In the Driver's Seat
An interview with Amber Deardorff, Mary Greeley’s new president and CEO.
In January, after years of attempts, Amber Deardorff qualified for the Boston Marathon. A few months later, that achievement was overshadowed by another big moment: In August, she became Mary Greeley’s President and CEO.
Deardorff has been with Mary Greeley for 22 years. She started as an intern in our cardiac rehab unit and then went on to be an intensive care nurse before leading the team that launched our electronic medical health record system. In 2017, she became part of the hospital's administrative team, serving as vice president for clinical and support services. In 2023, she was appointed vice president, chief operating officer and chief nursing officer. She assumed the top leadership position following the retirement of Brian Dieter.
She takes the helm at Mary Greeley during a particularly challenging time in health care. Here she talks about what those challenges are and how Mary Greeley is meeting them, as well as how being a competitive athlete contributes to her leadership style.
You’ve had a long history at Mary Greeley. Was there a moment when you thought, ‘I want to be CEO’?
If you would have asked me when I started 22 years ago, I would have thought you were crazy. Even when I joined the executive team in 2017, it seemed like a big, important and a little bit scary job that really wasn't my end goal. However, after several years on the administrative team the opportunity became more intriguing to me.
Going through the interview process, though, and leading up to it, just understanding a little bit more of Brian’s day-to-day, being able to see his interactions, and the influence that he has on the community, some of the interactions he gets to have, that's very exciting.
And so, as I've transitioned to the CEO role, that's one of the most enjoyable parts of the new position—actually getting out and talking with other healthcare leaders, getting out into the community, and talking to business owners. It's a lot of fun, and it's the part that I didn't know I would love so much.
You’re into physical fitness and compete in marathons. How do these activities shape your leadership style?
Physical fitness, wellness, and a healthy lifestyle are important to me and I think it sets a good example. Most athletic people are competitive by nature, and I certainly am. I'm a goal-setter. I get up early. I don't mind ‘the suck.’ I am comfortable in chaotic, unpredictable environments. I enjoy the competitive spirit of things.
You also have experience as a nurse. How does that help?
I was at the bedside and saw firsthand how patients heal. I was part of the treatments we provide and understand why it's so important to have that compassionate care at the bedside, and how it takes the entire team to care for the wellbeing of the patient. It takes all of us to care for patients that walk through our door.
As CEO one of the first things you’ve initiated was accountability rounding, which involves leadership teams visiting departments in the medical center. What is the value of this?
It’s a way to ensure we are working toward our goals as they pertain to safety, patient experience, workforce experience, and our finances. Like everything we do, the focus is ultimately on the quality and safety of our patient care.
Each week is focused on one of our four goals. We have different leadership groups depending on the day, including the members of the administrative team. They round in departments, interacting with employees, patients, and families. When safety is the focus, for example, we’ll talk about plans to ensure patient safety and do safety checks in patient rooms. When patient experience is the focus, we will visit with patients and ask about any questions or concerns they have.
It's all about listening and learning, maintaining quality and safety, and keeping lines of communication between leadership and staff open and transparent.
What are your priorities?
Our patients, first and foremost. We're here to take care of our patients and we understand we can’t care for our patients without our dedicated and excellent workforce. These are my top priorities—patients, community, and our workforce.
I also understand that we can't have an organization long into the future without making good, sound business decisions as well. So, as we continue to see the changes in healthcare coming, we have to make sure to stay on top of some of the federal changes coming our way. Obviously, the payer situation is changing rapidly. So, making sure that we're able to adjust and modify our own workflows and business based on our financial metrics as well.
What do you think our biggest challenges are right now? And how are we going to meet them?
Healthcare is changing rapidly, but healthcare has always changed rapidly. If we would go back to the '90s, what a phenomenal, quick pace of change. Healthcare adapted, and we survived.
So, how do we continue to adapt to the changes that are coming, things that are changing within our community? Patients are just getting sicker. So, gone are the days when we had empty emergency rooms, gone are the days where we had a few hours of reprieve and rest. We're consistently full. We're consistently busy. And the patients that are coming in are really, really sick.
Making sure we have the tools, equipment, and technology that we need to continue to take care of our changing community will certainly be one of the things we need to continue to focus on.
