McGinnis succeeds through service and efficiency
Sondra McGinnis, who was recently named chief nursing officer of Erlanger Medical Group, is constantly in search of better outcomes for patients while also trying to improve efficiency for her employer.
It has proven to be a potent, one-two combination for McGinnis, who now has management responsibilities for almost 500 employees and holds the prestigious title of Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives.
McGinnis has been a hospital nurse and manager for more than 20 years and the recipient of the Living Legacy Award from her alma mater, the Ida V. Moffett School of Nursing at Samford University in Alabama.
In the early 1990s, working as a case manager at Memorial Hospital, McGinnis and her peers were challenged by then CEO Clark Taylor to each take a diagnosis and try to improve outcomes. McGinnis chose bowel surgery and was able to get a group of surgeons to agree to a common pathway to care that improved patient outcomes while creating more cost efficiency, the two gold standards of health care management.
After earning masters degrees in both health and business administration from Georgia State University, while also juggling responsibilities as a nurse and mother of four children, she took a
career detour in the 1990s to open the Chattanooga Therapeutic Riding Center on her family farm in East Brainerd.
Forming the non-profit Riding Center provided practice in skill sets that would later come in handy when McGinnis returned full time to health care management. She learned to develop a business plan, set goals, direct training and work with a board of directors, she says.
McGinnis served as director of Chattanooga Therapeutic Riding Center until 2004, when it merged with another organization to form the Tri-State Therapeutic Riding Center in McDonald, Tenn.
Later, she got a chance to manage physician offices and began a climb through the ranks of management that would eventually lead to her current post as chief nursing officer at Erlanger Medical Group.
“Most of the goals I’ve set for myself, I’ve been able to accomplish from staff RN to managing doctor’s practices,” she said.