Executive Vice President, Vandalia Health; President, CAMC Health System
Photo by Charleston Area Medical Center.
By Alicia Willard
From growing up in Mullens, WV, to pursuing his bachelor’s degree, medical degree, residency and fellowship in the Mountain State, Glenn Crotty Jr., M.D., executive vice president of Vandalia Health and president of Charleston Area Medical Center (CAMC) Health System, has lived and worked in West Virginia for more than 70 years.
“West Virginia is a friendly place with low crime and a great environment to raise a family. I had great experiences growing up in the Mountain State, and it has always been home,” Crotty says. “My family modeled a great work ethic and compassion for others that served me well.”
Influenced into medicine by his grandmother’s family, Crotty’s great-grandfather was a country physician from Fayette County. His great uncle was a pharmacist and would regale Crotty with stories of Grandpa Hunter delivering babies in the region by traveling on horseback to rural parts of the county.
Following in his family’s footsteps, Crotty started his career as an endocrinologist in 1982, treating patients with diabetes and other metabolic disorders at the private practice Charleston Endocrinology. After practicing medicine for 16 years and teaching as an assistant clinical professor of medicine at West Virginia University School of Medicine’s Charleston Campus, he advanced to associate clinical professor in the CAMC internal medicine program.
During this time, he treated and admitted patients while serving as an attending physician in the internal medicine inpatient teaching service until he developed an interest in care quality and utilization. Pursuing this interest, Crotty worked to develop an avoidable delay program to improve hospital processes. While working part time for Carelink Health Plan as medical director in the 1990s, Crotty also developed an interest in administrative medicine.
After moving to CAMC Health System as the chief medical officer, he merged his interests and started improving processes for patient care and issues causing delays for physicians and staff. With Crotty leading these efforts, CAMC began partnering with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, collaborating with several children’s hospitals to test new improvement methods for the care of children.
Advancing to chief operating officer, Crotty furthered efficiencies by working to integrate improvement methodologies that helped improve the quality and cost of care. Crotty now manages the operations, bed flow, staffing and distribution of goods and services to the four hospitals that make up the CAMC Health System.
Crotty is currently assisting the team to solve Vandalia Health’s greatest challenge, which is the integration efforts of five additional hospitals to the network. With the merger, he supports the integration of key processes like revenue cycle, information technology, staff coordination and recruitment and retention.
“I have learned how to be patient and better understand human factors that create safety issues along with difficulties in executing processes as they were designed. I have learned that organizational communication is hard and that one needs to develop multiple methods for two-way communication,” Crotty says.
Outside the hospital, Crotty volunteered for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Board of Examiners for 12 years, serving as an examiner, senior examiner, master examiner and judge. He also served on boards for the American Red Cross, Partnership for Excellence and state Baldrige programs in Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia and Illinois. Currently, he serves on boards for the University of Charleston’s School of Business and the Clay Center for the Arts & Sciences and as a member of the legislative committee of the West Virginia Hospital Association.
To this day, Crotty attributes his greatest success to the 10-year journey and culmination of systems development, patient care and process improvement that led to being recognized as the 2015 Malcomb Baldridge National Quality Award recipient. CAMC is the only organization to date to achieve recognition in West Virginia.
“My family is from southern and central West Virginia and that is the main reason I’ve stayed—to be near family and to assist in their care. I enjoy the beauty of the Mountain State, the changing seasons and the proximity to other larger metropolitan areas,” he says.
Baldrige Performance Excellence Program
Dedicated to helping organizations of any industry improve systems, the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program oversees the nation’s only presidential award for performance excellence and offers products and services. The program’s goal is to help organizations improve performance and create sustainable results to effectively and efficiently meet their missions and achieve their visions.
No matter the type of institution, Baldrige provides a framework for improvement by helping organizations create a dynamic environment, focus on strategy-driven performance, achieve customer and workforce engagement and improve governance and ethics, societal responsibilities, competitiveness and long-term organizational sustainability.
With an estimated benefits-to-cost ratio of 820 to one, Baldrige impacts the U.S. economy with more than 685,000 jobs; 5,000 work sites; $193 billion in revenue and budgets; and 614 million customers served over a 12-year period. In health care, a study by Truven Health Analytics links hospitals that adopt and use the Baldrige criteria to successful operations, management practices and overall performance.
In West Virginia, Baldrige excellence awardee Charleston Area Medical Center (CAMC) was among the top 5% of local and regional competitors for overall quality in inpatient performance in 2014 and 2015. CAMC also outperformed the top 25% of hospitals nationally in avoiding unnecessary readmissions, was in the top 10% nationally for overall outpatient satisfaction in all areas and was in the top 10% on the Healthcare Performance Solutions patient focus index.
