Chief Medical Officer, Jack Stephens Heart Institute

Randy Jordan, has been part of a two-fold revolution in cardiology. In addition to the tremendously significant improvements in cardiac patient care in the past 30 years, the management of cardiology practices has also changed significantly.

Jordan is president and one of the founding members of CHI St. Vincent Heart Clinic Arkansas, the largest cardiology practice in the state. Over the past couple of decades there has been ongoing consolidation in many medical practices, particularly in specialties.

“We merged some groups and added new members and became a 30-physician group,” Jordan said. “More recently we have followed a national trend and aligned with a hospital to deal with falling reimbursement and to meet the demands of medical care today. Since our integration with CHI St. Vincent Health System three years ago, we have partnered with four cardiovascular surgeons and formed the Jack Stephens Heart Institute at CHI St. Vincent.”

Being a larger group has allowed them to hire professional management, and to effectively deal with the regulatory environment of modern healthcare. It has also improved the access to capital needed to move into Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and purchase very expensive equipment. Jordan said call has also improved compared to the days when two or three partners had to handle everything.

As chief medical officer for the Jack Stephens Heart Institute, Jordan spends about half of his time doing administrative work.

“The challenges of healthcare today are that it is very difficult for hospitals to meet the quality expectations in the environment of reduced reimbursement, and the only way they can do that is by having the cooperation of physicians,” Jordan said. “We integrated with CHI St. Vincent with a focus on helping bring improved quality to CHI St. Vincent and the patients whom we serve while at the same time reducing cost and improving value.”

The practice of medicine is really challenging today. Nationwide, hospitals are having a tough time. Some hospitals in Arkansas have closed and many of the smaller hospitals are particularly challenged. Some of those are looking to the bigger hospital systems to collaborate with or manage their hospitals.

CHI St. Vincent is owned by Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI), one of the largest hospital systems in the country. Jordan and his colleague, Marcia Atkinson, vice president of cardiovascular services at CHI St Vincent, work on a national level within CHI to bring consistency and quality to cardiovascular services at all CHI hospitals while at same time trying to contain spending by using cost effective equipment and devices, and sharing best practices to accomplish those goals.

Jordan has seen a huge evolution in cardiovascular care during the 30-year span of his career. Coronary angioplasty was just starting when he was a fellow. There have been life-saving innovations including the development of coronary stents, internal defibrillators and percutaneous valve replacement, as well as a host of drugs to treat hypertension, hyperlipidemia and heart failure.

“Open heart surgery had just gotten well established when I started,” Jordan said. “Since then we have seen some decline in the need for open heart surgery because of the rise of percutaneous procedures. These procedures represent a revolution for the patient in terms of their time for recovery and have tremendously reduced costs.”

Thirty years ago someone might have been hospitalized three days for a heart procedure that today takes only a couple of hours.

Today there are a lot of changes going on in the field of medicine, and much of it has been focused on controlling costs and implementing best practices.

“The pressures to reduce cost and improve quality have caused a huge amount of stress in the system,” Jordan said. “I don’t see that changing for quite some time. I think we will have these pressures for several years to come.”

While Jordan’s family is from Hot Springs, he lived in many places growing up with a father in the Air Force.

“But Arkansas has always been home as I spent summers with my grandparents,” Jordan said. “My father retired just before I started college and moved back to Hot Springs. I went off to college at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and then came back to Arkansas to start medical school at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. I’ve been here pretty much ever since.”

Jordan has been married nearly 40 years to Janet Bossard, the sister of his college roommate in Illinois. Her father was a physician in Indiana.

“I found what he was doing was really interesting,” Jordan said. “It looked a lot more interesting than biophysics, which was what I was studying before medicine. When I was an intern in internal medicine, cardiology was a big part of that. The cardiology faculty members were people I identified with. There were a lot of interesting things going on in cardiology at the time. I found it fascinating and challenging.”

Jordan has served as governor of Arkansas for the American College of Cardiology, and president of the Arkansas affiliate of the American Heart Association. He and his wife live in the country, have two adult children, and enjoy spending leisure time boating on area lakes.