Four Questions for Dr. Jim Shmerling, Children's Hospital CEO
Less than a year into his post as Children's Hospital CEO, Dr. Jim Shmerling is overseeing one of the biggest changes in the hospital's more than 100-year history.
Shmerling, 53, is spearheading the hospital's move from its downtown home seven miles east to a new 1.4 million-square-foot facility in Aurora.
Before joining Children's, Shmerling was CEO of the Monroe Carrell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., where he oversaw the completion of a new 216-bed facility.
The new Children's Hospital, which will share a campus with the University of Colorado Hospital and University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center, is part of what attracted Shmerling to the Denver job.
It doesn't hurt that the father of four is an avid triathlete.
1. Children's Hospital is scheduled to move to the Anschutz Medical Campus at the end of next month. Are you ready?
We're in great shape. I participated in building and moving into a new hospital at Vanderbilt, so I've gone through it once. We're moving seven miles to the new campus, and that (Vanderbilt) move was two blocks. The logistics are a little bit different, but the issues are the same. We're further along at this point in the game than we were at Vanderbilt.
This is a tremendous team effort.
2. You came to Children's from the Monroe Carrell Children's Hospital in Nashville, Tenn., in January. What's your foremost goal for your tenure at Children's?
First, I want to ensure patient quality. We do a great job of that, but I want it to be more transparent. We owe it to the community, and we owe it to ourselves to say, "Here's how we're doing." And to say to other hospitals that take care of children, "Here's the bar. How are you doing on the standard of care?"
If you're going to take care of children, it's an awesome responsibility. Parents entrust us with their children.
3. Children's has a longstanding partnership with University Hospital and the medical school. What's going to be different once you're all on the same campus?
When I started working in 1979, the average life expectancy of a child with cystic fibrosis was 14. Today, that life expectancy is in the 40s - and that's an average. Some patients live much longer.
It's still a fatal disease, but that change in life expectancy is a product of medical research conducted at children's hospitals.
What happens when a children's hospital shares a campus with an adult facility is there's a synergistic effect with the research facilities.
Having a research park, academic faculty from University and Children's all on one campus means we are going to rapidly accelerate the discovery of better treatments and cures for pediatric illnesses. I don't think there's another model in the world where there's all of this on one campus.
4. How did you wind up in a career in hospital management?
I finished my sophomore year in college at Tulane and was thinking what I wanted to major in. I couldn't decide between medicine and business and law - I wanted to do all of them. So I actually quit school for a year to work in a hospital as an O.R. (operating room) tech. I used that as opportunity to talk to different people in the hospital and find out what they did. When I talked to the hospital administrator, I realized that's it; that's a combination of medicine, business and law.
Read this article in the Rocky Mountain News
