CEO, St. Francis Hospital-Bartlett

St.Francis-Bartlett Hospital CEO, Kem Mullins, gets energized dealing with the many facets that make up the management of a hospital. As the head of St. Francis-Bartlett, he’s currently overseeing an expansion that will double the size of this suburban hospital. It’s a job Mullins is well-suited to, having been in hospital administration for more than 15 years.

It was in his early years that he learned the value of hard work. Mullins labored in the coal fields of West Virginia to put himself through college. And though his father couldn’t help much with tuition, his job with the coal company ensured his son always had steady work. Mullins’ father also suggested his son take a business management course during college. Kem followed his dad’s advice, and wound up studying under a professor who was launching an undergraduate degree in healthcare administration. Once classes got underway, Mullins knew he’d found his niche. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in healthcare management from Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia.  

“I had it in my mind that this career would allow me to leave West Virginia and go places,” he said. Indeed, it looked promising. His first interview took him to Naples, Florida. But his new employer, Health Management Associates, told him it needed an associate administrator to work between two small rural hospitals — in Kentucky and neighboring West Virginia. So much for far-flung assignments.

In his first position out of college, Mullins served two, 100-bed hospitals, an assignment that required him to routinely drive between the locations as he assisted in the managed-care contract. But he found the work energizing and continued his schooling, eventually earning an MBA from Morehead State University in Kentucky.

He learned a lot about hospital administration during those first years, and found he was good at it. His personable style also won him allies, and when the CFO he worked with later left to join Tenet Healthcare, he eventually joined the company, too.”I had the energy, drive, and desire to learn more,” he said. Now with Tenet Healthcare for 12 years, Mullins stepped into the CEO position in 2006, tasked to head St. Francis-Bartlett Hospital. He was promoted following a three-year position as chief operating officer at Tenet’s Atlanta Medical Center in Atlanta, Georgia, where he oversaw a 460-bed tertiary care facility.

When Mullins first took over management of St. Francis-Bartlett in 2006, the facility was operating under capacity. What he quickly determined was that administrators had not sought to build strong relationships with area physicians, a trend Mullins quickly worked to reverse. Eight years later, the hospital is in the midst of a $45 million expansion which will add 96 beds to the 100-bed hospital. By next spring, the hospital expects to have 56 new beds fully operational. The third floor has shell space that would allow the hospital to expand by another 40 beds.

Significant expansion in a relatively short time

Mullins said that when St. Francis-Bartlett first opened, the development trend was for a hub and spoke model, a community-based, suburban hospital designed to be a feeder into a larger hospital with tertiary services like St. Francis-Memphis.

“It wasn’t designed to support a comprehensive medical center,” said Mullins. “But as Bartlett has grown, so too, has the desire to have a hospital that meets all of the needs of its patients.”

When Bartlett leaders first campaigned the state for a facility, one argument made was that this was the largest suburban community in West Tennessee without a hospital. “Both the mayor and aldermen felt like it was an amenity the community needed,” in part to address the growth of population in northeast Shelby County. But Mullins said, this is calculated growth. “We don’t want to duplicate services, like open heart, neurological, burn, or full peds,” that are offered by St. Francis-Memphis. “Otherwise, we do everything they do.”

Mullins said there was no magic wand involved in growing the hospital.

“We looked at our existing primary care base and who wasn’t using the hospital and discovered physicians in the community had developed a large referral base that wasn’t referring here,” he said.  “We had to gain their trust and explain our vision to convince them that our primary objective was providing quality care and exemplary service.”

Ensure quality control

When it came to quality control, Mullins said, “We had an aggressive performance improvement initiative because of our capacity limits, from ER to discharge. We’ve had metric measurements to access whether we’re providing the right care at the right place and the right time.”

One interesting service Mullins put into place is “In Quicker,” which allows patients to schedule ER visit times.

“Scheduled ER visits allow patients to plug in where peak hours don’t exist, since we won’t give reservations during peak hours,” he said. “It helps to manage expectations to see the wait time of the ER. This way, patients can wait in the comfort of their homes until their time comes up. We’re trying to be more transparent with those times. Patients also fill out an application and if it shows certain symptoms, there is a nurse on-call 24-7.

When asked what traits he possessed that made him a good administrator, Mullins responded, by saying, “Recognizing opportunity.”

When Mullins came into the market, he saw potential growth opportunities. Since then, St. Francis Healthcare has opened three primary care clinics in the Memphis market. It’s also important, he said, “To have strong convictions to your principals because people will see through it if you don’t. Be honest in business dealings, regardless of the outcome, and have the ability to develop good physician relationships, because you can’t provide good patient care without physicians.” 

The key elements to running a healthcare organization are still important today: You must focus on delivery of care, service to patients, and service to physicians and employees.

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