Marcy Doderer had been the president and CEO of Arkansas Children’s Hospital for a little more than two years when she announced on Aug. 7, 2015, that ACH was building a hospital in Springdale.
Arkansas Children’s Northwest would be part of ACH’s statewide network of care, which was also announced that day. The network will attempt to bring children’s health services closer to where children live, she said.
“It was our first real public announcement that we intend to be more than just Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas,” she said.
The strategy of bringing health care access to children across the state is working, observers say.
Since 2013, when she became the chief of the state’s only pediatric hospital, Doderer has “positioned herself as the go-to leader for our organization across the state in what it means to improve child health, and nothing short of that,” said Rob Steele, the chief strategy officer at ACH.
“She will consistently stand in front of anyone, one-on-one or as a crowd, and espouse the benefits that society has by prioritizing children and particularly their health. … You can see it in her eyes that she’s passionate about that, and that she believes in that,” Steele said.
The highlights under Doderer’s leadership include the $167 million, 230,000-SF hospital in Springdale, which is expected to open in January. July saw the opening of ACH’s $4 million Southwest Little Rock Community Clinic.
ACH also recently created the Arkansas Children’s Care Network, which was designed to allow pediatricians and physicians across Arkansas to share information on how they take care of patients in order to improve the quality of care for children, Doderer said. Without the ACCN, doctors couldn’t legally share information, she said.
“We have over 100 pediatricians in the state signed on to that and … our dream would be to have every pediatrician involved and then also reach out to family medicine physicians,” she said. “So I think that work can start to really influence care for kids all across the state.”
Doderer held her breath recently as the U.S. Senate considered repealing the Affordable Care Act.
“When there is talk in the halls of Congress of reducing the federal spend on Medicaid by more than a third, it makes us very nervous,” Doderer said. “Because it means 40 percent of the kids in this country might not have insurance coverage, and that would be challenging. … It’s 65 percent of our business.”
For its fiscal year that ended June 30, 2016, Arkansas Children’s Hospital had net patient revenue of $495.83 million and net income of $51.8 million, according to its most recent Medicare cost report. That’s an improvement of 5 percent in revenue and 11 percent in net income compared with the previous year.
In her Little Rock office at ACH, Doderer told Arkansas Business that she spends some of her time these days working on ways to “fundamentally transform health care for kids.” She wants ACH to be embedded in the state, providing care closer to where the 710,000 children in Arkansas live.
She also spends some of her day lobbying elected officials in Washington and working with the Children’s Hospital Association of Washington to improve children’s health care.
Seeking Inspiration
Growing up, Doderer wasn’t interested in medicine as a career. “I was much more interested in business, and that was the path I took,” said Doderer.
Born at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, Doderer moved with her family to Little Rock when she was in elementary school. She graduated from Little Rock Central High School in 1985 and then went to Trinity University in San Antonio, where she majored in business finance.
Unsure what she would do with that degree, she was leaning toward a career as an investment banker. “But it wasn’t incredibly inspiring to me,” Doderer said.
One class elective that focused on the health care industry changed her outlook.
The subject made her realize that “you have an opportunity to blend doing good work for the betterment of many while still having a really kind of intense and intellectually stimulating business environment,” she said. She was hooked.
The course “helped me understand that there’s this whole industry out there called health care that had nothing to do with being the physician or being a clinician,” Doderer said.
During the summer of 1988, Doderer did an internship at ACH and found health care to be “interesting, very dynamic and inspiring all at the same time.”
From then on, she focused on health care.
After graduating from Trinity, she went to the University of Iowa and received a Master of Arts in hospital and health administration in 1992.
‘A Dynamic Leader’
In 1994, Doderer took a job at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas, where she worked in several leadership positions. She then became a vice president at Christus St. Joseph’s Health System in Paris, northeast of Dallas. In 2002, she became vice president/associate administrator for Christus Santa Rosa Children’s Hospital, also in Paris.
Soon, though, Doderer would get her chance to operate a children’s hospital, which was her goal.
In December 2012, Jonathan Bates announced he would retire on June 30, 2013, after serving 20 years as president and CEO of ACH.
The top executive search firm Witt/Kieffer of Oak Brook, Illinois, handled the nationwide search for Bates’ replacement. Doderer’s colleagues from across the country forwarded the firm’s messages to her.
“I ignored those emails for awhile,” she said. “But when I received it again from a colleague for a second time, … I came home and I said to my husband, ‘What do you think? Should I throw my hat in the ring?’”
Doderer said she knew the recruiter and quizzed him about the position. She applied, and in May 2013, Arkansas Children’s Hospital named her as its next CEO.
“She is a dynamic leader and brings experience that will help us navigate the uncertainty of health care in the years ahead and improve our quality and ability to better deliver a statewide system of care to Arkansas’ kids,” Tom Baxter, ACH board of directors chairman, said in a news release at the time.
Doderer oversees the hospital, which is licensed for 336 beds, and has 505 physicians and more than 4,400 employees.
Doderer said she knows it sounds trite, but she wakes up thinking about what ACH is going to do that day to affect the life of a child.
“There are many evenings that I finish my day and wonder if we did enough,” she said. “Sometimes we fall short. … but you wake up the next morning thinking, ‘What are we going to do today?’”
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