Michelle Rochette, a recovery nurse who’s worked at Bartlett Regional Hospital for 12 years, says what she wants from the hospital’s next leader is someone who provides the same sense of reassurance to the hospital and community that she provides to patients who are in a vulnerable state after they get out of surgery.
“I’ve seen a lot of CEOs and CFOs during those 12 years so that would be nice — to have somebody who would stay and have a good vision about this place and make it run so that we don’t lose it,” she said during a meet-and-greet at the hospital last week for one of the three finalists interviewing to be its new chief executive officer.
“A CEO is part of this community, they’re going to like the hospital, like the community, like this area, they will want to stay,” Rochette said. “And if they like their job and are able to manage this place that means there would not be as much of a turnover.”
Michelle Rochette, a recovery nurse at Bartlett Regional Hospital, talks about the facility’s future with Joe Wanner, the hospital’s chief financial officer and one of three finalists to be its next CEO, during a meet-and-greet Aug. 28. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire)
A vote on who that leader will be may occur after the board of directors interviews the last of the three candidates Friday morning, although an official announcement won’t be made until a contract agreement is negotiated with the new CEO, according to Erin Hardin, a spokesperson for the hospital.
Whoever is hired as the new CEO will preside over a hospital that’s suffered leadership, staff morale and financial problems in recent years. Hospital officials and the three candidates said they feel progress has been made during the past year under interim CEO Ian Worden, but resolving the financial crisis and reassuring people the hospital’s operations are stable will be essential tasks for a new permanent CEO.
Worden told the Juneau Assembly in May the city-owned hospital could run out of cash within three years without significant changes, since the hospital hasn’t been profitable and has been losing about $1 million a month since the summer of 2020. Part of the remedy involves the elimination of some “non-core” services such as substance abuse recovery and crisis stabilization — unless the Assembly and/or other entities are willing to provide funding or take over the programs — a discussion Assembly members are scheduled to continue at a Finance Committee meeting Wednesday evening.
Worden has stated he intends to remain at the hospital through the end of the year to assist the new permanent CEO with the transition.
The three CEO finalists have significant differences in the types and locations of the healthcare facilities they’ve worked at, although all have many years of administrative leadership experience. All three, in interviews with the Empire, also said they have experience helping hospitals deal with the kinds of problems and transition Bartlett is facing.
The candidates, in the order they are being interviewed by the board of directors (with videos of the interviews posted online as they available), are:
Melanee Tiura
Tiura, who did her meet-and-greet at Bartlett on Monday, Aug. 26, said she started her healthcare career 27 years ago as a dietitian and diabetes educator. She then transitioned to patient education and care, and it wasn’t until she moved to Alaska nine years ago that “I moved into a leadership position based on what was available at that time, and found that I love that.”
“I love helping helpers, so people who are helping patients, I love to pave the way,” she said. “So I love program development, I love figuring out complex funding, I love to help them be able to do the work that they do.”
Tiura has the most Alaska healthcare experience of the three finalists, mostly in the Southwest region as a manager for the Bristol Bay Area Health Corporation based in Dillingham between 2010 and 2014, and CEO of Iliuliuk Family and Health Services in Unalaska between 2019 and 2021. In between those she was the director of physician services for the UP Health System — Portage, in Hancock, Michigan. She is currently the administrator at Providence Valdez Medical Center.
“I’ve actually had my eye on Juneau for quite some time,” she said when asked why she applied for the top job at Bartlett.
The challenges — and community role — at Bartlett share similarities to the Iliuliuk facility, Tiura said. She said both she and the clinic had to fulfill many roles, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, from which “we’re all in a rebuilding phase.”
“We did work with our city, so that was a really good collaboration for the sake of the clinic,” she said, noting Bartlett’s similar approach to seeking a resolution to some of its struggles. She said that while “I wish I could say that there were easy solutions to these problems,” leaders at Bartlett appear to have initiated a thoughtful process to deal with the situation.
