Dr. Ian McFadden

As a young man, Dr. Ian McFadden, Chief Executive Officer of

Sweetwater Hospital Association, remembers the childhood influences that made him the CEO he is today.

As he explained, “My Mother was a medical librarian for 45 years. I spent time making rounds and delivering papers to various hospital departments with my mother.” Working with his mother influenced Ian to continue working inside the local hospital in Alabama during high school and college.

Throughout his college career, Ian continued to build his relationship with his local hospital under the influence of the CEO. Ian’s father, a county commissioner and board member of the hospital, spoke to the administration and asked them to put his son to work while he was at home. His parents felt it would instill in him discipline and focus. Ian worked for the CEO of the local hospital and got introduced to the administrative side of healthcare. Spending time in each department, Ian learned how a hospital operated and how patient care was delivered. The CEO helped mold Ian’s final career decision to be in Healthcare Administration.

Ian attended the University of Alabama Birmingham (UAB), eventually earning a Master’s in Health Administration, after which he worked at the top level of every hospital he was assigned. HCA Healthcare was the first company where he served as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of a small hospital in Florida.

Afterward, Ian worked for West Tennessee Healthcare in Jackson, Tennessee for nearly ten years, helping to develop their system.

Following a mission trip to Haiti, where he saw extreme poverty, Ian changed his philosophy and joined an inner-city public hospital in Memphis as the COO. “It was at the Regional Medical Center in Memphis where we developed a culture improvement process that became a staple for every turnaround I would do after that,” Ian says. “Turnaround is not necessarily only about financial and operational issues,” he explains. “It should be cultural as well. If you can turn around the culture, everything else is much easier,” adds Ian.

After completing his doctorate at UAB, Ian went overseas, forming his own firm, HRM International. His firm took hospitals in Saudi Arabia and Dubai and put them through the cultural development process to help them achieve rapid margin improvement with great success. “Covid changed all that,” Ian says.

Beginning in 2020, he didn’t want to travel anymore because of the pandemic. So, he decided to return to the U.S. and find the right place to be in rural community health, a place reflective of the type of community he grew up in. Ian joined Sweetwater Hospital in January 2021.

Sweetwater Hospital is a 70-bed rural facility serving East Tennessee. Ian, who has visited at least 50 hospitals in this country and around the world, feels the model of Sweetwater Hospital is probably the best that he has seen of a rural world-class facility. The debt-free hospital has everything a community expects to get from a healthcare perspective; pristine facilities, state-of-the-art technology, highly qualified staff, a growing roster of primary and specialty providers and specialists, and an outstanding support system from the community.

Sweetwater Hospital serves, view it as their “place of destination for healthcare.” And it is a dominant player in this market and has good support from the physicians and community.

“At Sweetwater Hospital,” Ian says, “all the facilities are updated or newly developed.” We most recently added a new patient tower with an updated seven-bed ICU. There are plans to add eight additional ICU beds within the next year. The hospital has also added satellite facilities, including Urgent Care, Industrial Medicine, and Physical Therapy. “We’re doing all these things because the market recognizes Sweetwater Hospital as the place to go for healthcare,” Ian says.

Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) will be offered starting later this year with the Da Vinci Intuitive Robot already purchased and onsite. This will precede the start-up of a Diagnostic Cath Lab the following year, for which a certificate of need has already been secured.

The core values of Sweetwater Hospital are changing. Until recently, its image was that of a traditional rural hospital serving the population of Sweetwater, approximately 6,000 citizens. “Now, we want to go from taking care of people in Sweetwater and understanding their healthcare delivery needs to caring for people in the entire five counties,” says Ian.

“We can serve those 500,000 citizens.”

Ian points out they are developing a systematic concept of caring for a broad area of people in a region of five countries. As that entails becoming more innovative, they now foster innovation as a major value. “We also foster growth as a major value,” Ian adds. “We foster respect, integrity, and dignity for our people as a major value. Building a culture of employee engagement is also essential, and we have a family-oriented culture because everybody knows everybody in a rural community.”

“We believe our responsibility is to take care of this region’s people, and we have that ingrained in everything we are about,” Ian says. “We are changing our culture from Sweetwater-oriented culture to East Tennessee region-oriented culture. We want to put family values at the forefront.” Sweetwater Hospital doctors are also committed to the East Tennessee region a nd its community. “Our values are patientfocused and community-based,” says Ian.