He's been the presiden and CEO of ProMedica since 2022, leading the organization through post Covid 19 pandemic challenges.

Remarkably, he and his team have turned an unprofitable health care system back to profitability.

And he continues to build a health care delivery system of clinical excellenc for those living in our region.

So let's head out to ProMedica headquarters for my interview with ProMedica president and CEO Arturo Pulizzi.

Arturo, it's great to be with you here at the ProMedica headquarters.

Arturo Polizzi: It's my pleasure to be with you.

Kristi: Tell us about your leadership prior to coming back here as president and CEO.

Arturo Polizzi: Oh, boy.

I go back a ways.

So I go back to 1998.

Here at ProMedica, I started right out of law school.

I started actually as an intern in the legal department.

I was here at ProMedica for 20 years in various capacities.

After about 13 years, I moved out of the legal department and started moving around.

My predecessor in this role.

Randy Ostrom, was a great mentor for me and really encouraged me to get out and about, get my MBA, which I did up at Michigan.

And then he afforded me a lot of opportunities in human resource and then ultimately operations.

And then I got an opportunity to be CEO of a system down in Cincinnati.

And I learned a ton about myself and my leadership style.

And how to manage board relationships and things like that.

Managed strategy.

Kristi: So then in 2022, you came back here and it was post-pandemic.

There were fiscal difficulties everywhere here.

What was that like as you stepped back into ProMedica post-pandemic from when you were here previously?

Arturo Polizzi We were losing a lot of money.

We had a lot of debt.

So the environment here was stressful.

So as I cam in, I had a lot of relationships from my previous time here at ProMedica, so that helped me get into the mix pretty fast and really try to figure out who's who, what's what, and how do we start to formulate a plan to get out of the financial situation we were in?

It became apparent pretty quickly that we had to take actio and we had to take action fast.

Kristi: So many health care organizations didn't survive.

Yeah.

So really, when you look back at that, what is your takeaway in terms of what you did?

Well right away.

Was it those outside entities that you worked with?

Was it the team?

All of the above?

Arturo Polizzi: Yeah.

So the restructuring plan really was to focus back on our hospitals and doctor and our memory care facilities.

At that time, we were huge, where $7 billion company, we had nursing homes, we had an insurance company.

And we really wanted to focus on what we do well, which is hospitals, doctors, memory care.

Those are the things we did really well.

So it was really divesting everything else.

We were able to adapt really fast and that gets back to that team.

Kristi: So how has that refocusing really streamlined business operations and even things like community engagement and impact?

Arturo Polizzi: Yeah.

I think it' helped us, you know, this focus, instead of being a mile wide and an inch deep, you know, now we can dig a lot deeper into northwest Ohio and southeast Michigan on what we're doing.

We still have a lot of community impact initiatives out there.

Rusty bide who our children's hospital is named after a benefactor, from gosh, is probably ten years ago now when he gave us that big gift.

You know, we've got a couple Ebeid neighborhood promises one here in Toledo in an urban setting and one in Adrian, Michigan, in a rural setting.

And Russ, his mantra was a hand up, not a handout.

And he was very much focused on education.

Let's help folks in these communities who need help get educated financially, clinically, wherever we can, help provide some education and a hand up.

Let's do it.

And so we're doing a lot of that work still in different communities.

And we have a lo of other initiatives going on.

We've got a great mobile care unit with the Ronald McDonald Hous that goes into different areas of northwest Ohio, which is fantastic.

So we've got a ton of stuff going on, but now it's more local versus national.

Kristi: When it comes to the different specialties Cardiology.

Neurology.

Oncology, orthopedics, children's.

How do you go about attracting the best specialists and really creating top teams that make a difference for the patients, but also s that people living in our region can stay in our region and get their care here.

Arturo Polizzi: You know, the way we drive it is just what you set through those service lines.

We have formal structure and all of those service lines heart, neuro oncology, pediatrics, orthopedics and we have physician leaders in all those areas.

We pair them with administrative leaders, and we have a strategic planning department who works with all of them to make sure we're staying state of the art in everythin we're doing, including research.

So it's through those plans that we're able to stay state of the art and do the high level stuff that we're doing.

It's and what was great, even during all of our restructuring, we never stopped any of that.

All of that kept rolling an we kept investing in our people.

We keep recruiting top talent and top talent recruits top talent.

So, you know, our physicians recruit their friends.

So when you have great talent, it attracts others.

And that's been a very good progra for us on the recruitment side.

And we've stayed very strong in that space.

And we invest in a lot of technology to state, state of the art.

You know, one of the things we're most proud o is our robotic surgery program.

We are one of the top programs in the country with robotic surgery.

Kristi: As you talk about that and delivering the best clinical care you possibly can.

I'm interested in understanding, you know, you're starting to build a culture of that.

And as you said, sort of that that begins to build upon it, you know, sort of with each other.

Yes.

But how do you continue to do that day after day, year after year and keep that culture thread in throughout the years and the generations?

Arturo Polizzi: Yeah.

Well, what we do i we create a very formal process through our strategy department.

So every year we've got a calendar of appointments.

So you got to show u and you got to make your pitch.

And if you're not being aggressive enough we'll push you.

If you're being too aggressive we'll pull you back a little bit.

But we try to be very deliberate in those planning sessions to make sure we're pushing enough to make sure we're staying on to of what's coming down the road.

Kristi How has the patient experience in your mind evolved through the years?

Arturo Polizzi Well, that's a great question.

The patient experience, I think, means different things to different people.

You know, if you're trying to get, an X-ray done you want to be able to schedule that really easily today.

You want to be able to do that online.

If you're in a hospital, you want to make sure your meal is hot and your meal is good.

So it kind of depends.

I start when I think about our experience.

I start with safety.

We have a culture of safety within our organization.

I think that's really important.

Whether you're in a physician's office or in one of our hospitals.

Safety first, and then the experience for me is once you're in our walls, we take great care of you, an our people are great with you.

Well, how it's evolvin right now is through technology.

What we're trying to make very easy for the consumer is to schedule an appointment to do a telehealth visit.

If you want to see your doctor or your caregiver virtually.

We're trying to make that very easy to do and really anything else.

Pay your bills, everything through that app.

Leveraging technology is where it's evolving, and we're trying to stay on the forefront of that.

Kristi: What have you learned the most about yoursel personally and professionally?

Arturo Polizzi: You're capable of a lot.

You just got to stick to it and keep grinding.

If you're hones with people, clear with people, even if they don't agre with you, they'll move with you.

It's impossible to get 100% consensus all the time, but you got to get enough and you got to have people respect you enough and trust you enough to take the leap.

Kristi: And you do that so well as a leader.

You see people, you hear people.

You have that emotional intelligence that really makes you an incredible leader.

Arturo Polizzi: Thank you.

Kristi So thank you for being with us on Business Life 360 and for all you do for this region and beyond.

Arturo Polizzi: My pleasure.