Gordon Jones, DHA, MHSA, PAHM, PPM

For my coaching clients, my story and I am sticking to it…

I have been a healthcare executive since 1991 although my exposure to healthcare began at birth. I am the son of a retired military medical corp. officer and physician who also has an additional 22 years of physician executive experience as the VP for Medical Affairs of a 500 bed health system. My leadership training began with learning the discipline of a military father as well as those taught in swimming, tennis and soccer – my three core sports growing up. While I had many gratifying moments in sports, it wasn’t until 1980 when a senior in high school and a co-captain of our high school soccer team of only 2 seasons. We stepped up that year well above our underdog status to beat the previous 5 year 4A State Champs and win the SC championship the same month that the US Hockey Team beat Russia at the Winter Olympic Games – both touted as great Cinderella stories. The feeling of that success was overwhelming to me and though it was years before I met a similar challenge in sports, I believe I have achieved the same success in my education, training and work experience.

From that moment on I tried (though not always succeeding) to be the best I could muster. I graduated from The Citadel (The Military College of SC) and entered the US Army being stationed at Fort Bragg with the 82^nd Airborne Division – both giving me a great deal of leadership training and challenging experiences. While in the military I evolved my education in business administration into a great interest in international business focused on China. I found a local Chinese immigrant who owned a flower shop to teach me Mandarin in exchange for my help around her shop in my free time. I was preparing myself to apply to the best International MBA school in the country at the time at the Unv. of South Carolina. However, I discovered that my grades at The Citadel were not going to get me in, so after leaving the military in 1989 I entered USC undergrad to earn a second bachelors in Government and International Studies to not only get my grades up, but to expose me to some of the professors I would be applying to at the IMBA school. Not only did I get to enjoy a co-ed education as an older student (The Citadel was all male during my time), I was also heavily involved in state politics through the student party associations. I was elected the USC representative to the SC Collegiate Congress where I won the award for Best Written Legislation (on ethics) and was then elected to represent the state at the US Intercollegiate Congress in Washington DC – all great fun and highly educational experiences.

Earning a second degree worked, to some extent. I dramatically raise my GPA to a 3.85, but at the same time I was applying to the IMBA program the democracy rebellion was taking place in China at Tiananmen Square. As with all US/China relations at the time, USC suspended its IMBA China Tract. Of course I was totally disappointed because I had the Vision then of the explosions that are occurring in China today and I wanted to be in the middle of it.

However, due to financial constraints and short term needs, I adapted my career goals to be successful in healthcare instead. My father, as a noninvasive cardiologist – the PCP of specialists of the heart – and physician executive, knew my temperament and business goals and suggested that I earn a Master’s in Health Administration. While I had spent several summers working at his hospital (starting at the bottom mowing grass, then a maintenance engineer, and ultimately in direct patient care as a Male Patient Attendant), I hadn’t considered the business opportunity before. Once I began to study the business, I learned of the industry’s diversity and the unlimited arenas that I could develop some really creative ways of succeeding and making a name for myself – so, I decided to take “The Path.”

While I was earning my degree, I was fortunate enough to get a job working for the University President (James B. Edwards, DMD and former Governor of SC and US Sec. of Energy). Not only was I exposed to all aspects of our a medical university operated, from student administration, through the legal counsels responsibilities, to the medical services divisions and the hospital authority, but I assisted in work that dealt with the community and the politics of assuring funding allotments from the state and research funding from the federal government. I did not know it then, but I was getting a much better education while earning my Master’s than most of my classmates would during their Residencies after we graduated. Again, I was fortunate in my residency posting as the Administrator of the MUSC Children’s Hospital and I had worked on developing the university’s deployment of TQM, and he asked me to be his protégé.

As every health administrator knows, a good residency exposes you to all aspects of operating a hospital or health organization and mine was no exception. However, I did learn that I was not built to go the large structured health system organization route and everyone knew it. While in my residency, I was also attending weekly meetings with the local Toast Master’s Club learning to speak in public, develop clear and concise message and deliver it in an understand and hopefully persuading manner. As it turned out, most of the speeches I gave were on entrepreneurial health related issues and “how to fix it” concerns, ideas I would not be able to follow up on in a traditional career path. So after my residency was completed, I joined a local healthcare recruitment and consulting firm and brought with me a contract from the Medical University to put together their community based primary care organization.

