Up & Comers - 2014

First job: Grocery store bagger.
Career he would pursue if not for medicine: Chef and restaurateur. Loves to cook and loves to eat.
On the run: Participates in half-marathons.
Favorite food Glutton for the perfect pasta.

Though not the ideal way to spend a birthday weekend, a bout with appendicitis in the seventh grade spurred Dr. Bryce Gartland's interest in the healthcare profession.

"I had a surgeon who really made a point of sitting down on my bed and spending time with me while I was in the hospital for an extended period ," the Dunwoody, Ga., native said. "His bedside care made a real impression on me in terms of the ability to help people."

As vice president of operations for Atlanta-based Emory University Hospital, Gartland sees his role as a connecting link between the clinical and business sides of healthcare, a career path he decided on before earning his medical degree from Medical College of Georgia in 2001.

"I had a real passion in being the integrating connector between the clinical practice and systems engineering and business aspects of medicine," Gartland said.

Last year, Gartland took on the additional role of interim director for the Emory Clinic Division of Hospital Medicine, where he oversees the country's largest academic hospital medicine group with more than 100 physician faculty members and an annual operating budget of more than $30 million.

Gartland was a part of the hospital-care team that treated two American aid workers who contracted the Ebola virus while in West Africa.

Both patients, Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, were brought to Emory in early August, where the two recovered and were released several weeks later.

"We had a phenomenal team of individuals," Gartland said about the experience. "Good teams prepare, but great teams respond, and this is one of those instances where we demonstrated what a great team we have in terms of everybody's ability to respond when we received the call about caring for the first two patients with Ebola virus on U.S. soil."

Emory University Hospital CEO Robert Bachman said Gartland's rare ability to understand the clinical and business sides of healthcare made him a natural choice for an executive leadership position at the hospital.

"Bryce is bilingual," Bachman said. "He speaks the language of medicine and the language of business very fluently and is able to move back and forth in both worlds very easily. His strategic-thinking abilities are remarkable." --Steven Ross Johnson