Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
UAMS chief’s time winds down
University trustees name campus building for retiring Rahn
Dr. Dan Rahn — chancellor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock — had a farewell tour of sorts over the past two days.
The chancellor is retiring at the end of July after nearly eight years at the helm. He summed up the academic medical school’s accomplishments under his tenure during Wednesday’s University of Arkansas board of trustees’ Joint Hospital Committee meeting. On Thursday, he came up again in the Building and Grounds Committee when trustees named a building on the UAMS campus: The Daniel W. Rahn Interprofessional Education Building.
And he bid adieu later that day when trustees granted him emeritus status.
The 67-year-old arrived at UAMS on Nov. 1, 2009, from the Medical College of Georgia, where he held several positions for nearly a decade before being selected in 2001 as the president and senior vice chancellor for health and medical programs for the University System of Georgia.
It was in Rahn’s faculty years at the Medical College where trustee Dr. Stephen Broughton of Pine Bluff first heard of the outgoing chancellor. Broughton was completing a residency program in psychiatry and chatted with medical residents in other fields.
“One of the things we noticed was that the people in internal medicine were significantly happier than the people in psychiatry, which is unusual because psychiatry is usually a vacation,” Broughton said. “We just talk to people. We don’t get stressed a great deal. They were significantly happier than we were, so we were always jealous of that, and you were the name that came up most often.”
Broughton said Thursday that he understood now why those residents were so happy.
Rahn started at UAMS when the campus had a budget deficit and through what trustee John Goodson of Texarkana called “trying financial times.” Still, the outgoing chancellor found efficiencies and managed to cut UAMS’ budget by $120 million over his tenure and increased operating revenue by more than 40 percent.
Cutting costs is going to have to continue, Rahn said, while UAMS still fuels investments in innovation and growth of its clinical side. At the same time, UAMS is falling behind in keeping salaries competitive to attract the best and brightest, he said.
“Although this is a recurring thing — being on the edge financially — we have nonetheless sustained the mission and expanded,” Rahn said. “And I’ve got confidence that that trend is going to occur in the future.”
But, it will require support from the UA board and the system going forward, he said.
Under Rahn’s leadership, UAMS reorganized its clinical programs to focus on patient-centered care, raised an average of more than $100 million annually, upgraded its information-technology infrastructure, increased the number of graduates — it had 950 to cross the stage last week — and increased collaboration for patient care.
Because of his focus on collaborative care, Rahn’s cabinet along with the UAMS Foundation Fund Board have contributed more than $300,000 to start an endowment in his name to support interprofessional education. Other UAMS employees and donors are still contributing to the endowment, said Leslie Taylor, UAMS’ vice chancellor for the Office of Communications and Marketing.
The building that will bear his name currently houses the colleges of nursing, pharmacy and public health, along with a portion of the College of Medicine.
During his last board meeting, Rahn also took the time to remind the audience that it needed to stay attuned to health care policy changes.
“We take the strong position that we need to look through the lens of whether changes to the nation’s health system move us toward the societal goal of a learning health system that produces better quality, better patient experience at lower cost,” he said, adding that the state has poor health outcomes and needed to continue to address those issues.
“We believe that one of the pillars in addressing those issues is that everyone has a fair and equitable opportunity for a healthy life and that requires that they have access to health care services at the right place at the right time. We’ve all got to work together to produce a system that will produce those outcomes.”