This was great! I was at the forefront of a trend in healthcare for hospitals to buy physician practices, especially in the South, and I was out and about working with small medical organizations that in fact needed the help. I was able to learn the internal workings of the small and solo medical group market, understand their difficulties in running their businesses and develop an acquisition model that was unusual at the time. We were a great success overcoming the traditional “Town & Gown” issues and bringing 90 premier physicians into the organization.

This success exposed to me to another trend that was developing in the physician management market and that was the rapid growth of the national practice management companies that were going public and using that capital to consolidate huge numbers of physicians and medical groups into companies worth billions in market capitalization. I found one that was young and growing fast with a model developed in California. Our personalities matched well and they hired me to build the company in the Southeast. The company was FPA Medical Management and when I joined to the company we were about $50 million in annual revenues, when my contract was bought out three years later the company was $1.2 billion in annual revenues and the SE division was $125 million of that amount. Not six months after leaving the company (I saw the writing on the wall earlier), each of the three national publicly traded physician management companies (FPA, PhyCor, & Medpartners) filed for bankruptcy and went out of business or morphed into something else. We were all very successful in building the business, growing the market, and creating some very large public companies, but just as the Internet Bubble a few years later, the business model and fundamental were not there – especially in the thinking that employing physicians was a financially sane thing to do. As it turns out, even the hospital models failed and now instead of primary care physicians being owned and managed by health systems it is the higher revenue specialty groups that are working in that model.

Because I left FPA at the right time, I was fortunate enough to have exercised my options and retained my earnings allowing me the flexibility to assess the market and learn where the new trends in healthcare would be explosive. Well I found it in health information technology. In the mid 90’s the HIT industry had a few big players, but none with more than two percent of the total market, thus it was still quite “Mom and Pop.” However, I ended up joining one of the oldest and largest health information technology companies in the world – NDC Health in Atlanta. At the time, we processed 95% of all pharmacy claims transactions across our EDI exchange and we owned the largest pharmaceutical sales database in the country. Additionally, the company was processing a significant number of hospital and physician claims in the country and providing practice management solutions to hospitals, physicians and dentists.

After a short jaunt working in the physician clearinghouse division, I was chosen to join a team of three executives serving as internal consultants for business development and the CEO’s strategy team. It was 1998 and the Internet was just booming in healthcare with public and private equity capital being thrown at every opportunity to use computer technology to solve the problems in healthcare the way it has in the business community. Our team assessed the entire NDC organization in SWOT fashion specific to what capabilities we could leverage to be a leader in the use of the Internet for new and evolving applications. Once we identified all aspects of our SWOT, then our team helped the senior executives develop the corporate internet strategy which included the identification of acquisition targets needed to fill out what we did not have internally and could not build ourselves in a timely fashion.

All this to say, what a great experience! I was exposed to all the corporate leadership of the company as well as industry leaders outside the company we were talking to about partnering. We were all talking about the cutting edge of health and medical information management that is still developing today and again it was the beginning of a huge consolidation of players working to gain market share. While against my normal MO, an aspect of my working for such a large company that was beneficial to my health executive experience was that the company’s employee development program gave me access to more formal leadership training programs. Over the 3 years I was with NDC, I completed several professional development programs including my PAHM with the Academy of Healthcare Management, my PPM certification through Villanova University’s Advanced Project Management program, and Dale Carnegies’ Leadership Advantage program. NDC also agreed to finance my doctorate in health administration, though I would end up taking that on myself later.

It took me until 2000 to realize that I was going to miss the boat if I wanted to have my own business and create my own wealth instead of working to build someone else’s. So that is when I created the first version of HealthYncubator.com which was a true incubator in that our objective was to help start-up health related technology companies develop their ideas into businesses and launch them into the market place. Our model at the time was to take a small amount of cash from the entrepreneur and invest our time and resources into their company via an equity position. I have had some great experiences over the past several years. This is where we developed the Staging Innovation in Healthcare Process discussed on this website.

