PHOTO | ATRIUM HEALTH

Atrium Health President and CEO Gene Woods has led the company’s growth and stature as a regional economic power over five years.

A calendar mixup led Gene Woods into a career in health administration.

Atrium Health’s president and CEO aspired to become a business professional when he enrolled at Pennsylvania State University but veered to a different path after a chance meeting with a hospital administrator at a health career day. In five years as Atrium Health’s CEO, Woods has led the company to unprecedented growth that includes Charlotte’s first medical school and recognition by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in 2020 for initiatives to reduce health disparities.

Woods, who is past chairman of the American Hospital Association board of trustees, talked about his early life, mentorship, leadership and equity at a recent session of The Post’s C-Suite Conversations. Responses are edited for brevity and clarity.

His upbringing:
Woods: My father was born in a rural town in Tennessee called Yuma, [in] western Tennessee. I think the population when he was born was about 300, and so he tried to get out of there as soon as possible and joined the Navy. And along his travels, he ended up in Rota, Spain, southern Spain.

Serbia is where my mother was born about an hour south of that town, so they actually got married, and it couldn't have been a more unlikely couple. Then they moved to Rhode Island. That's where a lot of actually interracial couples in the Navy would go and had a robust Portuguese population. So actually, it was born on a base in Providence, it's called Quonset Point. We lived there for a while, then in New Jersey then ended up going back to Spain. And so really the most formative times in my life, I spent seven years in Spain as a child from 4 all the way to 11.

My mom is the oldest of 12, and my dad’s the oldest of nine, so every time the family gets together, there's a lot going on. It's a big party, so that’s the kind of environment I grew up in.

What directed him to health care administration:
Woods: The folks I grew up with, some of them wanted to be doctors, some of them wanted to be lawyers. Nobody knew what a healthcare administrator did. Nobody had any sense of what that was. I’m fluent in Spanish because my mother spoke to me in Spanish since day one, and I knew I liked business, so I thought I was going to do some type of international business.

I spoke to a professor, and he said, ‘Well, you’re in luck, there's a career day on international business. Somehow, I got the dates messed up and actually went to the healthcare career day where there was a local hospital administrator, and he said healthcare is going through significant transformation and we need some young, bright minds to really help us transform healthcare.

If you care about community, if you really care about community, being a healthcare executive is one of the best ways you can actually improve people's health and wellbeing. And so really, after that one little mistake, I decided to join the undergraduate program, Penn State Health Planning administration, at the time was the largest in the country, in terms of undergrads. And so, and the rest is history, as they say.

Impact of mentors:
I've always thought big and large. I’ve always knew from the day I became an undergraduate at Penn State that I wanted to aspire to really have as big an influence and significance of a difference that I could make. I thought that was going to be as CEO as a larger organization, so that was my dream from the beginning. Along those lines, I had some wonderful what I would say sponsors, more so than mentors.

My first job in a hospital was in a little rural town in Pennsylvania Tyrone Hospital, the CEO there was African American, and he helped me [by] giving me increasingly big jobs to do at the time. I’d never had any experience and some of the things that he had me do and it was my way of learning and him helping guide me throughout it.

He exposed me to a lot of his network essentially, so I got to meet folks early in my career that I might not have otherwise met and formed a relationship with. And then I also worked for one of the largest health systems in the country, Catholic Health Initiatives. And the CEO there, Kevin Lofton … also really put a lot of faith in me and kept giving me more areas of responsibility. And that's how I kind of developed and learned and grew.

The other thing I will say, we talk about white allies these days, and I had a number of folks coming up – white males – that really also showed me the ropes and gave me opportunity. So, I've been blessed with a lot of folks helping me throughout this journey.

On leading a company like Atrium with its own history of bias against Blacks, and the charge of improving health outcomes for everyone:
I think that's a really important question. I mean, I think, first of all, obviously, the board here five years ago decided to hire me, first and foremost, because they felt I could do the job. And that's always the important thing, but also because they knew, given my background, that social justice has been always something that's been part of who I am, including when I was chairman of the American Hospital Association, which is the lobbying organization for 5,000 hospitals in the country.

I started a national movement around having health equity, so they knew that came to it as well. I think that's why they brought me on. If you look at our mission, it’s to improve health elevate hope and advance healing for all, so when I first came here, that was the most actually inspiring part of the mission.

It showed up in the middle of COVID. Last April, when we saw in West Charlotte, in the West End area, that there were disparities in testing, for example, it was all about action. It wasn’t about words at that time. So, we loaded up our roving vans, we work with the church communities, and we made sure that those testing disparities were eliminated, working on the same thing with vaccines. I think we have a powerful mission, from the board throughout the organization feel it, have internalized it. … I think it really, it's a culture that's ready to continue to grow and be the lead organization in the country for social impact, starting with our communities, but also, we believe that we can be a national model.

Atrium’s leadership:
Woods: I feel extraordinarily good. You know, there’s always work to do. So, every day I get up, saying, OK, what’s next? And how do we continue to advance but from the board through the leadership team, everybody's committed to help hope and healing for all. And it's not just words on some paper, it's really something that gets us up and gets us motivated every day.

On being nimble as a corporation:
If you are a $12 billion organization [like Atrium Health], if you get bigger and slower, that's not going to work in today’s environment. So, agility is really critical, and it has to do with how we make decisions. I'll give you an example. In the middle of COVID, when things were really peaking, we were running out of bed space and we knew that we had maybe two to three weeks maximum before we would fill up our beds.

… Physicians came to me and said ‘we got an idea that we can care for patients at home with COVID. We’ve got the monitoring systems, we've got the medics that can go into the houses, we've got everything. So, we’d like to go ahead and give this a try.’ And within a matter of a couple of weeks, we had made a major decision like providing care for COVID patients in their home safely. And we've seen about 80,000 patients now at home. So, the ability for being a large organization to make decisions that quick is really important.

I always say my goal is and will continue to be no matter how large we get is to make [Atrium Health], for lack of a better way of saying it, a small-town feel, so that people know each other, and we build different forums for people to connect. And my team knows no matter where they're at, in Georgia or anywhere else, if they if they need to talk to me, I'll typically get back to them the same day or the next day.

On Charlotte’s evolution from banking center 20 years ago to becoming a leader in medicine.
We aim to make it that way. We’re already known nationally in so many ways at Atrium, and we believe to this [new] medical school through this innovation district and through the new care sites that we’re providing in the strategies that we have this will be known as a healthcare town as well. And I think that's just good for the region, and it’s good for North Carolina.

On showcasing musical talents:
Woods: Actually, I’m in the middle of finalizing an album. … We’re going to put that out probably in the fall sometime. I have some serious players. I’ve got the trombone player ran James Brown’s band for a decade. And I’ve got sax player from Charlotte who actually played with Prince, I've got a whole bunch of who’s who on the album. It’s been fun because it's been the job that I do is 24/7/365.

It’s nice to every once in a while, get to the studio and do something a little bit different. … It's been very good for my mental health.

Comments