Amy Hart, CEO of Cuyuna Regional Medical Center in Crosby, Minn., understands as well as anyone in her position that varied perspectives are valuable in leadership — and that it can be lonely at the top. In that vein, she recently issued an invitation to her peers.
“We believe that we’re the largest critical access hospital in the country,” she said on the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast.” “So if you’re out there and you’re bigger — at $225 million net, 1,000 employees, doing 11,000 surgeries with surgeons who all live in my community, and all sorts of things you wouldn’t think happen in a 25-bed critical access hospital — please reach out, because we would love to swap notes.”
She has served as Cuyuna Regional CEO since February 2022, and in other roles at the hospital since April 2013.
“I was the COO prior, and if you think about my healthcare career journey, operations was my thing,” she said. “I cut my teeth in durable medical equipment and then went into private clinics, so I had that physician relationship. As you might hear me talk about sometimes, my undergraduate degree is actually in elementary education, so it’s an interesting path to get to where I am.”
Ms. Hart connected with Becker’s to discuss the pros and cons of being a “known entity” in her town, why even the smallest accomplishments are worth celebrating and why confidants are crucial.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: You mentioned your elementary education background. As you look back on where you’ve come from and how you ended up as CEO of Cuyuna Regional, is there something you learned outside of healthcare that you’ve been able to apply to your career?
Amy Hart: I think it is the elementary education part. I used to kid back in the day — and this will probably age me — that the only difference between running healthcare and running a third grade was the bulletin boards. And now, with quality and trying to make things interesting and understandable for people, you walk around all the hospitals and there are all these really cool bulletin boards — if we even call them that anymore — that show our progress. When I was student-teaching in third grade, it was the progress of how you were reading: Were you making it to the moon in your reading journey? And now we have that same thing in the quality journey.
So I guess the outside lesson is that people want and need to be reminded of the why. I know we talk about that a lot, why we’re in this crazy business. It’s a tough business, but you’ve got to look at the reward part.
Q: When you’ve had a particularly busy or fruitful day, what does that look like for you, and what is the “why” for you?
AH: I’m not a clinician. I always say that my contract says “no blood”; that was never my thing. But I always described what I could do from an operational standpoint: I always said I was the front end of the train, and my job was to clear the track so the people who are helping the patient directly don’t have to mess with this administrative stuff. And we’re an independent hospital; we are not part of a system. So we have some of that advantage, and disadvantage, of being pretty close to that patient care to be able to make those differences.
Q: As someone who’s clearing the tracks, you’re going to have days when things are not so easy. But before we get to how you cope with those days, because I do want to touch on that, what are you doing every day to keep yourself healthy?
AH: It’s both emotional and physical, and sometimes we forget that you have to do both. I’ve not been as good at it lately, but I got really good at going to the gym and working with a trainer. That investment is worth it for me — having a personal trainer. I also do massage. I invest that way in me.
You [also] need something that helps you completely unfocus. And this is what I’ve learned as I’ve grown older in my career: You can’t think about [your career] all the time, because it’s always going to be there. So how do you have those little escapes? Because I’m an operational person, it seems like I’m always thinking about the next step, what’s ahead, those kinds of things. So when I get to just piddle around in the yard or the house doing projects — I might have three or four different things going at a time — I can let my mind wander a little bit, like the Beatles song “Fixing a Hole.” And I can do projects where I actually see progress, because in our job, every day the desk is not clear, the project is not done, the issue is not resolved. Every now and then, you need to go, “Check. It’s done.” So if I clean out the junk drawer and that’s all I can get to that night, there’s some sense of accomplishment. Or I got the lawn mowed, or whatever it is that I did. That’s important.
There are also times when I go home and turn the music up, whether it’s in the car or at the house. Fortunately, I have no one besides two wiener dogs who are concerned about the noise. Sometimes you get lost in that for a little bit, and it helps me rejuvenate — why I’m doing this, what I’m doing.
Q: When you’re blasting that music, is it the Beatles? What is on your playlist right now?
AH: I’m a very big David Bowie fan, including the tattoo. A lot of people may not know that, so that’s probably it. However, my son plays guitar, and I would say he’s widened my music interest to some of the newer music, so it’s a wide variety. I’m sure there are some things on there that would make your mom blush, so that’s why it’s in the headphones when you’re working out or those kinds of things. But it helps you get that out of your system a bit.
I would say on the hard side — they talk about this, but you don’t know until you’ve been there — as you rise through the ranks, it does become lonelier and lonelier. I technically live in a town of 2,600, and even going out to get dinner or getting something to go, I’m a known entity. The good and the bad of that is people will come up to you and tell you about the wonderful experience they had, but they’ll also come up sometimes and say, “I have a problem with my bill,” or, right now, “Why don’t you have the shuttle service for the parking lot anymore?” And I don’t have it resolved — having that true confidant you can bounce those things off of, that real thought partner, whether internal or external, who will just listen [is important]. Because that adds to the stress, especially in this crazy world of healthcare we’re living in right now. And like I said earlier, that’s the reach-out: “What are you guys doing?” to someone who’s very similar to you.
There was a recent article about why we’re lonely at work, and it’s not just the CEO. Some employee engagement surveys used to phrase the question, “Do you have a best friend at work?” And at least the company we use had to change that, because people were saying, “No, I don’t.” So it became more, “Do you have someone you feel comfortable enough to go talk to?” I think we’re seeing that as we talk about staffing and all those kinds of things, and where you use the dollars you do have on engagement: People feel lonely.
Q: Is there a group of people you go to when you need a sounding board, or any reason to talk to someone about work or anything else?
AH: It depends on what I want to talk to them about. Yes, I have people — mostly a lot of my peers who have retired — whom it’s frankly OK to talk to, and you have confidence that you can talk to them. And it’s not that I’m totally selective, but if I know that one person was the expert at geriatric care and I’ve got a geriatric care problem, I might reach out to them and say, “How did you handle this?”
Q: You mentioned that you came from a different place originally, when you started out in elementary education, but you’ve been in healthcare for a long time now. When you look back on that, is there something you’ve learned about yourself from working in healthcare?
AH: I’ve adapted. I never would have thought at career day in high school that they would say, “Someday you’re going to be a COO or a CEO of a health system.” That was so far beyond what careers were even out there — to be able to say, “And you’re going to be successful at it,” or, “There are going to be days that you feel successful at it, and enjoy it, and find the mission in it.” It’s not just a job. That’s the thing I think is surprising to me — that I slipped into that.
Sometimes when you think a door closes, it’s really a window opening, or whatever it is they say. And looking back in any career, there are some things where you think, “Oh man, this is the end of the world” — whether it’s a reorganization or something like that — and it really was the best thing that ever happened to you. So take those opportunities and really reflect on them. But man, they sting at the beginning. That’s human nature. If it didn’t sting, I would worry about somebody. But yeah, there’s a good connect-the-dots there.
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