Columbia was big on consolidation and was a top-down company with tight central control. But that didn't stick well with community hospital CEOs, who over the years had developed their hospitals to meet their community's needs. I don't think you can take the Cartersville hospital model, for example, and put it in Macon or put Macon in Cartersville. That meant he wouldn't know the community, and it wouldn't know him. This nation is a collection of communities, but our leadership didn't understand that.
Health care is built on trust.
If physicians, employees, and patients don't have that trust, you're not going to succeed. If they don't know you, they're not going to trust you. Dr. Frist described it a number of years ago as a loose affiliation of hospitals with a common money source. It's a franchise. That means the CEO in Cartersville or Eastside or one of our other hospitals has a business to run, and he's entrusted with that business.