During this time of HealthYncubator, I helped many types of companies start-up, grow, expand and even reconstitute themselves. My work over the past seven years has allowed me to work with companies from Australia, Israel, Indonesia, and throughout the US. Advance technologies we were dealing with included a diagnostic blood screening technology for the early detection of Ovarian and Breast Cancers, bringing the World’s first imaged guided computer assisted dental surgical system into the US, helping to develop strategies for electronic prescribing and pharmaceutical point-of-care dispensing programs, developing and deploying web-native electronic medical record systems, working with employers to understand the changes in healthcare and help redesign their traditional health plans into consumer driven health plans, evolving the telemedicine industry to adopt Voice & Video Internet Protocol (VVoIP) applications, and working with clinical research organizations to provide community-based physicians (non-institutional) with access to clinical trial research as investigators bringing advance medical care directly to their own patients.

As you can imagine, all this work has been rather time consuming and taken me all over the World for extend periods of time, but it also exposed me to a new sport called Ultimate. Ultimate is played on two surfaces, grass and beach sand, and is a mix of the running of soccer, the plays of basketball, the scoring of football, and the throwing of the Frisbee (we call it a disc since we are not using the Whamo Frisbee product). I’ll tell you more about this when we talk, but in relation to the conversation here Ultimate has reintroduced me to the leadership and coaching skills developed in playing sports.

Again, being fortunate, I have developed the ability to play at the top of the game – at least in the beach sand version. In 2004 I was a member of the US team that won the Silver at the World Beach Ultimate Games in Portugal and this past December again a member of the US team that won the Gold at the 2007 World Championships in Brazil.

Over the years I have continuously self-reflected and tried to learn as much as possible about myself and how I interact with others. As you can imagine, I have a type A personality as I try to do everything that I put my mind to, which has been my saving grace and also my barrier to success at times. I have taken many assessments such as Myers-Briggs, 360^Ο, Jung, etc. etc. and what I have found out the most is that I also change continuously. We can all learn more about who we are, what our friends, family and peers think about us, and ways to take advantage of this knowledge, but until we put it in action and execute a plan, adapt to different situations, and understand that we are all just human beings, we will never be successful in our current cultural, societal, business and health communities.

While my work and play have all been worthwhile and very exciting like, many executives it has taken a toll on my personal life. Being in my mid 40s and unmarried had been difficult on my personal family goals (as well as those of my parents who want grandchildren). Certainly I was introduced to many very nice women; however, none were the one that I knew God intended for me. Until the time was right I knew that I would not be given the opportunity to meet nor the time to spend in developing a true loving relationship with God’s intended. Well in 2006 most of my consulting was being conducted in my home city of Charleston, SC. The furthest I had to drive for work was about 1.5 hours inland. During this time I met Jennifer, who is listed in the coaches section, and the timing was right for the two of us.

We married in Nov. 2007 and I have moved to Augusta, GA to live and work with Jennifer and administer her private Pediatric Speech, Language, and Occupational Therapy. This has also lead to the evolution of HealthYncubator from an incubator and consulting firm to a health executive coaching firm I can operate out of my office here. Jennifer and I have many years to catch up and we wish to start growing a family of our own. So, we have decided that my previous traveling regime won’t work. I am positioning my face-to-face work here in Augusta (and some at home in Charleston) including serving on the board of our Foundation for Therapeutic Options and other non-profit work while I provide my experience and knowledge to my BHS students I teach online through the Medical University of SC. HealthYncubator coaching will now be serving clients Live & Direct via the telecommunications center housed here in our offices.

I will also be bringing to my new Augusta community my previous community service experience as a former board member of the Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce (the oldest in the nation), Chairman of the Charleston Area Business Council, founding Chairman of the Chamber’s First Annual Healthcare and Wellness Conference for Business. I am also a Paul Harris Fellow with the Rotary International and I continue to support the South Carolina Special Olympics, the MUSC Health Sciences Foundation, the United Way, the Gibbes Art Museum, the South Carolina French Huguenot Society, the Second Presbyterian Church of Charleston, and each of their missions to contribute-in-service to their communities.

  
I have picked up tennis again, I play a bit of golf, and with Jennifer I now compete regionally in Olympic and Ironman distance Triathlons. I also continue to hold on to my life goal of visiting a new country each and every year thus allowing me to have lived and traveled extensively throughout the US, Western & Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Central & South America.

  
I express all of this information to illustrate that I bring all of this life and professional experience to you as my coaching client. You can be assured that I am enthusiastic about working with young, mid-career and exiting health executives alike bringing you the tools and the coaching you’ll need as healthcare professionals and business executives to excel in your current environment, and/or be propelled into the next.

Please feel friend to ask any questions of me with you communicate your interest in engaging me as your coach.