Technology, AI, and how it's adapting the workflows that we have here in healthcare will be something in the next three years I think will be the fastest change that we see within our walls.
This is a challenging time for healthcare in Iowa. Rising insurance costs, concerns about Medicare, nursing shortages, physician recruitment issues, the rural hospital crisis—how does Mary Greeley navigate all this?
The most obvious answer is that we stay focused on our mission goals—making sure we have services in place to address the growing needs of the communities we service and making sure we have the workforce and partnerships to deliver those services.
We also need to collaborate closely with our colleagues from other hospitals. From an outsider's point of view, healthcare can be seen as very competitive. Just a quick look at billboards, and you will see the competitive nature alive and well. However, I think COVID really highlighted our interdependence on each other as well. When community hospitals around us start shutting down beds or when rural hospitals are no longer able to recruit surgeons or provide 24/7 coverage, patients who need these services have to go somewhere.
These significant cuts to the rural hospitals will force patients to go to more urban hospitals, which means our urban hospitals, including Mary Greeley, will become more and more saturated. We have to anticipate this and be ready for it. We’ve already seen it here with the increase in the number of obstetrics patients due to these services being discontinued in some communities in our area.
Rural and urban hospitals are going to be impacted by everything that’s happening. We might be competitive in nature, but we really are all interdependent. ‘How do we keep patients in their community?’ is something that I'm starting to hear a lot. The Iowa Hospital Association is doing a really nice job of involving all the Iowa hospitals in this important discussion.
In late 2024, we opened the Ames Surgery Center (ASC) in partnership with McFarland Clinic. How is that going?
Good. We’re still in the build-up phase, but all specialties have moved over as of September. Patients have phenomenal experiences there. The patient satisfaction is quite high, and the outcomes are tremendous.
As activity increases at the ASC, it will obviously decrease in Mary Greeley’s Operating Room (OR). How are we managing that?
Prior to the ASC, we were at capacity in our OR. We couldn’t bring in other specialties, other providers, because we didn’t have the room. Now recruitment is ongoing for specialties that we know will stay at Mary Greeley. Cardiology services, for example. Our cardiology clinic is expanding rapidly, and we just hired an additional mid-level provider and are seeing some expanding growth in our cardiac cath lab.
We just have to continue to make smart decisions. We have our eye on service line growth and gaps in services within our community. We partner with many Iowa clinics—McFarland Clinic being our main physician partner—to help fill the needs of our community.
The words quality and safety are used a lot at Mary Greeley. Why are they important and what do they mean for our patients?
They are more than buzzwords. In our consumer perception surveys, we typically get good ratings for quality, but our convenience is more highly rated. For larger hospitals, however, it’s just the opposite: low ratings for convenience and high for quality. I think some of that is people equating a larger organization with higher quality. I wouldn’t hesitate to put our quality of service, our quality of care, right up with larger hospitals.
I would also argue that our patients don't even think about safety or quality when they walk in our doors, because they know we are a safe organization with very high quality care. And that's shown in recognitions we’ve received like the Baldrige National Quality Award and Magnet. Our Magnet status shows that we are involving those nurses working closest to the patients in our safety and quality processes.
We focus all of our attention on making sure that our patients don’t experience harm when they are in our care. We track and measure our quality and safety processes, and we benchmark nationally, at the state level, and locally. We benchmark against ourselves, and we benchmark against the very best organizations. Our vision to be the best is very much aligned to this quality and safety as well. So, we, our patients and our community deserve the very best high-quality care. And I think anyone that walks into our organization will see that. It's everywhere.
In light of all these challenges, what makes you optimistic about the future of Mary Greeley?
The community first and foremost. We live in a fantastic community that's really generous and dedicated to healthcare. Our culture is fantastic, and we hear it all the time from our new employees coming in—how it's just a different place to work. We see it in our engagement surveys. We see it in the work that happens every day. We have a very highly engaged workforce, and that's going to help us continue to be successful into the future.
Also, we have great partners, including McFarland Clinic, Iowa Heart, Doran Clinic, Wolfe Clinic, and many other hospitals and clinics in our region. We also have a highly educated board of trustees. They keep their eyes on the trends and are very active with the American Hospital Association. They will always play a big role as we navigate our future. ■
