FEATURE STORY — March/April 2009

 

The Messenger

Gordon Eggers has worked hard to ensure that Crusader Clinic, a community health center in Rockford, delivers medical care on par with the area’s top private providers. Now, he has to convince residents that it does

By Steve Hendershot
Photography By Lloyd DeGrane

Gordon Eggers, president and CEO of Rockford-based Crusader Clinic, talks to Christy Kowaski, who has worked for the organization for 11 years as its corporate compliance officer. Kowaski’s son Alex had just received pediatric care.

It’s been three years since Gordon Eggers, MPH ’85, left the examination rooms at Crusader Clinic for the relative seclusion of the administrative suite. But he still can’t walk through the lobby in peace.

“Gordon!” cries a woman, rushing toward him. “I’m going to be a grandmother!” In one smooth motion he congratulates her, waves at another former patient, then spots one of the Clinic’s dentists and tells her a quick story while he walks.

Eggers doesn’t mind the attention. He’s now president and CEO at Crusader, a community health center in Rockford, which has 40,000 patients, three-quarters of whom live in poverty (22 percent of Rockford is in poverty, double the statewide level). He thinks the Clinic delivers medical care on par with the area’s top private providers, and he’s trying to spread the word—both to his patients and the community.

“Patients don’t know what to expect when they come here,” says Eggers, 57. “They sometimes have images of themselves that are impoverished, but we don’t want them to feel that way about their health care. Because in my mind, we’re competing on high-end quality.”

To that end, Eggers is making changes at Crusader that are reshaping the Clinic’s offerings and image. There are new facilities like the Women’s Health Center, which employs high-end technologies such as 3-D ultrasound; new specialists, who are giving Crusader’s patients on-site access to care in disciplines such as neurology, podiatry, orthopedics and endocrinology; and greater emphasis on customer service skills, resulting in a patient-satisfaction rating of 3.7 on a 4-point scale—the best score in Crusader’s history.

In addition, Eggers has increased salaries at Crusader to what he says are “equitable” to those in the private sector. Crusader has 275 employees, including a full-time medical staff with 24 doctors, five dentists, two midwives, five physician assistants and 11 nurse-practitioners.

Crusader’s patients are noticing the results. “Because of the economics, most patients aren’t expecting the same quality at a community clinic that they would get in the private sector,” says Leon Hansen, a Crusader patient who also serves on the Clinic’s board (to meet federal-funding regulations, patients must comprise at least half the board’s membership). But Hansen says positive word of mouth has changed perceptions in the neighborhoods that Crusader serves, and that patients understand they’re getting top-notch care. We have built Crusader up to “where it’s equal to or better than some of the private providers, and the patients believe that now,” remarks Hansen. “When they walk in the door, they expect that kind of care.”

But can Crusader really compete, service-for-service, with the area’s top private health care providers? After all, the Clinic is a community health center where 31 percent of patients are uninsured and pay as little as $20 for services, yet Crusader relies on patient fees for 72 percent of its annual revenue. (Only 17 percent of Crusader’s $23 million annual budget comes from government funding.)

According to the competition, yes.

“Crusader’s patients have ready access to care from excellent providers who are practicing at very high standards. It’s a great place to practice,” says Kathleen Kelly, chief medical officer at the SwedishAmerican Health System, the area’s largest provider. She’s also a Crusader board member, and says Eggers is key to the Clinic’s success—his knowledge of human nature, his clinical expertise and his energy.

Servant-leadership in action
Eggers’ medical career is marked by creativity, energy and improvisation—and circumstances that require them: In Papua, New Guinea, where he set up bush clinics and nurses made slings out of palm fronds; in Kazakhstan, where he trained physicians and families made their own crutches. As a primary caregiver in rural Colorado, he learned to drive an ambulance while simultaneously attending to patients.

“When you work in places like that you just stop complaining,” says Eggers. “And then when you get to a place like Crusader, you appreciate everything you can do, from being able to paint a wall to hiring a new type of doctor.”

That approach requires a unique blend of confidence and humility—“servant-leadership,” Eggers calls it—that meshes well with his personality and background. He’s a physician’s assistant, which means that he can treat patients and prescribe medicine, but only under the supervision of a doctor. The PA was the perfect credential to take Eggers to places starved for medical care, such as Sudan, the Samoan islands or Kiowa, Colo., where he was the only health care provider in Elbert County (his supervising physician would consult with him via shortwave radio).

Eggers takes a hands-on approach to managing the Crusader Clinic, which serves 40,000 patients, three-quarters of whom live in poverty. Here he meets with Teana Rhoads, a nurse practitioner and ultrasonographer, in the ultrasound suite of the recently completed WomenÕs Health Services unit. In 2008, the unitÕs personnel delivered 1,096 babies at SwedishAmerican Hospital.

