With parents who were both healthcare administrators, Mark Allen definitely knew what he was getting into when he decided to follow in their footsteps. Just his path to administration did not come with an accounting degree but rather included time as a paramedic, working in a cardiac catheterization lab and in the Emergency Department. For the past seven years, he has been in administration at the Jackson Clinic, taking the reigns as COO three years ago.
Moving from Mississippi at the age of five, Allen considers Jackson his home. He graduated from Jackson Christian School and went on to Mississippi State to study turf management, something he quickly realized was not the career for him. He returned to Jackson, to, as he said, “get back on track.”
“My parents were both accountants who had careers in healthcare administration. My dad spent 25 years as a vice president with West Tennessee Healthcare and recently retired as the administrator of a smaller multi-specialty group in Mississippi which he ran for 10 years. My mother is the regional CFO of a group of behavioral health hospitals. They both had great work ethics and were very fulfilled in their careers,” he said. “I never felt like getting into this was expected of me but more of a matter of doing what I knew and what I wanted to do for a career. I knew the quickest way to get into healthcare was to be a paramedic so I did and also finished my business degree and also got my masters from Union University.
Since joining the clinic seven years ago, Allen has had a variety of responsibilities including project management, physician liaison and recruitment that let him work his way up to becoming COO. He attributes much of his management style to his mentor, Carl Rudd. “He always said to hire good management people around me, set direction then let them go,” said Allen, who oversees more than 550 of the clinic’s 750 employees and physicians. “Being a paramedic as well as my clinical experience, helps in that I understand the day to day flow of patient care and what it takes to take care of patients. I have been in the trenches and know what it is like. I feel as though I have been trained to manage train wrecks both literally and figuratively.”
Allen says that just trying to change the decades old culture of reactive healthcare to proactive or population health management medicine is one of the challenges facing the clinic that they are taking steps to address. “Managing a patient’s health while they are still healthy is challenging, but I think we are working on that and making progress,” he said. “We want to provide the best medicine at the best cost and we are not just putting lip service to that we are actually putting that into play.”
The clinic has created a population management department with ten registered nurses. Predictive analytic software is utilized to predict high-risk patients for admission or diseases that they have not been diagnosed with yet. The nurses take a proactive role and reach out to patients with chronic issues to see what we can do to keep them well. To address cost of care, the clinic has created departments that provide high quality procedures at lower cost such as a clinic-based GI lab that can do diagnostic scopes.
While Allen deals more in the day-to-day operations at the clinic, he says that through programs such as establishing themselves as a Medicare savings-driven accountable care organization they are increasing the quality while decreasing the cost of care for the program’s 40,000 lives in West Tennessee that are attributed to the clinic.
“We are learning to practice medicine the way it is going to be practiced in the future,” said Allen. “Our goal is to create a system that looks at the 40 year old working male patient that is not sick and determine how to engage that person to be concerned about their health in the future. How do we do preventive medicine with that person at whatever point they are in life. We want to make preventive healthcare affordable and efficient for the working person who is not sick. That is a big part of what we are working on. We are testing different theories on that and have a few initiatives in the works. We are looking where we need to be in two or three years and start putting things in place.”
Since the Jackson Clinic is not alone in its desire to move forward in this endeavor, Allen says they utilize other clinics and professional organizations to stay on top of latest trends. “We look at what other clinics across the country are doing and how they are dealing with these issues,” he said. “I am also very involved with a national COO Leadership Council. We meet twice a year to discuss these issues and see how others across the country are handling them.”
Like his parents before him, Allen has to balance family and work, a challenge he says is made easier by having a very supportive family. “Jennifer and I have been married for 12 years and she really takes the pressure off me. We have two children ages ten and seven. We are very involved in our church, Medina First United Methodist and the kids are involved in sports and music so they have something to do just about everyday,” said Allen. “I have a family that understands that there are just times I have to be at work. But now I have been known to be the most overdressed person at a sporting event or playing dodge ball on Wednesday night at church. You just have to make it a priority in your life and that helps you balance it all.”
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