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Joy Drass, M.D.,WEMBA'91
Joy Drass likens her current position
as president of Georgetown University
Hospital to triage.
A critical care physician who practiced
in a surgical trauma unit for 13
years, Drass, 54, is good at quickly
assessing what needs to be done to save
a patient, then methodically performing
the tasks most likely to ensure survival.
Her charge at Georgetown, where
she attended medical school 20 years
ago, is not dissimilar. Georgetown,
like the Hospital of the University of
Pennsylvania and myriad other teaching
hospitals across the nation, is struggling
to survive. In July 2000, the university
sold its ailing teaching hospital to
MedStar Health, a Columbia, MD-based
nonprofit organization that owns
hospitals and other health care services
in the Washington-Baltimore area. In
the three years before MedStar stepped
in, the hospital recorded losses of more
than $200 million.
Drass, who played a key role in
negotiating the agreement, came to
Georgetown from the Washington
Hospital Center, also owned by
MedStar, where she served as vice president
for professional services and as
associate medical director. "If you work
in a surgical intensive care unit, there's
no environment in medicine, with
the exception of maybe an operating
room, that's more uncertain," she says.
"There are a lot of skills that I learned
and developed as a critical care physician
that have an absolute application
in a stressed organization. I call it triage,
but others might call it prioritizing.
It has to do with being able to look at
a situation and quickly set goals to get
from point A to point B, build team-work,
and develop structure to support
people when they are in an uncertain
environment."
For Georgetown, getting from point
A to point B meant focusing on four
key goals. Drass needed to stabilize
operations, improve patient customer
service, improve revenue collection, and
develop a long-term plan to ensure the
hospital's survival. Early clinical changes
included strengthening the hospital's
cardiovascular surgery capabilities and
trying to set the hospital apart from
peers by developing specialties in very
complicated procedures such as organ
transplant surgery and high-risk births.
Employee focus groups, town meetings,
and an aggressive recruitment program
were also put into place.
After a year and a half on the job,
Drass seems to have made some early
inroads. For the first six months of the
year, the hospital's in-patient volume
increased 8.5 percent compared to the
same period in 2000. Emergency room
patient numbers rose by 16 percent for
the same period. Employee turnover has
also dramatically decreased. Nursing
turnover fell from 25 percent to 6
percent, numbers that are critical to
improved patient care, Drass says.
"I never have a dull day. It's been
our transition year — a time for us to
gain the confidence of the physicians
and employees who became a part of
MedStar and for us to stabilize the hospital
and begin to rebuild. It was a big
change for this hospital," Drass says.
Indeed, for teaching hospitals such
as Georgetown, transitioning from the
more methodical, consensus-driven
pace of university governance to the
more business-driven corporate model
is often a struggle. Physicians, skeptical
of what they perceive as a less patient-centric
approach to clinical care, are
typically wary of new leadership, particularly
given the health care industry's
tumultuous state. In recent years, several
well-regarded medical centers have
been repeatedly sold and, in some cases,
their for-profit parent companies forced
into bankruptcy — a reality that also
heightened staff and physician anxiety.
Drass admits she faced a lot of "wait
and see" when she became president at
Georgetown. "But the employees and
physicians were at least glad that they
knew who their new partner was going
to be," she says, after years of uncertainty
and well-publicized financial difficulty.
"The uncertainty had come to an
end, and that offered some stability.
With the transition finally concluded, I
think there was at least a sense of relief."
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