President, Salem Regional Medical Center · Emergency physician · Director & Audit Chair, Meridian Trust Bank
Salem · Meridian Trust Bank · 911+ connections
I run a 400-bed hospital with 3,000 employees and still work two emergency shifts a month, because a hospital president who does not see patients forgets what the building is for.
I joined Meridian Trust's board in 2018, after the bank financed our cardiac wing, and chair its audit committee. I brought one thing from medicine: the morbidity-and-mortality review. When something goes wrong, we review it without blame and ask what the system should have caught. The bank's error-tracking process is modelled on it directly.
The first question is never 'who'. It is 'what should have caught this'.
At the audit committee this week we reviewed a wire that was sent to the wrong account in August. $18,400, recovered in 48 hours. The review lasted forty minutes and the word 'who' was not used once. Three controls changed. This is what hospitals taught me: people report what they will not be blamed for.
Reach the Beach: 200 km, done, with both daughters for the first time. Slowest of my eleven finishes. Best of my eleven finishes. $14,200 raised for the American Lung Association, which treats some of the same patients I do.
Bend branch sponsored the mile 90 water stop. We saw you. You were smiling. Suspicious.
Running a 400-bed hospital and still working the emergency room: two shifts a month, usually nights. Last Tuesday I treated a patient who was also, it turned out, a Meridian customer with a question about her mortgage. I referred her to Rosa. Everything is a system.
Introduced blameless incident review to the bank's audit and error-tracking process.
400 beds, 3,000 staff, Level II trauma centre. Opened the cardiac wing (2018) financed by Meridian Trust.
Still works two shifts a month.
M.D., Oregon Health & Science University, 1997
B.S. Chemistry, Oregon State University, 1992
The same review in 2017 would have taken a week and found a scapegoat. The three controls are already in the Folder.
Control no. 2 is a 140-foot-walk-to-the-printer type fix. Costs nothing. Already live.