It also sees him in good stead at Crusader, where Eggers spent 18 years seeing patients as a PA before becoming president and CEO. (He still makes the occasional house call to longtime patients, though his staff discourages this practice.) Eggers’ goal is to create a full-service health care solution—everything under one roof. He says his patients are less likely to follow up with off-site appointments or to pick up medications than patients elsewhere, so he’s hired part-time specialists, added classes in parenting and violence prevention, even trained his staff to recognize and treat psychiatric conditions such as depression.

His compassion for his patients is no surprise to those who worked with him as a PA (he used to slip nurses $5 bills to pass on to patients who needed help with pharmacy bills). For his staff, though, Eggers leads with a tough-talking, no-excuses approach. He emphasizes customer service, and instituted pay-for-performance programs that are based in part on patient satisfaction ratings. Posters throughout Crusader exhort doctors and clinicians to “get on the bus,” and for those that don’t comply, Eggers is blunt: “I’ll make them somebody else’s problem.”

But Eggers says he doesn’t often need to play disciplinarian, and it’s clear as he moves through Crusader’s Broadway facility that his staff doesn’t see him as a threatening figure: The nurses all joke with him, and a janitor tells him he can make a root beer float in the staff room. “Gordon is probably the most respected administrator I’ve ever worked under,” says Kathleen Walsh, a nurse-practitioner in women’s health. “He sets a great example, clinically as well as administratively—he’s fair, he’s kind.”

The return home to Rockford
When Eggers joined Crusader as a PA in 1987, it marked his return to his hometown of Rockford, and his first job after earning his MPH from UIC. It was a symbolic moment, moving home with a degree that set him on a career path that pays homage to both his parents: his father was an executive with local manufacturer Ingersoll Machine Tools, and his mother was a standout volunteer for several local not-for-profits. “When you’re growing up, you don’t quite know how that’s flavoring your thinking, but as you get older you see that [service] is kind of what the family does,” he says.

Eggers entered the UIC MPH program planning to work overseas (which is still his goal when he retires in a decade or so). As a result, his curriculum included topics such as tropical and occupational medicine. Yet even with the MPH degree, 11 years would pass at Crusader before he added any administrative duties: in 1998, he became the Clinic’s medical director.

When he was up for the president and CEO post in 2005, his lack of executive experience was a concern for board member Hansen. “I thought maybe all the people who had him as a patient were giving him more credit than he had coming, and I just wasn’t sure he had enough experience to run a clinic,” recalls Hansen. “But he’s erased all of the questions. He’s shown a tremendous willingness to learn, and I have to admit it: We’re doing quite well.”

Today, Eggers’ imprint on Crusader is clearly visible. He says the staff is “innovative, vigorous and energetic,” and his coworkers agree.

“We’re so energized, and this is such a cool place to work,” says Cindy Leib, who manages the largest of Crusader’s three locations, on Broadway in Rockford. “Gordon has given us leadership and a vision that have lifted us to another level.”

Eggers and Crusader are even attracting attention outside of Rockford: in 2007, Eggers received the “Service to the Underserved Award” from the American Academy of Physicians Assistants.

Provider of hope
Crusader staff delivered 1,096 babies in 2008, and the waiting room of the new Women’s Health Center radiates energy and optimism. When the new wing opened in February 2008, a pharmaceutical sales rep told Leib that it looked cutting edge—not at all like a community health center. “It’s so thrilling to have people from the outside stand and look and say, ‘I can’t believe Crusader is like this,’” says Leib.

The facilities are important to Eggers, who wants patients to know instinctively that they’re getting top-notch care. They also speak to his greatest challenge: providing more services, better facilities and better care within the confines of a fairly static $23 million annual budget. The building upgrades owe largely to a recent $5.2 million capital campaign that completed in 2007, and Eggers thinks his staff can become more efficient by focusing more on preventive care.

Health care, of course, is not always healthy newborn babies and successful vaccinations. Eggers knows this all too well—six years ago, he was diagnosed with lymphoma, and doctors told him that he had three months to live. He survived, and took away a lesson that inspired him to make Crusader Clinic’s facilities convey warmth and quality.

“Having hope is physiological. When you get despondent, you get sicker and die faster,” says Eggers. “So you have to give your patients hope—and you have to give your staff hope—so that everyone knows that the future is good.”

In one of the ultrasound rooms, patients Jenny Redner and Chris Brasel are watching a three-dimensional image of their unborn child, 32 weeks along. Crusader’s Teena Rhoades is describing the process to them, something about “transsecting longitudinally,” but mostly Brasel and Redner are staring at the monitor.

“This is kind of blowing my mind,” says Brasel. Redner is silent, and her eyes never stray from the screen.

Brasel says the care at Crusader is “actually pretty good”—no surprise to Eggers, who knows that as a community health center, his Clinic has to overcome perception problems from its patients. But Brasel’s experience is typical, says Eggers: “You fight [the negative perceptions] until they come in here, and then they evaporate.”

Rhoades explains that their baby is a healthy weight and size, and Redner and Brasel watch until their baby removes a hand that was blocking its face.

The 3-D image is powerful and vivid, and Redner finally speaks.

“Pretty cool,” she says, then repeats it over and over, quietly, still staring. “Pretty cool, pretty cool.”