Joe Landsman, stability and the story of UTMC’s growth
The photos of the University of Tennessee Medical Center tell a story of pride and potential. The caption on one from July 1956 describes the brand-new hospital.
“The six-story, $6,000,000 citadel of medicine in which research, teaching and training will have equal importance, is shown above on the Alcoa Highway site overlooking the Tennessee River across from the U-T farm campus buildings. The building’s 245,000 square feet make it the University’s largest single structure.”
Nearly 70 years later, the massive UTMC campus would boggle the minds of those ambitious founders.
The growth was not foreordained. In 2019, Hahnemann University Hospital, the teaching hospital of Drexel University College of Medicine, closed amid a financial crisis that shocked the medical community. The hospital was established in 1885, and when it closed, nearly 600 physicians who were residents or fellows were displaced, and Philadelphia lost a vital Level 1 trauma center.
The closure was presaged by a revolving door of top executives at Hahnemann in the years before it collapsed. Five CEOs cycled through the organization in a single year.
So to understand the growth of UTMC from a single hospital to a nationally recognized academic medical center that boasts 10 academic departments, 11 residency programs and 17 fellowship programs, one needs to start with stability.
And another way to spell stability is Joe Landsman. Landsman retires as UTMC president April 1, capping a quarter century in top leadership, including as president and CEO before he handed off the position of CEO to his successor, Dr. Keith Gray, in anticipation of retirement. Remarkable among leadership at most medical organizations, Landsman retained a core team throughout his tenure.
Together they pushed and pulled and cajoled and convinced and demanded and directed the people who are the institution. The results are both physical and conceptual. They are concrete (literally). They are cultural.
Landsman lands heavily on the last when I asked him to reflect on his legacy. “When I look back, I think first of all, changing the culture and the team that lives our culture every day,”
Our cover story today is a package that focuses on the major milestones of Landsman leadership at
UTMC. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt the limitations of the physical space of the newspaper as acutely as I did in this effort. To try to distill the work of a career as substantial as Landsman’s would take a book, no exaggeration.
What shone through in two hours of conversation that could easily have stretched for two more was his consuming passion for the place he chose to serve for so long and his pride in the people who helped build the University of Tennessee Medical Center into an anchor for our community.
Landsman has an easy manner in conversation and his explanations bounce seamlessly between illuminating anecdotes and impeccable detail. I never worked with him, but I imagine there were elements of both in his leadership style.
“We went,” Landsman told me, “on a very deliberate journey.”
Joel Christopher is the executive editor. Email: joel.christopher@knoxnews.com.