Man of many talents looks to the future

William Host’s plans didn’t include giving this interview and tour of Wilkes-Barre General Hospital. He should be relaxing on a beach somewhere, or visiting one of the eight grandchildren of whom he is so proud.

But Host’s priorities changed dramatically in April 2005 with the death of Joan, his beloved wife of about 47 years.

“I would have retired (on June 30, 2006),” at the end of a turbulent but productive five-year run as president and chief executive officer of Wyoming Valley Health Care System, he said. Instead he signed a three-year contract extension.

A commitment to complete the “renewal” of the largest health care provider in Northeastern Pennsylvania has helped him deal with the loss of a lifetime partner.

“My wife and I became exclusive at the age of 16,” he said, and married in 1959 when both were attending college in Pittsburgh. She accompanied Host, 67, along a career path few physicians follow.

Starting in 1965 with a Laceyville family practice office, Host has moved steadily onward in the academic, medical and administrative worlds, ultimately returning to the region to take the helm at WVHCS in 2001. Along the way he learned new medical specialties, pioneered a surgery technique at Tyler and Wilkes-Barre General hospitals and became part owner of a vacation resort.

At Wyoming Valley Health Care, Host has taken a hard-nosed business approach that has healed the system’s financial bruises, faced down a union that represented more than 400 employees and become entangled in a high-profile legal battle with a well-regarded neurosurgeon.

The contrast between the dedicated physician and careful administrator is intriguing to Denise Cesare, president and chief executive officer of Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania, who admires Host’s accessibility and forthright manner.

“He is a very tough businessman. But on the personal side he’s very caring,” Cesare said.

“It’s almost a dichotomy,” but everything he does is for the benefit of the community even if it doesn’t seem so on the surface, she said.

A solo start

A native of western Pennsylvania, Host was first exposed to science by his father, who ran a chemical laboratory for a specialty steel firm.

His medical career began in 1965 when after earning his M.D. degree he opened an individual family practice office in Laceyville after he and Joan scouted the state for promising locations. At the time the couple needed income to pay accumulated college debts, so Host passed on an ob-gyn residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Before long a pattern would emerge that has repeated every five to eight years in William Host’s professional life.

“I was ready for another spurt of growth,” he said, and decided to move into surgery through a residency at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, where he had earned his M.D. in 1964.

Thomas P. Saxton was the chief administrator at Tyler Hospital in Tunkhannock when Host arrived in 1973 to begin his surgery practice. He didn’t know where Host’s career would take the newly minted surgeon, but spotted his restless energy.

That included orthopedics and delivering babies, an aspect of the ob-gyn field he had declined to pursue nearly a decade earlier.

Saxton also could see that Joan Host was an important partner in a blossoming career.

Joan Host would later make her own significant contribution to health care, becoming a certified cancer registrar and compiling the region’s first tumor registry, which identified a high rate of cancers in the Susquehanna River basin.

William Host took an interest in then-new surgical techniques that used fiber-optic scopes to look inside the body, eliminating the need for invasive procedures that require lengthy healing. He introduced the practice at Tyler and expanded it at General, Nesbitt and Mercy, where he also practiced.

Saxton was running General Hospital when Host approached him about buying the new equipment. Even though he was bowled over by the young surgeon’s presentation, he did not foresee what was ahead.

A new specialty

In 1980, while continuing his surgery practice, Host ventured outside the medical field to buy a share of the Shadowbrook resort that appeared headed for bankruptcy.

“It required a significant turnaround,” he said. “That kind of sparked my interest” in the operation of a business, which health care was fast becoming just as much as it was a community service.

On his resume, Host says that over the next several years 20 motel rooms were expanded to 80, the golf course was rehabilitated and, “Above all, it makes money and will be debt-free in three years.”

He has since sold his interest in the resort but still maintains a home on Shadowbrook Mountain. And in the process he discovered a new specialty – financial rescues.

In 1986 Host added administrative responsibilities at Tyler Hospital, becoming chief executive officer in 1989.

