EMERGING POWER: DeNarvaez makes an impact in health care

KINGSPORT, Tenn. – When she was working as a certified public accountant in south Florida, the last thing Margaret “Denny” DeNarvaez wanted was to start a career in health care management.

But the 55-year-old Ontario native changed her tune when she realized the field gave her an opportunity to help people while challenging her with a world where government regulations and business practices changed almost daily.

She’s spent the past 12 months working as the Wellmont Health System’s president and CEO, a position that’s given DeNarvaez  the ability to supervise eight hospitals, 20 other medical facilities and 6,500 employees.

“There is no other business where you can see the impact of your work the same way as it is in health care,” DeNarvaez said in an interview about her career and the leaps of faith that brought her to Wellmont’s Kingsport headquarters.

“We have an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of the people we serve,” she continued. “And that’s an awesome responsibility.”

Changing her tune

DeNarvaez said she avoided health care-related assignments in the late 1980s because she thought it involved working with too many government regulations and an archaic payment system that stood in the way of what people wanted to do.

“It wasn’t a field I had any interest in,” DeNarvaez said, adding that she avoided accounting contracts that involved the banking and finance industry for the same reasons.

But DeNarvaez started to change her tune in 1983, when she audited a health maintenance organization that would eventually become part of Humana – a Fortune 100 company that now provides health insurance to 11.5 million Americans.

She said this work gave her the chance to experience first-hand the central challenge involved with health care management: How do you make the system more efficient while ensuring that patients get the care they need and deserve?

“We were changing the model,” she said of the HMO and the impact it and other companies like it had on health care. Being involved with these changes caused DeNarvaez to rethink her feelings on the field that eventually became her career.

Less than two years after performing the audit, DeNarvaez accepted a position working as the financial services director with Miami’s Mount Sinai Medical Center, a 955-bed hospital that was the first of four hospitals and health care systems across the country that she’d work at before coming to the Tri-Cities.

This journey, which took DeNarvaez from  Florida to Minneapolis, St. Louis and eventually to Kingsport, is best characterized by the many leaps of faith the health care executive said she made along the way.

Leaps of faith

DeNarvaez loved south Florida, a place she lived and worked in for 21 years after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Fort Lauderdale’s Drake University in 1977.

But there was one problem: “My oldest son was a hockey player,” she said, explaining that Oscar, who is now 28, was recruited to play for a Minnesota public high school in the late 1990s.

When her second son, Felipe, who is now 26, was also recruited to play hockey at this school, DeNarvaez said it was time for her and her family to pack up their belongings and move.

“We actually said: ‘Let’s put a for sale sign in our front yard and see what happens,’” she said of what was her first leap of faith.

But DeNarvaez landed on her feet and in less than a year started a four-year career as the operations vice president and the president of Minneapolis’ Abbott Northwestern Hospital.

“It was a great experience,” DeNarvaez said of her time at Abbott Northwestern, where she had the chance to compete with the world renowned Mayo Clinic and the medical practices that sprung up around it.

DeNarvaez continued this theme of competing against some of the country’s best-known health care companies in 2005, when she moved to St. Louis and started work as the president and CEO of the St. John’s Mercy Health Care, a company that managed four hospitals, a surgical center and a 342-physician medical group.

What made this position especially challenging was that the hospital’s nursing union decertified right before she took the job as its top administrator – something that meant she had to rebuild relationships and trust between the hospital’s nurses and its administrators the second she walked into the door.

“They had to take a leap of faith,” she said, adding that in the end, the hospital was recognized as being one of the best places to work – a sign that DeNarvaez’s work rebuilding the trust and relationships that held the hospital together was successful.

It had been so successful, she said, that seven St. John’s administrators decided to follow DeNarvaez when she made her final leap of faith and moved to Kingsport last year so she could take the helm at Wellmont.

“They’re coming here because they trust me and the decision that I made,” DeNarvaez said, adding that unlike her previous leaps of faith she plans to stay with Wellmont for the long term. “That speaks volumes for this area.”

gmclean@bristolnews.com

(276) 645-2518