St. Vincent North CEO Tim Osterholm Leads Healing Ministry
Tim Osterholm was raised Catholic but now attends the nondenominational Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock with his wife (whom he married in a Methodist church) and two children. His career has taken him to a Methodist hospital in Omaha, a Baptist cancer center in Knoxville, Tenn., a Catholic hospital in Corpus Christi, Tex., and now to St. Vincent North in Sherwood, where he has served as CEO since December 2009.
“I say I’m moving through health administration one denomination at a time,” he jokes. “Next place should be Barnes Jewish or Mount Zion or something.”
The self-described “people person” had known he wanted to work in healthcare since he was in high school in the small town of Glenwood, Iowa, where modern medicine helped his mother win her battle with breast cancer. He had entered college planning on becoming a physician, but while his grades had been OK, he realized he lacked the passion to excel at the top of the class. Sort of by default, he became a lab technician at the Methodist Hospital in Omaha. “I just wanted to be in healthcare,” he said. “I wanted to somehow help patients or be a part of the healthcare industry.”
But several years into his career, he found that the laboratory’s solitary work wasn’t a good fit. He wanted to work with people. And so he enrolled in a Master of Public Administration program at the University of Nebraska and waited for his chance to do more.
Soon he was asked to supervise a phlebotomy department, a job he found he enjoyed and excelled at. He was glad to get into administration. He found that he enjoyed his new position and that he had a gift for creating relationships, leading people, and assessing situations – the skills necessary for leadership in a healthcare environment or anywhere else. He said that he “liked it to a point where I also said, ‘I want to do more than this. I want to be in a leadership role, not just a supervisor.”
In 1999, he was promoted to a service executive’s position at the hospital, a job that, among other duties, put him in charge of the cancer program. It was an appropriate role for the son of a breast cancer survivor who had started a Race for the Cure in her hometown.
Cancer would remain a focus of Osterholm’s professional life. By 2002, he had become director of the Baptist Regional Cancer Center in Knoxville. His next job was service director of the CHRISTUS Spohn Cancer Network in Corpus Christi, Texas. That was followed by a stint as executive director of oncology and imaging services with the CHRISTUS Spohn Health System.
Brought to Little Rock by St. Vincent Health System CEO Peter Banko in 2007, with whom Osterholm had worked in Corpus Christi, Osterholm became administrator of St. Vincent Doctors Hospital before coming to St. Vincent North. But even though his work is no longer cancer-focused, he hasn’t strayed far from his work with the disease. In his spare time, he serves as president of the Hope Ambassadors, a community advisory council for the American Cancer Society. He has been a volunteer leader in American Cancer Society chapters in every community where he has lived.
As CEO, it’s Osterholm’s job to lead a team made up of many different kinds of players. Some, like nurses and staff, are under his direct authority, which requires one type of communication skills. (His wife, Kerri, an RN at St. Vincent Infirmary, is a valuable sounding board in that respect.) But doctors aren’t employees. How does an administrator set an agenda for highly-skilled speciality surgeons who work independently of the hospital?
“I think, one, it’s understanding that those guys are people,” he said. “What they want to hear from an administrator, they want someone that’s going to communicate with them. They don’t want somebody that’s going to drop a bomb on them. If anything, (what) I (would) hear from a physician is, ‘I didn’t get a chance to be a part of the decision,’ or, ‘No one ever told me this was going to happen.’”
The business of healthcare will be undergoing major changes in the coming years, and as a hospital administrator, it will be Osterholm’s job to lead the hospital through those changes. He said the hospital has already made plans out to 2014. One assumption is that while more people will have health insurance, the overall bucket of money available to hospitals won’t grow, so hospitals will have to find ways to lower costs while still meeting patient expectations. Osterholm said the hospital is projecting that insurance reimbursement rates will more closely match the lower rates paid by Medicare. Meanwhile, incentives will more closely align with the quality of care provided, which will favor quality hospitals.
“I think what we have to do as leaders, is know that it’s not going to be the status quo,” he said. “We really become change agents. How do we lead an organization to be ready for change? And really for me, that’s where healthcare and healthcare leaders have to be able to anticipate what’s going to happen and then mobilize your organization to make those changes and do it without it really becoming a problem – just recognize it’s part of what we have to do.”
Every hospital where Osterholm has served has been church-affiliated, and St. Vincent, of course, is no different. The hospital was founded in 1888 as a 10-bed charity hospital by the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth. In fact, it was the first hospital in Little Rock. Is it more difficult to manage profitably a hospital where serving the underserved is so much a part of its core purpose and where the work is considered, in Osterholm’s words, a healing ministry? Not really, Osterholm said. “Whether you’re a Catholic hospital or a for-profit hospital, you’ve still got to be able to deliver care at high quality, manage your expenses,” he said. “Bad debt and charity? Yeah, that does make it difficult, but if Catholic health is not there, where are those patients going to go? So I would say being in Catholic health doesn’t make it more difficult.”
Although nuns no longer manage the hospital, a statue of Mary in the lobby is a reminder of the hospital’s continuing purpose. In fact, Osterholm said most of the people involved in a faith-based hospital like St. Vincent see their role as both a mission and a ministry, just as the sisters did.
“You know,” he said, “we talk a lot at St. Vincent about the sisters, the nuns, aren’t in the hallways. … Who’s going to carry that on? Just because they’re not in the hallways doesn’t mean the staff and how you feel, when you come in, can’t carry on that culture, can’t carry on what those sisters built.”
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