“Tyler needed a turnaround,” he said, and by then he had developed a strong interest in the business side of health care while still practicing surgery. He prescribed a combination of reduced personnel and improved efficiency, closing some care units and consolidating others while making use of modern technology.

By 1991 it was again time for change, and Host decided to concentrate on administration. He enrolled simultaneously at Columbia University in master of business administration and master of public health programs.

Still working at Tyler when he returned to school, Host hired a driver to take him to and from New York three times a week. He chuckled as he described how his son converted the back seat area of the car into a “study room.”

Next came eight years at the Liberty Health System in New Jersey, culminating in the position of chief operating officer of a teaching hospital where he helped engineer another financial recovery, again drawing on technology and personnel management techniques.

“It gave me an opportunity to work on both sides of the house,” he said of the experience that required interacting with physicians, residents in training and employees.

It also exposed Host to a mentor, CEO Dr. Jonathan Metsch, whom he described as “extraordinary, temperamental, bright and persistent,” terms those who know him might apply to Host.

Coming home

With a $300 million endowment on hand and 15 acres of land along the Hudson River on which to develop new facilities, Host told his assistant not to forward entreaties from headhunters on the lookout for proven health care executives. But she mentioned one call, because it was about a position in Wilkes-Barre.

Ready to leave for a much-needed vacation, Host tentatively took the call. After some initial discussion, he agreed to fly to Chicago from Mexico one day for an initial interview. One thing led to another, and soon he was assuming the leadership at Wyoming Valley Health Care, which was emerging from a failed attempt to become an integrated system based on an employed physician model.

“I wasn’t surprised” at his return, Cesare said. “He really does have a passion for this region.”

A consultant firm, The Hunter Group, had been running the system since March 2000 and had narrowed a $24 million annual loss to $21 million for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2001.

Charles Parente led the search committee for a new CEO and at the time was the incoming chairman of the system’s board.

“He was head and heels above any other candidate,” Parente said. The fact that Host was a doctor was a plus, and Parente felt he could more easily gain cooperation from the system’s physicians.

There was another plus: “I’ve never met a man of his age with more energy,” Parente said. “The busier he is I think the happier he is.”

The rest of the story is one of those anecdotes that lives forever. After his first interview with the board, Host and Parente sat down at Friendly’s restaurant in Dallas.

“We had a handshake deal put together,” Parente said. “I wrote down three or four terms on a napkin and he put it in his pocket.” And that was it. Terms included a salary of $305,000 for Host’s first full year, a sum that grew to nearly $387,000 in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2005, the last year for which figures were available.

Host took over in August and quickly moved to place his stamp on the organization.

“He came in at a tough time,” Cesare said. “They had to make some difficult decisions.”

She said when a consultant leaves the hard work is not totally done and it’s not unusual to keep them on for an extended period of time. But Host kept Hunter on board only a few weeks.

“He’s very confident in his abilities,” Cesare said, and she sensed he was ready to rise or fall on his own.

Since Host’s arrival the system’s finances have improved dramatically – a whopping 11 percent operating loss in fiscal 2000 has become a nearly 2 percent profit in 2006, according the figures compiled by the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council. Wyoming Valley Health Care System is one of only eight statewide to move from a negative three year average total margin from 2005 to 2006.

As he did at Tyler and in Jersey City, Host trimmed staffing; WVHCS has about 800 fewer employees now than when he arrived, he said. But with more than 3,200 workers, the system still is the region’s largest employer.

While clearly relishing his contribution to the performance improvement, Host is quick to share credit.

“There isn’t anything easy about health care,” he said. “It takes a hell of a team to get this done.”

There have been difficult times, to be sure. A bitter 21-day strike and lockout of 400 members of the Professional Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals union took a toll on the reputation of both Host and the health care system in 2003.

“The strike was a wake-up call for everybody,” said union executive director Bill Cruice. The next time around, the health system and union agreed early on a five-year contract that raised wages to the highest level in the region.

“I credit Bill Host for recognizing how important it is to be on good terms with the nurses,” Cruice said.

Cruice said Host did not participate directly in negotiations but knows he was the final word on the new contract.

“All I can judge is the decisions he’s been involved with, which are I think getting wiser.”

