After a year in leadership at Southcoast Health, David McCready is well-established in the role and settling into the rhythms of life in the region.
He joined the system as president and chief executive officer of the Southcoast Hospitals Group on Oct. 1 last year, and succeeded Dr. Rayford Kruger as president and chief executive officer of the entire system on Jan. 3. McCready was chosen from a pool of more than 70 candidates who responded to a national search in November 2022.
McCready came to Southcoast Health with a wealth of experience, having previously served as president of Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital for five years and a member of the leadership team at Brigham and Women’s for 18 years. Earlier, McCready worked as an administrative leader at Boston Medical Center and at Highmark Health in Pittsburgh, and as a management consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers.
As Southcoast Health’s president and CEO, McCready oversees a nonprofit enterprise of three hospitals – St. Luke’s, Charlton, and Tobey – and 52 sites in all offering clinical services, employing just over 8,000.
A native of Beaver Falls, a Pennsylvania steel town, he earned a bachelor’s, a master of health administration, and master of business administration degrees from the Katz Graduate School of Business, all at the University of Pittsburgh.
McCready serves on the board of trustees of the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association.
Last spring, Newsweek included Southcoast Health in the United States category of its World’s Best Hospitals 2024 list, recognizing it for the sixth consecutive year. That record earned the health system “All Time Winner” status. Southcoast Health was one of only 17 hospitals from Massachusetts and Rhode Island to earn the “best hospitals” distinction.
In a conversation with The New Bedford Light at Southcoast Health’s new pediatric rehabilitation facility, the CEO spoke about what drew him to the field of health administration and the challenges facing medical care providers today. He also talked about what he foresees for the region’s health care landscape as Providence-based Lifespan Health System takes over St. Anne’s Hospital in Fall River from the bankrupt Steward Health Care.
New Bedford Light: What have you learned about the community since you took the helm of the Southcoast hospitals group?
David McCready: It’s been a really positive, warm welcome for my family and me as we’ve gotten settled in the region. You know, I spent the last 25 years working in Boston, and I was at Brigham and Women’s Hospital for the last 18 or so years. I worked at Boston Medical Center and did some consulting with PricewaterhouseCoopers out of the Boston office.
This SouthCoast region is definitely Massachusetts, and I say that very positively, with all the blessings that we have in this commonwealth. But there’s something really quite unique about this region that’s frankly very warm and appealing to me.
It strikes me that there’s a sense of pride here, among the folks who live here, the generations who have grown up here. A pride in the past, of what made this region great. I think about the textile industry in the Fall River region, of course, here in New Bedford, the whaling industry, and more recently the fishing industry.
So, pride in what sort of got us here in the first place, but also a realistic understanding of where the world is going, and leaning into that, and being part of that. So, for instance, the whole blue economy and taking advantage of the energy opportunities with the ocean, our greatest natural resource here, and being part of that. That’s something that’s really poignant for me to observe here as well.
I would say that I find that our political leaders, government leaders, are remarkably present and supportive of us certainly at Southcoast Health. I think about Mayor (Jon) Mitchell in New Bedford who couldn’t be a better partner to Southcoast Health, Mayor (Paul) Coogan of course in Fall River, Derek Sullivan, the town manager in Wareham … We couldn’t do this work in isolation. We need their support. In many ways, we’re very much aligned with the work that they do as well. We’re all trying to take care of our communities in (all the) ways we possibly can.
And then I would say that I find that the community really embraces Southcoast Health, and I have had nothing to do with that, of course — I just started about a year ago. But it seems like there’s a sense of community pride in our hometown health care organization, and I feel very comfortable and very positive about that and appreciate that very much.
NBL: What inspired you to choose the health care administration field?
DM: I got involved in psychiatric social services as an undergraduate … and did some work on the case management social services side. A couple years into that … I realized I’m probably not all that well-suited to provide direct patient care, but I love the health care industry, and I like the combination of working to care for people but also the business side of it. I always had a little bit of a business bent to my mind. Health care administration just seemed like a perfect fit.
