Thomas Zenty

Yeah, I had a slightly different path.

I'm a little bit atypical in that I knew what I wanted to do from the time I was 15 years old.

I wanted to be a hospital administrator, which is a really geeky sort of thing to do at the end of the day, right?

But I never wanted to get into academic medicine, and the reason for that is I grew up in a really small town, and the local hospital administrator took an active interest in me, and she was a fascinating leader and

Very powerful woman and someone who I'll never forget.

Had a big impact on my career.

I had to do an undergraduate internship, and I worked in a small 200-bed non-teaching hospital.

But then coming out of graduate school, we had to do an internship, and I interviewed at 10 or 11 places.

I read the theses of the previous students where they did their administrative residencies and those that did them in non-academic medical centers.

And what I found is people who went to the academic medical centers had a very narrow slice of something that they were responsible for.

And I didn't want to get lost in the complexity of a very large, complicated organization where I wouldn't have an opportunity for a breadth of experience.

So I chose to go into the non-academic world to begin with, thinking that I could always work my way up, which is ultimately what happened.

You know, what everybody talked about today, and it's going to resolve around one issue if we can ever figure it out, and that's culture.

And I must tell you, everything that I heard today was consumerism, consumerism, consumerism, consumerism.

Academic medical centers are not designed to be consumer-centric.

So what I find to be the most challenging is changing a culture that has been ingrained and taught for over 100 years.

Now, people are very responsive, and we've made terrific progress.

But there's always some challenge in an academic medical center because you try to balance the tripartite mission of research, teaching, and clinical care.

So to your question specifically, we put something in place about six or seven years ago.

It's an acronym called CARTS.