Rahn talks retirement, successful 2016 for Passavant Hospital

By Ryne Turke on October 14, 2016 at 8:00am

Passavant Area Hospital’s CEO and President is stepping down from his position at the end of the year, but he’s leaving the hospital in a fantastic situation.

WLDS-WEAI News caught up with Doug Rahn on Thursday during the hospital’s annual board of directors meeting. He says “a lot has been running through his mind” over the last 48 hours, but is very pleased to be ending his long career in the medical field at Passavant.

“It has been so refreshing to have an engaging community and an outstanding board, leadership team and employees. If I had started my career here, I’m not sure I would have ever left… It has been that rewarding. It has been fun to really work on these things and see the organization get so energized around improvements and expansion. It has been a very rewarding experience.”

Rahn is thrilled that Passvant is a year ahead of schedule on its three-to-five-year overall plan. Rahn credits his passionate employees, dedicated medical staff and focused leadership.

“Every hospital in the country is compared on the same indicators. On those 23 indicators of safety and patient outcomes, we are in the top ten percentile. That was a nice improvement of our prior year when we were in the 15-20th percentile. Our financial performances continue to rebound. We have about a five percent operating margin. Our employee engagement climbed to the 95th percentile. The performance has been very symmetrical across the organization and I’m pleased with the growth we’ve seen.”

Passavant’s partnership with Memorial Health System gives the hospital an opportunity to take advantage of key programs that can be franchised for the local market. Rahn says a handful of new programs were made available to the community in 2016.

“JointWorks is one of those programs. We’ve also brought over the Memorial Weight Loss and Wellness program. We saw 70 patients last month and our goal was to have 90 in the first quarter, so we are ahead of schedule there. We’ve also started a new intensive service in our ICU where we have specifically trained physicians overseeing the care. We started an inpatient dialysis service so that patients that need support for their kidney functions can get that locally. Those were some of the services we started this past year, in addition to the ten-bed psychiatric unit we opened.”

Looking into the future, Rahn looks forward to facility upgrades and improvements in patient safety and satisfaction.

Click below for the interview with Rahn.