MORGANTOWN – David Goldberg, president and CEO of Mon Health System and Davis Health System, is proud to be at a community hospital and proud of the staff — medical and otherwise — that surrounds him.
The Dominion Post sat down with Goldberg to talk about the system he oversees and how he approaches his leadership role.
Mon Health and Davis Health make up Vandalia Health North, serving as a community health system – as opposed to a university-connected academic medical center.
“From a community perspective, we’re closer to the ground,” he said. Academic centers train medical professionals. “I take what they do and bring it to action.”
Mon Health also does research and trains residents along with medical and nursing and pharmacy students, and nurse anesthetists.
“We are training them at the bedside, but on a smaller scale, in a community environment to give them that next level of education. But we’re also making sure that we are always accessible and dealing with the community’s needs in the moment.”
The medical staff and management team are totally engaged, he said. They know their patients and see them in their offices and in the hospital. “That is community medicine … and I think the community hospitals are the linchpin to the healthcare system.”
Goldberg said he serves seven to 10 customers every day: patients and their families, colleagues, doctors and staff, boards, the foundation and foundation board members, politicians and the broader community.
“We are a community charity. Mon Heath Medical Center is the county hospital.” So he is responsible to be a good steward of the dollars, keep up the building, and provide tools the staff and doctors need.
That means he’s constantly out walking the halls. “The only way you can do it is you get to meet with them and talk with them to make sure we’re making good investments based on what they’re seeing day in and day out.”
Goldberg holds town halls for all staff and meets with a group of physician leaders on one Wednesday a month at 6:30 a.m. The group includes medical directors and members of the medical staff leadership, medical group leader Dr. Brad Warden and physician group Vice President Karen Friggins.
They go over what it is like to practice medicine at Mon and Davis, to make sure that the needed tools are there, access is there, tests are being done timely, the hospital is friendly, clinics are clean and accessible, “what is it like and what do we need to do to continue to be laser focused on our patients each and every day? Our mission is every patent every time.”
Goldberg said he considers Mon Health Medical Center an advanced community hospital. It offers thoracic surgery, high-level orthopedics, same-day joint replacements, Watchman implantation.
Mon Health and its Vandalia South sister CAMC offer an emerging advanced procedure called renal denervation, used to treat high blood pressure. A Friday article published by the American College of Cardiology explains: “RDN involves the selective disruption of the sympathetic nerves located in the renal arteries. By ablating these nerves, RDN aims to reduce sympathetic activity, thereby lowering BP. The procedure is performed using various methods, including radiofrequency ablation, ultrasound or perivascular injection of neurotoxic agents.”
Representatives of a European company called Record Medical, which developed the Paradise Ultrasound Renal Denervation system, is coming to Mon Health this month to talk about how it can do advanced procedures, he said. “What does that say that they’re coming from Europe to come to West Virginia?”
And, Goldberg said, Mon Health is the only electrophysiology accredited hospital in West Virginia. Electrophysiology deals with heart rhythm problems, such as AFIB.
“All of these things happen because we can make things happen in the community environment,” he said. “Our job is to engage everyone [on staff] to be an owner.” Doctors see the numbers to understand the business side in order to be good stewards of the dollars.
They continue to grow, Goldberg said. They’ve hired nearly 40 doctors through the end of August and have another 20 on deck to start between now and February.
‘People want to come here, and it’s because the doctors are part of telling the story,” he said,
And they are running in the black. They provided merit and market pay adjustments to staff at Mon and Davis in August. “We’re investing in our people.”
Email: dbeard@dominionpost.com
