This is how a midcareer should look. Kay Ayers, vice president of AvMed Health Plan, keeps finding herself with new and wider responsibilities. And she likes them. A partner in a CPA firm, the 47-year-old Ayers joined Gainesville-based AvMed 15 years ago as corporate controller. At the time, it was a not-for-profit hospital company. Now the hospitals are gone, and AvMed is the state's fifth-largest HMO and its largest not-for-profit. Ayers has had a transformation, too. After a stint as personnel chief, she heads member services. A "definitely unusual" career track, says AvMed CEO Edward C. Peddie.
Ayers runs the four call centers and 120 employees that handle AvMed's 1.2-million annual calls from 326,000 members. "It's been an eye-opening experience," Ayers says. AvMed struggles with the same issues as other HMOs: controlling costs while keeping members satisfied. Self-described as clueless initially about member services, Ayers took a seat in a call center to listen in as reps dealt with members. Since taking over, she's expanded to six from one the number of regional "member councils" through which members give the company quarterly feedback. She also has overseen the upgrading of technology and web offerings to improve service.
Ayers finds it funny to be asked whether she wants to be CEO someday. (Chief Operating Officer Robert C. Hudson is a better bet as Peddie's successor.) Like a lot of managers who get to see a CEO's job up close, Ayers has her doubts. That's part of being midcareer, too.
Education: Bringing Stature to Pharmacy
Here's a comment Sven A. Normann gets when he meets students in his University of Florida doctor of pharmacy program: "I didn't know you were 6-foot-4." It's not a terribly scientific observation, but it's understandable. The students' mental image of Normann comes from the small screen -- his videotaped lectures for the working professional distance-learning program.
Designed for pharmacists who have a bachelor's but never got a PharmD -- the current coin of the industry realm -- Normann's program has 475 students nationally, compared with 440 in the traditional on-campus program. Normann joined the university as the program's assistant director in 1994 when it had 20 students. He became director in 1998.
The high-profile Normann gave the program stature. One of the first board-certified toxicologists in the nation, Normann for 11 years ran the Florida Poison Information Center at Tampa General, for a time the only poison control center in the state and one of the nation's busiest. (He helped get more Florida centers established.) He's an authority on coral snake bites, thanks to so many people in Florida getting them.
The Florida-born son of a Swedish father, Normann, 46, is a community college product. In addition to a degree from Valencia in Orlando, he has degrees and has been a resident or a fellow at Creighton University, the Mayo Medical Center, the University of Florida and the University of California. He even took a course in teaching distance learning from a university in Toowoomba, Australia. "If I'm going to do a distance learning program," Normann says, "I'm going to really make it distant."
Preventative Care: Working to Improve the Odds
Black babies born in central Hillsborough County have the same odds of dying before age 1 as babies born in some Third World countries. Improving the odds has become the mission of Estrellita "Lo" Berry, the 44-year-old director of Central Hillsborough County Healthy Start. The program uses local churches, doulas and community volunteers to reach pregnant and postpartum women with advice as well as emotional and physical care.
Berry worked in mental-health services for 15 years before joining Healthy Start. "I just woke up one day and said I want to work with prevention instead of intervention and crisis," Berry says. "I'm from the community. I see myself as part of the community."
The Tampa native and her husband, George Berry, are indeed active in the community. George Berry works with Volunteers of America, helping adults make the transition from state institutional care to community living. The couple also serve as foster parents for children with severe emotional disturbances, giving families a respite and keeping the children out of state hospitals. Lo Berry says she follows the example set by her parents, Sam and Bert Washington. "We were always told what you give comes back to you," she says.
Berry looks forward to receiving permanent federal funding soon for the program, which comes out of the Tampa-based Lawton and Rhea Chiles Center for Healthy Mothers and Babies. In the past year, the program helped 564 mothers and 391 babies. Early results: The rate of substance abuse among Healthy Start pregnant moms is a quarter that of pregnant moms not in the program.
Administration: A Dose of Know-How
Dr. J. Darrell Shea
Agency for Health Care Administration
Age 67, Orlando
First: The first chief medical officer for the state Agency for Health Care Administration, which administers Medicaid and regulates healthcare in Florida.
One-liner: "People don't know what AHCA is -- let alone what I do."
What he does: Provides clinical know-how to regulators, acts as liaison to practitioners, especially by translating agency jargon for them.
Previous: Private orthopedic practice, Orlando; faculty, University of Miami and University of Pittsburgh. A New York native, he was educated at the University of Rochester and was a research fellow at Oxford.
Most interesting body part to work on: The spine. He ran Jackson Memorial's Spinal Cord Injury unit.
Attribute: Positive thinker. For instance, with doctors and hospitals seeming to fight endlessly with managed care, medicine seems more contentious these days. Shea downplays the conflict. His evaluation: "The team is more complicated."
Nursing Homes: Counterattacking the Lawyers
Leslie Williams
National Healthcare Corp.
Family: Husband, Joel, a musician; and children, Whitney Olivia, 1, and Michaela, 3.
Dramatic experience: Played an angel last Easter in a church pageant.
Education: Milligan College, Johnson City, Tenn.
Leslie Williams' "catharsis thing" came while pregnant with her daughter, Whitney Olivia. A nursing home administrator, Williams felt the industry was getting such an undeserved beating from trial lawyers that only one thing had been left untouched. "Over here, the left rib, the third one down isn't broken yet," she jokes. After praying, she says, she began to find ways to champion the industry. "Doors just started flying open all over the place."
Williams, who runs Tennessee-based National HealthCare Corp.'s 180-bed home in Merritt Island, found one door led to a U.S. Senate hearing room, where she testified in November against minimum staffing requirements for homes.
In March, the 34-year-old helped inspire an industry rally in Tallahassee in favor of making nursing homes harder to sue. With her musician-husband, Joel, she made an "on-hold" phone message in favor of the bill that callers hear at 70 Florida homes belonging to NHC and others.
"She's a smart lady," says Beth Ferris, a Texas patient advocacy group leader who battled verbally with Williams at the Senate hearing. "She's attractive. She's young. She's very articulate. She's just wrong."
No numbers-cruncher in a suit, Williams first worked at a nursing home when she was 16. Joining NHC as a trainee out of college, she later ran a Winter Haven home before taking command of NHC Merritt Island while it was under construction. "What goes on inside these walls is a lot of love," she says.
NHC Merritt Island now has 200 employees. It also has a $222,000 liability insurance premium, up from $9,996 five years ago. Plaintiff lawyers make her boil.
Williams wonders whether she should run for public office. "It's up to God," she says. "He hasn't led me yet."