Hospital plans transition to new leadership

Days after Kalispell Regional Healthcare President Velinda Stevens died, the hospital’s leadership team gathered in the same conference room where Stevens had announced health-care expansions less than a year before. This time, they were there to describe how the organization planned to move forward in her absence.

Stevens died Jan. 22, after living with breast cancer for years. She was 64. For the last 18 years of her life, she guided Kalispell Regional’s growth, which has become the top employer in the valley.

Roughly three weeks before she died, the Kalispell Regional administrative team sat around Stevens’ kitchen table to outline how the hospital should balance responsibilities when it was time to find her replacement.

“She talked about continuing to grow relationships in health care, finishing projects she had started,” said the hospital’s interim chief executive officer Curt Lund in an interview later that afternoon.

Lund sat in a nearly empty office. Velinda Stevens’ nameplate hung by the front door.

The view out the office window was a construction site — the hospital’s soon-to-come pediatric and women’s center, a $40 million project intended to help families stay in the Flathead for care.

“That project, which only she knew how to get started, is one of the things we’ll keep rolling,” Lund said, watching the workers outside. “... I don’t feel qualified to be this hospital’s CEO, but I do feel qualified to help in this time of transition.”

That’s how Stevens planned it, he said.

LUND HAS been on the hospital board of trustees since 2011 and is currently serving as chairman.

He expects to serve as the interim CEO for roughly a year as the search for a new Kalispell Regional president unfolds.

In the month leading up to Stevens’ death, the Kalispell Regional Senior Management Team organized a search committee of seven members, selected from the board of trustees. He said that group will begin meeting in February to define the job position they hope to fill.

Part of that process will include deciding whether they want a physician or business person to take the reigns, Lund said.

“Velinda had a background in nursing, but she was a tough businesswoman,” he said. “This job needs someone who understand both of those worlds.”

The leadership team plans to hire a research firm to narrow the pool of candidates, which Lund said he expects to include current employees as well as applicants from around the nation. Ideally, the team will pick a new CEO by fall, he said.

Lund said after meeting Stevens, he soon learned she was quick to find solutions, but always made decisions based on patients’ needs.

“I remember getting a call from her — she had been in the ICU for several days — and told me, ‘There’s a patient who needs your help. They’re in the emergency room, go see what you can do,’” he said. “With her, that story happened over and over again.”

At Thursday’s meeting, many of the people in the room voicing the plan they had shaped with Stevens had worked with her for nearly two decades.

Patrick Rankin, chief physician officer, described himself as the “newbie” to the team. Stevens recruited him to the position 19 months before.

He said the hospital was already in a time of transition before beginning the search for a new leader.

Less than a year ago, North Valley Hospital stepped under Kalispell Regional’s umbrella. Today, the organization is juggling three major construction projects and imminent health-care reform as President Donald Trump works to fulfill his promise to dismantle the Affordable Care Act.

“She designed this management team to deal with all that change,” Rankin said. “So all the dramatic changes are not new to us. We were prepared to deal with these things and molded to work in her world.”

He said when Stevens brought him on the team, she told him his job was to make life easier for physicians and better for patients. Stevens told him when someone asked for help, his job was to say “yes” and then find out how.

Karen Lee, chief nursing officer, said that mentality stretched across the medical world, from a physician needing new equipment to a rural health center requesting assistance.

She said sometimes, it meant helping just one patient.

Lee described a young woman from Kalispell diagnosed with a Stage-4 cancer who sought a second opinion in Denver. There, doctors told her there was nothing else medicine could do.

“The patient’s family called and said, ‘All she wants to do is to come home, she wants to be in her bed, with her dogs in Montana,’” Lee said. “And when we told Velinda, Velinda looked at you like only Velinda can and said, ‘Go get her and bring her home.’”

They dispatched A.L.E.R.T’s fixed wing air ambulance to Denver and brought the patient home, where she died two days later, Lee said.

Lund said while the hospital won’t be able to find a replication of Stevens, they feel prepared to find the organization’s best leader.

“One way you might put it, is we have plenty to do,” he said.

Reporter Katheryn Houghton may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at khoughton@dailyinterlake.com.