INTERVIEW
Kathleen C. Hittner
POSITION: President and CEO, The Miriam Hospital
BACKGROUND: Hittner moved in 1979 to Rhode Island, where she began her tenure at Miriam as a staff anesthesiologist. Within three years, she had advanced to director of cardiovascular anesthesia. She advanced to the positions of anesthesiologist-in-chief and president of the hospital’s medical staff before becoming president and CEO in 2000.
EDUCATION: B.S. in biology and chemistry, Albright College, Reading, Pa., 1969; M.D., Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, 1973; residency in clinical anesthesiology, Georgetown University Hospital, Washington, D.C., completed 1976.
RESIDENCE: Warwick
AGE: 58
On the path to becoming president and CEO of The Miriam Hospital, Dr. Kathleen C. Hittner has had her share of firsts: She was the first woman on the Hospital Association of Rhode Island’s board of trustees, and the first woman president of the Rhode Island Medical Society. Last month, she was named 2006 New England Business Woman of the Year by Bryant University. The key to her success, Hittner says, is to do everything her male colleagues would do – and not let her gender get in the way.
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PBN: How do you feel about being named “Business Woman of the Year”?
HITTNER: I think sometimes one underestimates the business component to running a hospital. The Miriam Hospital is a nonprofit hospital, but it’s quite a business undertaking to run a hospital successfully. Basically, what we have here is all the hotel services one needs to provide for people in addition to caring for sick people. We have a huge enterprise. [As a] nonprofit, we have to be excellent stewards of the money that we earn and raise. … It’s critically important to having the equipment you need and to attracting the great employees that you have to attract in order to successfully run a good hospital.
PBN: How do the hotel-like services Miriam offers affect costs?
HITTNER: We make every effort to make our patients comfortable in ways that don’t necessarily cost you more money. One of the things we focus on is customer service and the way we treat our patients. … A lot of the services are geared toward comfort, particularly for our elderly patients. We have a very high percentage of elderly patients here. … We have specific programs in the hospital, such as the Genesis program, which are geared toward mobilizing our elderly patients and getting them well quickly. The valet parking serves not only patients, but also our neighbors. It provides ease to our patients, but it also keeps people off the streets so they’re not parking in front of our neighbors’ homes.
PBN: In 2005, you hired Monica Anderson to focus on community outreach. How’s she doing?
HITTNER: Monica is doing a beautiful job. The main thing she does with neighbors is maintain accurate, timely communication so they know what is going on with the building project and around the hospital. She does a tremendous job dealing with the community – not just individual neighbors, but also being of service to the neighborhood. … What we have done besides [hiring] Monica, is involve the neighbors specifically in some of the committees that have to do with our building plans.
PBN: What is the status of the hospital’s expansion?
HITTNER: If you look to the right of the hospital, you see that new building is up. All of the steel is up. We’re just starting to enclose and waterproof the building so that we can begin the inside preparation. The building should be occupied by September 2007.
PBN: What will that mean for patients and employees?
HITTNER: The first floor is going to be a new radiology suite, a beautiful new cafeteria – with windows, which I promised them for the beginning – and meeting rooms. The second floor is going to be 10 replacement operating rooms, so all operating rooms are going to be brand new. … The third floor is going to be 36 private rooms and private bathrooms. Recently articles have been written … on the importance of private rooms. Going forward, the architects want hospitals to focus on private rooms for prevention of the spread of infection. Keeping patients in their own space with their families is very important.
PBN: What impact do you see the Landmark Cardiac Center having on Miriam’s center, which until Landmark was one of just two in Rhode Island?
HITTNER: Competition in the health care environment is there without a question. We have to manage that competition like any other business. And how is that? We have to make sure that we’re doing our job really well, making it convenient for our physicians and our patients. Competition is a healthy thing. I think it always makes you a little better.
PBN: What impact has high-deductible insurance had on health care?
HITTNER: What happens with high-deductible insurance is that a lot of patients are dropping their insurance because they don’t want to pay the deductible. Or they’re not seeking care when they need it because they don’t want to pay the high deductible. Then whatever illness they have gets worse and worse, so when they do come to a hospital, they’re quite ill. I really see that as a negative all the way around. What I really think is sad is that many of our patients don’t even know that they have the high deductible until they come and seek services. They may read about, they may have been told about it, but it doesn’t register. … All of this – health insurance, Medicare Part D – the patients are so confused overall. We spend a lot of time and energy helping them to understand.
PBN: How has being part of the Lifespan network helped Miriam?
HITTNER: Being part of Lifespan has been extremely beneficial to Miriam Hospital. One of the big ones is information systems. We have come a tremendously long way in developing good information systems like physician order management, where doctors put orders into the computer and it automatically goes to the pharmacy. The biggest thing that information systems advance has done, I think, is promote patient safety. So we can read the doctor’s orders because we don’t have a handwriting issue to deal with. Also, the availability of information for the physician to take care of a patient is very important.
