Better Hospital Care Starts in Boardroom

Written by Dianne Molvig Tuesday, April 26 2011

Snapshot: Connie Curran
Connie Curran’s career path has had numerous twists and turns since she finished nursing school in 1969. Her first job right out of college was as a public health nurse in the Chicago housing projects. She next worked at Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago’s inner city. While there, she earned a master’s degree and became a teacher and mentor for undergraduate emergency room nursing students.

That experience propelled her down an academic path. She earned a doctorate in educational psychology and headed west to become a dean at the University of San Francisco. A couple years later, she migrated back to the Midwest to become the first dean of nursing at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Next she returned to the hospital world, becoming the head of nursing at New York City’s Montefiore Medical Center, the largest private U.S. hospital at the time.

Curran has made other career moves along the way, but fast-forward to today and you’ll find her heading Best on Board, a Chicago-based consulting firm that provides training to nonprofit hospital board members.

Her 32-year career journey may have been a meandering one. But from the beginning, Curran has kept her sights on a goal that’s close to her heart.

Womenetics: How did you expect your career to unfold when you were starting out in nursing?
Connie Curran: Someone once asked me about my career plan. I said, “What career plan?” Still, my vision when I first decided to become a nurse is the exact same vision I have today. And that is, I want to make the world a better place for patients and caregivers.

I feel in everything I’ve done – whether it was being an ER nurse, a dean, a chief nurse, working in Washington, a consultant – I could see a connection to that original vision. How lucky can a person be to have found something in life you really care about? And I still feel passionate about it.

Womenetics: How did you get into consulting work?
Curran: I figured out I wasn’t a real scholar. I’d written dozens of publications, won lots of grants to do research. But what I liked most was thinking of an interesting idea, getting others to support it, and then trying out that idea. So I discovered what I really was: an entrepreneur. I’ve spent the rest of my life building companies.

My first consulting job was with APM, a health care consulting company that was later bought by Computer Sciences Corp. My experience there gave me a taste of what it was like to be an entrepreneur. Later I launched CurranCare, a nationwide management and consulting services company. We managed hospitals’ nonacute care, such as hospice programs and rehabilitation centers. I sold CurranCare to Cardinal Health.

Womenetics: How did you happen to have lunch in the White House?
Curran: I’d always done speaking and writing about health care and hospitals, under the business name Curran Associates. One morning I was driving up to Madison, Wis., at 6 a.m. when my cell phone rang. The caller said, “You don’t know who I am, but I’m a friend of Joe.” The caller was with an executive search firm, and he was looking for candidates for a position. He couldn’t say who the employer was – just that all the candidates he’d lined up were white men and that he needed to include a woman.

I wasn’t qualified; the candidates were supposed to be oncologists or former cancer society presidents. I wasn’t. But he wanted to put my name in anyway. I told him I wasn’t looking for a job, but OK, I’d send in my résumé.

I forgot all about it, and then one day he called to say “they” wanted to meet me. “They” turned out to be George and Barbara Bush and California Senator Dianne Feinstein. They were starting a nonprofit cancer organization called C-Change and wanted someone to direct it. The Bushes had lost a five-year-old daughter to cancer, and Feinstein had lost her first husband and a couple of sisters.

I thought, well, I don’t have a chance at this job. But why turn down lunch at the White House with three interesting people? The lunch was there because at the time the younger Bush was president.

I got the job. I started the organization. We did some interesting work, and I stayed for three years. But I found out that it wasn’t my cup of tea. I’m not a politician.

Womenetics: So that brings us to your current venture, Best on Board. What is its purpose?
Curran: There are about 5,500 hospitals in the United States, and about 85 percent are nonprofit. Each hospital is legally run by a board of directors, or trustees as they’re called in the hospital world. They give their time for free.

On the one hand, I admire trustees’ commitment. On the other hand, I’m dismayed that they often don’t know what they’re doing. In fact, sometimes hospital CEOs like to keep their board ignorant because then the board just rubber stamps whatever the CEO wants.

So I decided to create a system to, first, improve hospital board performance and, second, improve board diversity. There are 3.5 million registered nurses in the United States, compared to around 900,000 physicians. The average hospital board has three or four doctors, but fewer than 2 percent of hospital boards have a nurse on them. Also, there are very few Hispanics, African-Americans. It’s really a white boy’s club.

At Best on Board, we’ve created a curriculum centered on core competencies for hospital board members. They need to know what quality care is and how to measure and report it. They need to understand where the money comes from and where it goes. They need to know your fiduciary responsibilities under the law. And they should understand something about human resources – about recruiting and retaining people. We got our first training enrollees in April 2010.

Womenetics: Why does hospital board excellence matter to consumers, to patients?
Curran: It helps patients in several ways. The board has the responsibility to get and keep good doctors, to operate the hospital in a financially responsible way, and to deliver quality care and know what that means to the community. So the board is absolutely core to a hospital’s quality and cost of care and to the professional expertise of the professionals who work there. It’s extremely important that the board members know what they’re doing.

Dianne Molvig is a Madison, Wis.-based freelance writer who writes regularly about business management, financial services, law practice, consumer education, and other topics.