic, health-education programming, a fitness center—even a legal-aid clinic. “We’re trying to be a one-stop shop for total health,” he says. Challenging work, but rewarding, as well. “Going home feeling like you’re doing something good and not taking advantage of anybody,” is chief among those, Dennis says.
Todd Hill
Northland Psychiatric Specialists
Three months into his psychiatric residency at the Veterans Administration Medical Center, Todd Hill had an epiphany. It was delivered to him at the tip of the 9-inch butcher knife that a patient thrust into his jaw. “That was kind of a defining moment,” says Hill. “I could have chosen to do something else, and I guess a lot of people would have. By the grace of God, it was not in the neck, but I thought, do you continue to do what you really love, or sign on to something else?” The answer to that question came the next day when Hill, bandaged, showed up for his assigned rounds.
The gravitational pull back to seeing patients was the same one that brought him to medicine in the first place: The values of small-town health-care delivery he’d learned from his father, who owned and operated a clinic in Wellington, Kan. “I grew up immersed in a health-care lifestyle,” Hill says. “I worked as a kid, as a janitor at the clinic, and knew nothing but him being a D.O. and having a small-town practice.”
The younger Hill was going to break that mold by majoring in music at KU—he still plays guitar at local venues—but realized a musical career was a tough way to make a living. So it was back to his roots, entry into medical school and pursuing, Hill says, “what I knew and grew up with.”
Today, he plies that trade at a remarkable number of venues, including the practice he co-founded, Northland Psychiatric Services, along with North Kansas City and Liberty hospitals; at his alma mater, Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, where he chairs the department of psychiatry; and other clinical and consultive settings.
“If you love what you do, I don’t think it’s as much of a challenge,” Hill says. “I try to approach psychiatry from a common-sense standpoint: I’m a big believer in talking to patients, sending them to a therapist if they need to go, but very conservative when it comes to medicating them.” Underlying that, he says, are the values and work ethic of a small-town practitioner. “I always said I’d never work as hard as my dad,” Hill says, “but here I am doing the same thing!”
Julie Buttell
Elite Sports Medicine and Physical Therapy
Tears and laughter. Julie Buttell remembers seeing and hear-ing both at the renowned St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Given its reputation for treating some of the most challenging pediatric cancer cases, the tears were understandable. The laughter? It seemed a constant in the physical therapy department, where Buttell first started volunteering as a sixth-grader. “So many kids were sick and there were lots of tears walking around the hospital, but in that department there was always laughing, joy and a general sense of hope,” says Buttell, a physical therapist at Elite Sports Medicine and Physical Therapy. Watching therapists teach children that had an amputation learn to walk again seemed so rewarding.”
She left her native Memphis for Rockhurst University and both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physical therapy, then worked in five states around the country, in differing therapeutic disciplines. Through time and experience, she’s developed her own perspective on treatment. “No one thing works for every client, so as many tools and experiences you have to build on, the better,” she says. “My contribution to patient rehab stems from combining techniques from all of my backgrounds to treat my clients more holistically.”
One thing that makes her calling rewarding , she says, is that while most other health-care practitioners are time-starved, “we have time to listen, absorb, and act. The average time an M.D. gets to spend with a patient is 7 minutes; we get 60 minutes for an evaluation and 45 for each visit.”
People, she says, are blessed in many different ways in life. “I am blessed to be right where I am supposed to be, doing exactly what it is I am supposed to be doing. The profession has given me peace. I wake up most days and know I get to put my hands on another person and help them to feel better and move better so they can be exactly where they want to be, doing what they want to be doing.”
Auxiliary Staff
Lizzie Clevenger
Excelsior Springs Hospital
As Lizzie Clevenger might tell you, the trick with any job is getting past the first 50 years. After that, it’s smooth sailing. Since setting foot in the old Excelsior Springs Hospital on Easter Sunday 1962, Clevenger has been a fixture in the dietary unit—hospitalese for the kitchen.
When Clevenger was honored for her half-century of service in 2012, CEO Sally Nance said that, according to local legend, Lizzie had stood on the spot where the new hospital would be built in 1977 and announced where she wanted the kitchen to go in.
