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East-Side
Savvy
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By Pam Droog
Richard Mark
President & CEO
St. Mary’s Hospital of East St. Louis
Richard Mark likes to tell graduate students in healthcare administration
they’re lucky because, unlike him, they’ll get right into healthcare
careers. Mark’s own career path took several turns before he landed
at St. Mary’s Hospital of East St. Louis, where he’s president and
CEO.
After earning a degree in child development at Iowa State University
in 1977, Mark was an assistant high school football coach and special
education teacher in his hometown Collinsville, Ill., for three
years. When the city received a grant to counsel young, first-time
offenders, the mayor of Collinsville asked Mark to head the program.
“That’s how I got my start in public life,” he notes. That job evolved
into the mayor’s assistant, which led to a stint in customer service
for Illinois Power, which led to six years as executive director
for the St. Clair County Intergovernmental Grants Department.
At the same time, St. Mary’s Hospital was losing $4.5 million a
year. “It was about to close,” Mark says, when hospital representatives
came to his agency for help. “That’s when a representative of St.
Mary’s parent company asked me if I’d ever thought about going into
healthcare.” About six months later, Mark joined St. Mary’s as senior
vice president/chief operating officer, and in 1994 was named to
his current position. He’s also senior vice president of Ancilla
Systems, Inc., the hospital’s owner, managing real estate transactions
for the four-hospital group.
“For several years now, it seems like if there’s a problem, just
call Richard!” he jokes. But that’s for good reason: he’ll fix the
problem. Mark led the hospital’s turnaround from a $6.5 million
loss in 1990 to a positive eight percent margin in 1997, reducing
expenses by more than $1 million the first year. He also developed
the Neighborly Care Plan, a managed care plan for Medicaid recipients
that provides financial stability for St. Mary’s and saves Illinois
$1 million annually.
In addition, Mark established a Physician Recruitment Program, which
attracted 17 young doctors to East St. Louis to form a multi-specialty
group practice, and enabled St. Mary’s to build a new medical office
in 1994. Perhaps most impressive of all, as the volunteer chairman
of the East St. Louis School District’s Financial Oversight Panel,
he turned a $5 million deficit in 1994 into a $30 million surplus.
“I just try to keep things simple,” Mark explains. “Too often, people
get caught up in the latest management fad. I try to focus on the
basic mission.” At the hospital, he says, that’s taking care of
patients. At school, it’s providing an education for children. “I
said, let’s put the money in those things first, and stop everything
else,” he says.
Though the solutions seemed simple, sometimes implementing them
was a different story. “At the hospital I made some decisions people
didn’t like initially, but as a result there’s still a hospital
in East St. Louis,” Mark says. “And because of some of the moves
I made at the school board when they had multi-million-dollar deficits,
they’re putting up nine new school buildings now. People like me
or hate me,” he adds, “but I have to look at myself in the mirror,
and if I’m doing the right thing, so be it.”
Mark also does the right thing on behalf of numerous civic, cultural
and community organizations. He serves on the boards of the NAACP,
Major Case Squad, the American Hospital Association’s Public Policy
Committee, St. Louis 2004, Union Financial Group, Ltd., Quincy University,
Illinois State Chamber of Commerce, the Eads Center, YMCA and other
organizations.
Mark recently was named to the executive committee of the RCGA and
believes his role is “to point out to the membership what’s going
on in Southern Illinois, so they’ll consider how their decisions
may affect the east side,” he says. “After all, we are a region,
and the more community leaders realize and embrace that concept,
the better this region will become.”
He admits it’s frustrating trying to overcome the negative stereotypes
many people have about East St. Louis. “That changes once they come
over and talk to us,” Mark says. For example, he says, former Mercantile
Bank president John Dubinsky was one of the first to ride the MetroLink
to the east side and visit St. Mary’s. “He said, ‘This is great!
Let’s work together,’” Mark says. “From that first meeting, we were
able to eventually put a Firstar Bank branch in the hospital, the
first in East St. Louis.”
That’s just one of many successful partnerships the hospital has
formed under Mark’s leadership. He believes other great opportunities
exist in East St. Louis for investors and entrepreneurs, in areas
such as light manufacturing and technology. “However, we want to
make sure any new business would encourage and give incentives to
people to live here,” Mark says. “I’ve seen many examples of people
who get jobs, make good salaries, then leave East St. Louis. That
really hurts the community. We have to bring back residential development
and investment in homeownership.”
As a fourth-generation east-sider, Mark certainly has a vested interest
in the area. He and his wife, Melissa, have three children. One
son is a banker, another attends Eastern Illinois University, and
they have a 10-year-old daughter. Between hospital, school board
and civic duties, Mark’s at meetings at least four nights a week.
But weekends are devoted to his family, and to his two rare breed
German Shepherds.
The ultimate escape, however, is hunting. “I enjoy bow-hunting for
deer, and I’ve hunted ducks and geese in Mexico, bear in Canada.
I love it out there with no phones or pagers,” Mark says. “You’re
just kind of gone.”
Pam Droog is a St. Louis-based free-lance writer.
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