A few years later, he moved on to become chief operating officer of Holy Cross Hospital in Chicago, where local physicians were balking at admitting their patients because they frequently complained about their experiences. Through better training of hospital department managers, he engineered a turnaround that gained national attention and a visit from troubled Baptist Hospital in Pensacola, Fla., which hired him as president.
“Holy Cross is where the light bulb clicked on,” he said. “The way you create great service is by creating a great place to work. The key is creating great supervisors.”
Over the next four years, he took Baptist, a hospital ranked in the ninth percentile in patient satisfaction with a 30% turnover rate, to one of the top-ranked hospitals in the nation. In 2000, he launched the Studer Group because his experiences there had taught him that “there were techniques that were transferrable.”
Today, the Studer Group has 227 employees and a roster of clients that include some of the largest for-profit and not-for-profit hospital chains in the country, including HCA Corp., Community Health Systems and Kaiser Permanente. He is the author of seven self-published books, including Hardwiring Excellence.