So what’s kept her in that kitchen all these years? “I always worked in dietary, so it is what I knew,” Clevenger says. “I like the work and I like the people; this is my home away from home.” Her shift starts early; she’s up at 4 a.m. so she can be in the kitchen in time to get breakfast going. And when you’re cooking 90 meals twice a day, speed and efficiency matter. “If a patient can’t eat and has to have a special meal, I also have to make that, and that takes a while,” she says. But the routine is set: “I pour all the water to start out with, then make lemonade, and work on the tray line,” getting meals prepped for in-room delivery.
The best part of her job, she says, is making the cakes for patients’ desserts, with chocolate her signature recipe. There is, she says, no flip side to that question: “There is nothing hard about my job, but I’m just getting slower and slower.”
The most rewarding aspects of those 52 years, Clevenger says, “are all the close friendships I’ve made over the years.”
Born and raised in Liberty, Clevenger moved to Excelsior Springs in 1939. She has a son and a daughter, four grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren, and when they show up at her house, you can bet she’s involved in meal preparation.
So how long will she be wielding a spatula at the hospital?
“’Til they get rid of me, I guess,” she says.
Richard Zaroban
Olathe Medical Center
It wasn’t health care specifically that called Richard Zaroban to Olathe Hospital almost 40 years ago, but it was a certain kind of pediatric issue: “I had just finished my college degree and had a 2-month old baby to support,” Zaroban recalls. “I needed a better job than I had at the time,” and he found one as maintenance mechanic at what is now Olathe Medical Center.
Today, he’s director of building services for the sprawling, 280-acre medical complex, responsible for the physical plant of the 300-bed hospital, its medical offices and what he calls “my patients” and their visitors.
The glue that has held him there, for nearly four decades, he says, “was the culture of the organization. Olathe Medical Center has never been satisfied with the status quo. The organization has always sought to expand and bring the best health care to its community and it gave me the opportunity to grow with it.”
The regulations that prompt gnashing of teeth in physician and administrative offices are just as prominent in what Zaroban does in a support role: “The biggest challenges,” he says, “would be ever-increasing responsibilities within the organization and compliance with codes and regulations from various regulatory bodies.”
But he relishes the challenges, as well as a position where no two days are the same, he says. “The opportunities I have had to be involved in construction are a great source of personal satisfaction. I enjoy showing off the facility and saying, ‘I had a hand in building that.’”
The challenges, he says, come when he must “step out of my comfort zone and try new and different things.” But when he masters them, he says, he feels “a sense of personal pride and the satisfaction of knowing that I was able to have a small part in providing quality health care to our customers.”
Becky Thomas
Children's Mercy Hospitals & Clinics
She was determined to work with children, but wasn’t sure whether that would be as a nurse, teacher or social worker. When Becky Thomas graduated from high school and finished some business-school courses, the stars aligned with a cashier’s position at Children’s Mercy Hospital. She jumped at the chance—and had a moment of self-realization: “I applied thinking it would get me one step closer to working with kids,” she said, but the orientation tour ended any dream of pediatric nursing. “If the sight of the kids hooked up to machines and tubes made me cry and my heart ache, how could I be an effective nurse?” she says. “So, I decided right then and there to utilize the skills that I had just obtained and stick with something that I could handle—numbers.” She’s been doing that ever since, moving quickly from the cashier position to the accounts receivable department, then into a payroll position. She’s now payroll manager for the hospital network, which means cutting pay checks to 6,500 employees every two weeks. “I would have to say the biggest challenges are meeting the numerous deadlines and staying compliant with the ever-changing laws, rules, and regulations that surround pay practices,” Thomas says. “But, I am fortunate: I have a very talented team; they are the ones who help to ensure we overcome these challenges.” And when they do, there’s a measure of satisfaction that comes from making sure no employee time is lost with inquiries about payroll discrepancies. By ensuring their pay is correct, she says, “they can focus on our patients and their families.”
If those in the hands-on care positions can do that, Thomas is living through their experience. “Although I do not provide direct patient care, I am proud to be a very small part of such a wonderful organization that truly focuses on the children,” Thomas says. That focus, she says, “includes support for their social well-being and on-going research. … So I guess the profession has given me the opportunity to be a part of a wonderful, talented, and professional organization.”