So, I went to business school, got my second master’s in health care administration, and started to work my way up the chain. It’s a lot of fun. Health care organizations, a hospital system like Southcoast, these are among, I would say, the most complicated organizations to run. There’s so much at stake. Especially for nonprofit organizations like ours. It’s not about making money. We have to make enough money to keep our mission going, of course, but we’re not here principally to make money. We’re here to serve our patients.
The business side — earning a margin of profit, as little as they are recently — it’s a means to an end of taking better care of patients and the community. Health care leadership to me is where the business stuff meets caring for patients, and it’s just a very exciting place for me. It’s a comfortable, natural niche for me to fit in as well.
It’s been a wonderful, wonderful career, a wonderful life, and this job at Southcoast I really feel is the pinnacle of my career. I’d love to spend the next 10 years here doing this … and I’m very, very pleased and proud to be here. …
I have full responsibility for all the revenues, all the ways that we make money, and all the expenses to run places like this (the pediatric rehabilitation center) and employ the staff and buy all the supplies and what have you. And at the end of the day … as long as we make a little bit more revenue coming in than the expense that we spend, we’re good. We don’t need to make a bunch of money. We need to make enough to just invest in the mission. And if we’re fortunate to make a little bit of a margin at the end of the year, then it doesn’t go outside of the organization. We reinvest that in facilities like these, or a new MRI, or whatever it is.
That feels good to me, like the mission, the values of the organization are very positive. There are plenty of examples nowadays circulating about how other organizations have more of a profit motive. They’re here to make money and pull money out of these organizations. That’s not what I’m interested in doing. That’s certainly not what Southcoast is interested in.
NBL: It seems to be human nature that people tend to be more vocal with their criticism than their praise. What do you point to as reasons health care consumers should put their trust in the Southcoast system?
DM: I would say Southcoast is — and this is one of the things that sort of pleasantly surprised me about this organization — in addition to being a very caring, values-driven organization, that the level of expertise and the care that we provide is amazingly high quality.
I came from the academic medical centers in Boston, and those are the best in the world, of course, and I’m very proud of being part of that. There’s so much care that we provide here that is just as good as anything in Boston. It’s absolutely remarkable.
So, what I say is that most of the care that our community needs, from simple primary care to complicated heart surgery, we provide here, and we provide really well. The compact that comes with that is that there are a few things that we just don’t do as a community health system, and we shouldn’t. We don’t … do bone marrow transplants or liver transplants or something really complicated like that … our patients can be reassured that when it’s necessary for us to refer out to a big academic center, we have no trouble doing that. We have wonderful referral relationships with them, so we can take care of everything or arrange to take care of everything, and we’ll do it in the right way, for the right reasons. …
When you’re sick and you’re vulnerable … it’s partly that you need the best expertise, the best care. You want to make sure that your doctors and nurses and techs are as good as they can be, and ours are wonderful. They’re extremely well trained and clinically very, very competent. But it’s also the care, right? …
Sometimes, just (as important as) what we do to you and the medicines that we give you, and the surgeries that we do, is how do we embrace you and take care of your whole person? That’s really what good care is, in my mind.
NBL: What do you see as the most significant challenges in health care today?
DM: I think it’s the financial issues, especially around community health providers. …
The reimbursement that we get from the commercial insurance companies is, especially here in the South Coast, not quite fair. Everyone gets paid more or less the same for Medicare and Medicaid, and we take care of lots of Medicare or Medicaid patients. The reimbursement is pretty standard. I would argue that it’s never enough, right? But it is what it is.
But you know, the contracts and relationships we have with the commercial insurance companies like Blue Cross and Harvard Pilgrim and United and what have you, we need to keep pushing them to pay us fairly so that we can continue to deliver our mission. …
(At the same time) we have a responsibility internally to run our organization as efficiently as we can, so there shouldn’t be any waste. … As a system, we come together and we look at all of our 50-plus physical sites around the region, and (consider), is there duplication that we can eliminate? Can we consolidate some things and do it more efficiently? We try to be as frugal as we can (without compromising) on the quality of care that we provide. But to make all that work financially, it’s tight. …
Every health care organization, every company, is having trouble recruiting staff and retaining staff. It’s incumbent upon us as an employer to be an attractive place to work, to be a good, positive, diverse, kind culture for employees. Not just to attract new folks, but to retain the staff who work here. The average tenure of health care workers around the country is around two, three years. At Southcoast, it’s closer to 10. So, we’re doing something right here. That’s really important.