“I think it’s being done very responsibly and respectfully, and then brought forward to hear what, what the public has to say about it,” she said. “Ultimately, this is your hospital, this is your services and yet if the hospital can’t afford to continue to float those programs we do need to either look for additional funding streams or change the model in some way.”
Questions about leadership stability at Bartlett are “actually one that I’ve been answering all day,” Tiura said.
“I would never take a position, I would never apply for a position unless I intended to be there long-term, so I would say that I do bring stability to the role should I be selected,” she said.
Staffing shortages have been widespread in the healthcare industry, especially since the pandemic, but Tiura said she had success in rural Alaska that she believes can be replicated at Bartlett.
“I would say lessons that I’ve learned is be a great place to work, number one, and people will come and they will refer their friends,” she said. “We’ve also looked at a lot of flexibility where possible. We’ve learned some things from people who have enjoyed living kind of a traveler life, and so tailoring our positions to temporary hires that may come back over and over — so they’re part of our community, but they come for three months or six months at a time, and then they come back next year at the same time.”
“So building those relationships will continue to help the organization, but tailoring it to the lifestyle that people have started to lead throughout the pandemic. So I think kind of capitalizing on what’s worked in other communities — and we’ve had some great successes to share — I would say that trying those in Juneau would be an excellent start.”
Among the challenges Bartlett is facing is increasing competition for money-generating services from entities such as SEARHC. Tiura said she has faced similar situations and the focus needs to be “where can we do what we do best and not overlap to the point that we’re harming each other.”
Joe Wanner
Wanner, who did his meet-and-greet Wednesday, Aug. 28, returned as Bartlett’s chief financial officer last November after two previous stints at the hospital dating back to 2011. He is plenty familiar with the duties of the top job since, among other things, he gave the CEO’s presentation during the hospital’s most recent board meeting when Worden was absent.
“I’ve been at the elbow of CEOs for the last decade so I understand what the role takes,” Wanner said.
“I’ve seen what a good CEO can do for the organization and what a bad one can do. So I think I can come in and make a positive impact to the organization and continue on some of the stuff that’s been positive over the last nine months now, bringing the hospital to a sustainable place.”
Wanner was Bartlett’s controller from 2011 to 2013, and its CFO from 2017 to 2018. In between those stints he was a top administrator at Wallowa County Health Care District in Enterprise, Oregon — first as its CFO between 2013 and 2017, then as its CFO and chief operating officer between 2018 and 2023.
When asked about the leadership stability concerns of employees, given his movement between the two hospitals every few years, Wanner said “I bought a home here and moved my family here, so that’s going to be the basis. This is now our home.”
Questions about employee morale came up in every discussion he had with staff during the screening process, so he understands the importance of providing reassuring leadership, Wanner said.
“Obviously when you see questions repeat themselves that’s something we need to focus on,” he said. “But a lot of it gets back to they’ve had such a rocky road at senior leadership seeing the change in directions every six months. I think that if I can bring the stability at the leadership level, and so the long-term plans are not constantly changing and they can feel secure in their positions, that’s going to be the first step.”
Wanner’s presence at Bartlett the past nine months means that, in addition to being the best-known of the three finalists to employees, he also is a key architect of the program cutbacks the hospital is making in an attempt to balance its budget. While some of those actions — such as shutting down the crisis stabilization program in the Aurora Behavioral Health Center that opened last December — have been criticized by people in the community, Wanner said such difficult decisions are necessary to keep Bartlett’s core operations healthy.
“You have to take a step back and look at the different pieces of the programs that we’re looking at,” he said. “Are they sustainable? Will they be sustainable as a standalone program, or will they need subsidy in perpetuity? And what’s that do to the other programs that we’re almost required to have?”
“So we took that as kind of the basis for our perspective and started looking at each program — which ones were losing significant amounts — and we looked at them. Can we fix the program? Is there any way we can make it profitable, or at least break even? In a lot of instances, there was nothing we could do.”
Wanner said such an approach will be part of his longer-term vision for Bartlett, which is serving a city and region that is both declining in population and facing increased competition from providers such as SEARHC.
