David Strong looks back at nearly four decades of hospital life, looks ahead to home life

Back in the early 1970s when Strong began his occupational journey, Healthcare Purchasing News, where he served as an editorial advisory board member, Hospital Purchasing News and even its initial forerunner, Purchasing Administration, didn’t yet exist and wouldn’t debut until 1977.

The industry association known today as the Association for Healthcare Resource and Materials Management was approaching the decade mark as a professional society within the American Hospital Association and not as a personal membership department. In fact, Strong has been an association member since 1980 and was an AHRMM Board Member from 1992 to 1994. He served as president of the Michigan Association of Healthcare Purchasing and Materials Management in 1991.

Throughout his career, Strong developed supply chain leadership experience at hospitals and multi-hospital systems in Texas, Tennessee, Michigan and Oklahoma, developing what he views as "the ability to see the bigger picture and know how my department and our activities impact that picture, and specifically the bottom line," he told HPN in late 2004.

Prior to joining Integris in August 1999, Strong served as system director of materials management for the El Paso (TX) Market of Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp. for three years. He spent two years previously as corporate director of materials management at Detroit, MI-based Horizon Health System. Strong began his career at Methodist Hospital, Memphis, TN, before moving to Medical Plaza Hospital, Fort Worth, TX, then to Fort Worth (TX) Osteopathic Hospital, then to Providence Hospital, El Paso, TX, and then to St. Luke’s Hospital, Saginaw, MI.

Strong clearly was passionate about supply chain management in healthcare. "I am impatient with people who want to discount the financial benefits we bring to the table," he said in late 2004.

Before Strong slipped into retirement
last month, HPN Senior Editor Rick Dana Barlow slipped him a few parting questions to reflect on his career and the industry as a whole.

STRONG: I will be taking the Master Gardener class, so that in the future I’ll know what I’m talking about relative to my yard and gardens.

I enjoy taking a mediocre supply chain department and making it better. None of us should be surprised that we still have facilities doing things the same way they did it 15 or 20 years ago. I think it would be fun to be a consultant who went to work in a facility, moved into the town for three to six months, and put the train on the right track. Someone who had the authority to make the changes necessary to move to the next level in the supply chain process.

I can’t do that. Brevity has never been one of my strong suits. My motivation in healthcare has always been, ‘If you aren’t taking care of a patient, you better be taking care of someone who is.’ If you look at most supply chain management departments, you see that we touch every employee everyday. We are responsible for the economic, timely support of the caregivers with the supplies and equipment they need to enhance positive outcomes for their patients.

It may seem mundane, but after combining [accounts payable] into supply chain management, we started using a credit card to make AP payments. In calendar [year] 2008, we received over $200,000 in rebates. Wow, making AP a revenue producer… not bad.

The past five years I have played Santa at our children’s mental health facility and every year I cry. Every year some little boy or girl says, ‘Santa, I just want to go home for Christmas.’ I know they won’t be going home and I cry.

Yes. We are different. Nobody dies if the door doesn’t get hung on a Ford at the end of the shift. Nobody suffers if Wal-Mart doesn’t have the exact product they want. You can learn it, but you can sure be bloodied if you don’t learn fast. We are the only industry totally 100 percent about people.

Develop a tough skin and develop it fast. Find out if the person you report to can get up to 30,000 feet and see the big picture or are they always looking at everything from street level. You have to be able to step back from the day to day operations and imagine what might be. What if we did it another way? And lastly, if you don’t have a sense of humor, you are dead.