Another glitch came with a 2004 decision to suspend the privileges of well-known neurosurgeon David Sedor after Sedor allegedly threatened Host and other administrators. Sedor was frustrated that a planned expansion of the neurosurgery unit was replaced by a closer relationship with physicians at Penn State Hershey Medical Center.

A charge against Sedor of making terroristic threats was dismissed, although a district justice did recommend he attend anger management training after he allegedly threatened to kill Host and others in his office, according to a police affidavit.

The confrontation drew letters of support for Sedor in local newspapers along with criticism of Host’s and the administration’s handling of the incident.

Sedor subsequently sued Host and WVHCS, alleging racism, misuse of radiation equipment and steering patients to a system-owned imaging department. The lawsuit is pending and in the discovery stage, said WVHCS in-house counsel Mary Cummings.

Seeing the future

It’s clear Host has lost none of his enthusiasm for health care technology as he describes in intimate detail a new $1.5 million imaging machine installed at General Hospital. He gives an animated description as staffers demonstrate how the 10-ton “magnet” can move between two operating rooms, enveloping a patient for scans without disruption.

Ironically, one of its primary uses is in neurosurgery, a department Host wants to build up. A second surgeon was recently hired, and he plans to seek designation as a stroke center this fall. He sees that kind of specialization as the future of health care.

The cost of high-tech gadgets is one reason for the shift. Host believes that the best technology should be available in the region, but that every hospital can’t afford to buy it. That leads to another prediction; that more hospital mergers are inevitable and necessary.

“There’s going to be a lot more consolidation in health care,” he said, creating “significant integrated systems” to eliminate the massive duplication of costly equipment.

Locally, that means he expects to renew talks with Scranton’s Community Medical Center once CMC has completed its takeover of Moses Taylor Hospital. An alliance between WVHCS and CMC would compete with a growing Geisinger Health System.

“Everybody would be better served if there were two strong, patient-oriented health care systems in Northeastern Pennsylvania,” he said.

But for all the emphasis on treatment, Host has come to believe there’s only one way to truly fix a health care system that sucks up an inordinate share of national resources.

“This question of healthy living has to be addressed,” he said. “It we do not emphasize (it), all of the other things will only determine that we lose the battle more slowly.”

A sprint to the finish

As William Host’s journey through the health care system nears an end, he’s spending more time with his family, including his 93-year-old father, who lives at system-owned Heritage House.

“We wander all over the place,” Host said, he on foot and his dad in a power chair, often visiting the F.M. Kirby Center and other downtown stops. For more distant trips, Host had a chair carrier installed on the back of his car.

Host also visits with his four children and eight grandchildren, who live up and down the East Coast. Sometimes they gather at the Shadowbrook house, where he and Joan raised their family but where he no longer spends much time.

“I just don’t have a reason to be there,” he said, his confident tone suddenly subdued. Instead he has bought a house near General Hospital, “where I live 85 percent of the time.”

Asked how he managed to make so many successful changes in direction over a 42-year career, Host quickly points out that he didn’t do it alone. Joan Host was “comfortable in conditions of uncertainty,” he said, “which was a godsend to me.”

The transitions didn’t create tension for either of them, he said, since the only adverse outcome would have been economic.

Winding down slowly is not in the cards, though, with a major hospital expansion under way that includes the 96,000-square-foot John D. and CeCe McCarthy Critical Care Pavilion and the 40,000-square-foot Charles E. and Mary Parente Cancer Center.

“There won’t be any lame duck period,” Host said. “It will be a sprint” to complete those projects.

The next step will probably be a couple of months at the beach, without a cell phone, he said, although Cesare has her doubts.

“I cannot envision Bill Host sitting on a beach somewhere,” she said. “I just can’t picture him retiring.”

A HEALTH CARE JOURNEY

The career of Dr. William Host has taken him from a family practice in Laceyville to president and CEO of Wyoming Valley Health Care System. Here’s a snapshot:

1969: Begins a surgery residency at UMDNJ, then accepts a fellowship at Allegheny Hospital.

1993: Vice president and clinical director, department of surgery, Jersey City Medical Center.