“Healthcare is you try to diagnose an issue and solve it,” he said. “So it’s the same thing, just from a management perspective. We happen to have something going on with the hospital that’s causing this problem, so we need to figure out what the issue is, diagnose it and then cure the problem. And I think when you talk to anyone here they’re all going to be in line with that.”
Among the challenges Bartlett has faced — along with many other healthcare providers — is recruiting and retaining employees. One of the first Wanner would need to find if he is hired as CEO is a new CFO, although he said one advantage he’ll have is he’ll be in a good position to mentor whoever that might be.
“We have a pretty strong management team,” he said. “They’ve gone through COVID, they’ve been here for a lot of years, so they have support underneath the CFO role. And so if I can get someone that they’re sharp, they have a good personality, they get along with staff, I can train the other intangible pieces…So if I don’t find someone that’s tenured I feel confident in my ability to bring someone in.”
Jon Friedenberg
While taking over a hospital that may run out of cash in three years may seem like a daunting prospect, Friedenberg said he took on a far more perilous challenge in 2010 when he departed a profitable hospital in California to help lead one teetering on the brink.
“I left that and went to what at that time was called Marin General Hospital, and was one of three people who assumed responsibility for that hospital with two days cash on hand,” said Friedenberg, whose meet-and-greet at Bartlett is scheduled at 4 p.m. Thursday and his interview with the board at 8 a.m. Friday.
Jon Friedenberg, one of three finalists to be the new CEO of Bartlett Regional Hospital, is scheduled to participate in a meet-and-greet at the hospital at 4 p.m. Thursday and be interviewed by the board of directors at 8 a.m. Friday. (Photo provided by Bartlett Regional Hospital)
The facility, now known as MarinHealth Medical Center in Greenbrae, California, also lacked a proper computer system and didn’t meet the state’s seismic requirements, Friedenberg said.
“So we had to build an entirely new hospital, even though we had no money, and so a lot of people questioned my sanity and thought ‘Gee, why are you leaving like the most stable hospital in the country, a great hospital, and taking a job at a hospital that everyone thinks…was going to go bankrupt?’” he said.
The response, which also applies to why he is seeking Bartlett’s top job, is “I think that there’s good reason to believe that with the right mix of changes, a lot of which is already happening at Bartlett Regional, that financial stability can be restored.”
“The scope of the challenge at Bartlett is very modest compared to what we faced at Marin,” he said. “And if I didn’t think it was doable I wouldn’t be a candidate.”
Bartlett and Marin share some similarities, including being the only full-service hospital in their communities, Friedenberg said.
“I think that in both cases, with the right leadership, the right outreach, the right communication, that the situation can get addressed successfully,” he said. “That will create other opportunities for other initiatives, whether it’s focusing on adding services or improving existing services, quality and safety issues, and so on.”
Friedenberg remained at Marin until 2020, departing as a ribbon-cutting was about to occur for the hospital’s new facility — and after helping it get through the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic — to take a job at the CEO at Mary Crowley Cancer Research in Dallas. He remained there until December of 2022 before launching his own healthcare consulting company, also based in Dallas, which he said was motivated in part by a longtime interest in genomes (genetic material that comprises DNA in humans).
“I’ve been doing consulting a little bit in acute care, but mostly it’s been in oncology,” he said, referring to cancer diagnosis and treatment. ” And that’s been very rewarding.”
Having decided to go into business for himself a year and a half ago, why does he want to return to leading a hospital in a structured setting?
“The answer is that I spent 18 years in the (executive) suite of an acute care hospital, and there’s a part of me that really enjoys that work and I’ve had a lot of success doing that,” Friedenberg said. “I find it very professionally rewarding and so there’s been a part of me that’s, while I’m doing my consulting and oncology, looking to see if there is the right opportunity for me to jump back into acute care, and the issue for me is really one of fit.”
“Part of the attraction is that there’s certain challenges actively being addressed now by the (Bartlett) board and the leadership that’s there, but those are the kinds of issues that I have a lot of experience with,” he said. “If I feel that there’s an opportunity for me to make a meaningful contribution then that would be motivating for me.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