NBL: Providence-based Lifespan recently agreed to purchase Steward Health Care’s St. Anne’s Hospital in Fall River. Using your crystal ball, how do you foresee it will change the health care landscape in the South Coast?
DM: Everyone knows we bid on St. Anne’s. It was a discussion that my board and I had many, many, many times over the past several months. And we decided back in March or so that we wanted to put a bid in on it. St. Anne’s is a good hospital. It really is. Before Steward came in, a lot of our providers worked both at Charlton and St. Anne’s. It was sort of a fluid back-and-forth, and there still are a lot of synergies, a lot of things that we can do together. We actually still do, and so we thought that bringing St. Anne’s into the Southcoast family just made a lot of sense.
There’s a lot of things that we could do better having them as part of us — a bigger geographic reach, and also maybe reducing some redundancies in the city and what have you — a lot of good reasons for us to have tried, and I’m glad that we did.
We put forward what we thought was a very healthy bid for St. Anne’s; turns out that Lifespan put a stronger bid in. We did a very detailed financial analysis to understand what it was worth financially — not clinically, it’s worth a ton clinically, that’s all good. But the bid is a financial sort of offer. We assessed what we thought we could afford and what it was actually worth, keeping in mind that we have a fiduciary responsibility to the mothership. You have to make sure Southcoast stays healthy as well. We didn’t want to overextend ourselves in a way that would compromise our ability to keep serving our patients as we do now. …
We’re used to having competition in Fall River. But I say that in air quotes, because there’s plenty of patients for everyone. There’s no shortage of patients. We all will be busy. We have a competitor in Fall River now with Steward. And changing that sign from Steward St. Anne’s to Lifespan St. Anne’s, it’s not going to make that much difference for us.
I know John Fernandez, the CEO at Lifespan. John and I are friends, we worked together at Mass General Brigham for many years. And their mission is the same: They want to serve patients and do the best that they can for the community. Where there are opportunities for us to collaborate, who knows? Maybe there’s some ways that we can do things together in the future.
But I will say that we’re not going to just sort of rest on our laurels and wait and see what happens. Because we have more geographies, more patients to serve, more service lines to grow that our patients need, and we’ll continue to do that. We’ll continue to expand a little bit north, a little bit more west, our clinical centers: cardiovascular, cancer, orthopedics. There’s so much demand for these services that we’re going to continue to grow those in different ways. …
So, I don’t think it’s a threat. It’s an interesting change in the health care environment. And I hope at the end of the day that having Lifespan adds to the community’s access to first-quality care. But we’ve been here, and we’ll continue to be here.
NBL: It’s obviously a high-pressure job, so what do you do to unwind?
DM: I try to keep it in balance as best I can. I practice yoga five days a week. One of the many great things that I’m enjoying learning about this region is that there are yoga studios everywhere. It’s a delight. I try to practice almost five days a week, if I’m good. That helps as well.
I try to spend as much time with my family as I can and relax, and I just try to put it into perspective.
I can spend entire days and weeks in my office just doing work and being on Zooms and whatever and having meetings. One of the things I try to do to reset myself is to go out and be among the patients and our staff and remind myself as to why we’re doing this in the first place. Seeing the good work that’s happening all over the organization, that sort of reignites my passion for this work. …
I try to find some type of work/life balance, and I really encourage my team and all of our staff to do the same thing. I want them to be happy at work. I want them to feel positive when they come to work the next day. That culture that I try to embody myself and try to practice is something that I think translates into better care for our patients as well.
Joanna McQuillan Weeks is a freelance writer and frequent correspondent for The New Bedford Light.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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