‘New Guy’

By Steve Spencer

Afew minutes into an interview, Baptist Health President and CEO Troy Wells, discussing the health system’s culture, lobs a remark across the table that’s taken as self-deprecating throwaway. Even though he’s been at Baptist Health for 18 years, he said, sometimes he still feels like the new guy.

Wells came to work for Baptist Health in 2005 after the rural hospital he was running was sold. Wells knew Russ Harrington, then the CEO of Baptist Health, through industry networking and called him for advice. Harrington told him to show up and he’d find something for Wells to do. Wells took on whatever role or task Baptist needed done at the time. He ranged across departments and got a broader view than most administrators in any industry, picking up an invaluable perspective on the people, culture and mission of the institution.

When Harrington announced his retirement in 2015 after 40 years at Baptist Health, the board of directors decided to forego a nationwide headhunting effort. Instead, it voted to move Wells into the position. He’s been in charge ever since.

Wells’ entry into the health care industry almost didn’t come about. After graduating from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, he knocked around for a year, not sure what he wanted to do. He ran into a college friend who extolled the value of a graduate program in health services administration offered by the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Wells earned that degree, and a graduate fellowship at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Hot Springs followed, leading him to become administrator of Newport Hospital. There, he learned the day to day of running a hospital and experienced at ground level the issues involved in providing health care to a rural community.

“Coming from a rural hospital to work for the biggest health system in the state was intimidating,” Wells said. “I thought, there’s got to be all these people here that know something that I don’t know. This system is huge, it’s sprawling and I kind of felt lost.”

Founded in 1929, Baptist Health has grown into Arkansas’ largest private, not-for-profit health system, with more than 10,000 employees handling more than 20 percent of hospital business in the state. The organization is, inarguably, a cornerstone of the state’s health care system.

What kept Wells on course was Baptist’s mission. “A lot of people do the same things we do,” he said, “but what differentiates us is the reason why we do what we do.”

Wells stressed that this unity of mission, the ministry, makes Baptist Health’s culture such a palpable one.

“We put people first and foremost. Historically, we have made decisions that favor people over anything else, knowing that sometimes it’s not the textbook business decision. At least, in the short term.

“That mission is why we have so many long-tenured leaders and employees here. They know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. It creates a feeling of family.”

Wells didn’t so much have to instill a corporate culture at Baptist as to stay true to it in driving the organization’s growth.

“Arkansas is very rural. You have people spread out in a way that makes it difficult for them to access health care,” he said. “I think that health systems here have a responsibility to help communities that don’t have access to health care.”

For Baptist Health, this outreach includes sending physicians to more remote regions on a periodic basis, helping to operate rural hospitals that need help and increasing the use of virtual health appointments and other technologies.

“Our strategic planning breaks down growth into two compo- nents,” Wells said. “Service growth and growth of the Baptist system.”

The long-term trend has been for more and more services to move outside of a hospital’s walls. “A lot of health care delivered today is in ambulatory environments, physicians’ offices, surgery centers, events that can happen outside the massive institutional settings that are hospitals,” Wells said.

“There are some things, like high-end emergency care, critical care medicine and high-intensity surgical care, that will most likely continue to need to be accomplished inside a hospital.

“We’re also the largest volume provider of women’s health services across the state. We deliver a whole lot of babies. It’s vitally important that we make sure we do the hospital things really well.”

The trend toward consolidation among hospitals means Baptist Health sees opportunities to grow the system, too. “We’re in the middle of bringing Drew County Memorial in Monticello into our system,” Wells said. “And we anticipate that there could be other hospitals that would be interested in talking with Baptist about becoming part of our system at some point in the future.”

Asked about Baptist Health’s biggest challenge ahead, Wells didn’t hesitate.

“Manpower,” he said. “Labor is tight everywhere, but our industry needs a workforce with highly specialized training, nurses and respiratory therapists, physicians and pharmacists.”

Wells is proud of the actions Baptist has initiated to help create the workforce it needs. He noted in particular the system’s Graduate Medical Education program partnership with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

“We’re training 117 physicians there — internal medicine, psychiatry, family medicine and transition students.”

Baptist has also partnered with high schools to introduce young people to the possibility of health care careers at a much younger age.

“We are going to keep going upstream to try and solve some of our manpower problems,” he said. “We don’t expect a payoff in the short term, but these efforts are going to have a positive impact on the state for generations.

“Fundamentally, our business is people that need care and people who can provide that care. The job of our leadership team is to help those two groups get together, to support them and to make it all happen efficiently.”

Wells said taking this long-game approach is the backbone of Baptist Health’s strategy to streamline management of the complex, sprawling issues facing today’s health care players.

“You have to think about it like that,” he said.

Still, after almost a decade at the helm, Wells still feels like the new guy.

“While we are continuously bringing new talent into the Baptist system, the average tenure of our leadership team is 13 years. Our head of human resources has been with us 36 years, the central region president 28 years, the chief nursing officer 32 years, the EVP of strategy and innovation 35 years and the president of the medical center in Little Rock for 31 years.” He could’ve gone on with more examples. Wells’ line about feeling like the new guy wasn’t a throwaway; it reflects a deeper truth about the long-term culture of the Baptist Health system.