An anesthesiologist and hospital administrator from Massachusetts will serve as the next president and chief executive officer of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health system.
Dr. Joanne Conroy, who currently runs the Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in Massachusetts — a teaching hospital — will take over in August. She succeeds Dr. James Weinstein, who retires at the end of June.
Anne-Lee Verville, the chair of the hospital system’s board of directors, led a search committee that selected Conroy. Verville said in a statement that Conroy has a “collaborative approach, communication skills, and demonstrated ability to think and work strategically to achieve key goals.”
Conroy is the first woman to run both the hospital and health system since the health system started in 2009. Her salary was not available.
Conroy received her bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College, whose medical school is affiliated with the hospital. She received her medical degree from the Medical University of South Carolina. She is a trained anesthesiologist with certifications in pain management.
“It’s really an honor to be selected to represent the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health system,” Conroy told reporters Thursday. She said she has admired the hospital since she was an undergraduate and continues to admire how they it tackles health care reform.
“I saw how they took the information from the Dartmouth Atlas,” a project that looks at how medical resources are used throughout the country, “and actually integrated it into their culture in a way that was probably unlike other organizations in the country,” Conroy said.
She said those questions include: “How much care is the right care? Would some of our interventions actually be harmful? How do you pay health care organizations on quality and outcomes as opposed to just units and service?”
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center is a half-owner of OneCare Vermont, the Colchester-based health care reform entity that seeks to create one coordinated health system that pays doctors based on the quality of care they provide instead of the quantity of services they perform.
The Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health System started in 2009. The system added New London Hospital in 2013; Mount Ascutney Hospital and Health System in Vermont in 2014; Cheshire Medical Center in Keene in 2015; Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital in Lebanon in 2016; and the Visiting Nurse and Hospice of Vermont and New Hampshire, also in 2016.
Conroy outlined two ways she wants to strengthen the health care system when she takes over.
“One of the specific challenges is, how do you actually create a system with your new affiliates,” Conroy said. During her interview process, she said the affiliates said they were “really interested in helping to form that Dartmouth-Hitchcock health care system.”
“We have to decide what it means to be a system,” she said. “I think that’s the first conversation that I’ll be having with a lot of our affiliates that have really joined us in the last two years.”
Conroy also said she would like to strengthen the system’s role in southern New Hampshire. She said the system already serves “a tremendous number of people” there and the system could “leverage and grow” its presence.
Conroy joins the hospital system after a period of turbulence. Just one year ago, the flagship hospital posted a $112 million deficit. In October, the hospital announced it would lay off 84 people. Some executives chose to leave their jobs.
Conroy said the business team at the hospital has already started addressing the financial issues. She said the budget issues could also be addressed through efficient processes and billing more effectively for services.
Dartmouth-Hitchcock sued the state of Vermont in 2015 because it receives lower Medicaid payments than the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington, even though the hospital serves as a major referral site for patients in southern Vermont.
Conroy said she wanted to address any employee morale issues through open transparency, including town hall meetings, employee newsletters, walking around the hospital during the day, and walking around the hospital at night.
She said of the night rounds: “The night crew is a little different from the day crew. You need to round at 2 in the morning as well a 2 in the afternoon.”
Conroy starts Aug. 7.
