The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘Lead with your heart as much as your head’
Marna Borgstrom retires as CEO of Yale New Haven Health System
NEW HAVEN — Marna Borgstrom has overseen a major expansion of the Yale New Haven Health System since she was named CEO in 2005, with five hospitals spanning the shoreline from Greenwich to Westerly, R.I.
Borgstrom’s strengths a health care executive, however, come not just from her experience since she began as an administrative resident in 1978. They are rooted in her ability to relate to her staff and patients with genuine warmth, and to support others along the way, say those who have worked with her.
The influences she has had stretch far beyond New Haven. Valerie Powell-Stafford was an administrative fellow in 1990 at Yale New Haven. Now she is CEO of Northside Hospital in St. Petersburg, Fla.
“Marna was this great role model for me, and I still reflect upon what I learned from her as a working mom as well,” Powell-Stafford said. “I would look at her in awe at how she was able to balance this very demanding career, as well as a family.”
Powell-Stafford said she has made the lessons Borgstrom taught her a part of her life and leadership. One is not to bring the concerns of work home, but to devote home life to family. Also, “she did a great job at listening and making sure that all the appropriate stakeholders were at the table when important decisions were made,” Powell-Stafford said.
And Powell-Stafford said she has followed Borgstrom in supporting other women in the health care field. “She’s done a great job in promoting women in particular … and making sure we have opportunities,” she said. “That’s
“I would look at her in awe at how she was able to balance this very demanding career, as well as a family.”
Valerie Powell-Stafford, an administrative fellow in 1990 at Yale New Haven
something I’m very intentional of as well.”
Borgstrom, 67, announced Sept. 15 that she will retire on March 25, 2022, 43 years after she joined the hospital, planning to stay for a short time before moving back to the West Coast, where she, her husband, Eric, and their sons, Christopher and Peter, lived.
Her successor, Christopher O’Connor, like Borgstrom chosen from within Yale New Haven Health’s executive ranks, will be only its fourth CEO since 1976.
When James Rawlings worked at Yale New Haven Hospital as assistant vice president for community health, and the hospital was a tenth of the size it is now, with fewer than 4,000 staff, “She could tell you almost every employee’s name as she walked down the hallways,” he said.
Borgstrom’s ability to connect personally wasn’t confined to her co-workers, either, Rawlings said. “She could walk in every community,” including the heavily Black neighborhoods in the Hill area around the hospital. “She had that magnetism, that gravitas,” he said.
Borgstrom was born in Baltimore and grew up in Connecticut. Eric Borgstrom is from north of Seattle, “and we both always thought that we would love to live there,” Borgstrom said. “But you know, one thing led to another and I just kept having new opportunities. And I never did the same thing for more than a couple of years.”
But while she would have found the same challenges in another setting, she said, “there’s something very important about working with a team of people who you feel like you can get work done with.”
So when Joseph Zaccagnino retired early, at age 59, Borgstrom became what she calls “the accidental CEO.”
“I realized that, if I didn’t throw my hat in the ring, I would probably have to look for another role, because somebody new would come in and they would build their own team,” she said. Friday was her 16th anniversary as CEO.
Once she rose to the health system’s leadership, “she didn’t sit in the chair; she transformed the chair,” said former Mayor John DeStefano Jr. One of the ways was how she improved the relationship between the hospital and Yale University. Yale New Haven is the primary teaching hospital for the Yale School of Medicine.
“Marna was part of creating a much healthier relationship. … She worked at it. I think it was a goal,” DeStefano said.
Research and jobs
Borgstrom said the partnership with Yale is one of the strengths of the health system. “The deans of the medical school have been good enough to include me and members of our team in a lot of their leadership meetings,” she said. “I know not just the clinical leaders who we support, but I know basic science chairs and the research-teaching-clinical care community is very integrated at Yale, more so than other places.”
Dr. Nancy Brown, dean of Yale Medical School, wrote in an email, “Marna has consistently supported graduate medical education.
She has led a drive for standardized excellence across the system. She has also articulated a vision for greater alignment between the medical school and health system, one we are poised to realize.”
She added, “The creation and growth of Smilow Cancer Hospital has allowed us to deliver cutting-edge cancer care to patients across the state of Connecticut.”
As one of the two largest employers in New Haven, along with Yale, Yale New Haven is critical to the city, but also attracts related businesses. “Our new factories don’t make guns. They create jobs and private sector businesses in New Haven,” including pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers, DeStefano said.
“The neurology center on the St. Raphael campus is going to be meaningful not only for patient care and for research but for the economic benefit of the city,” he said.
DeStefano said he and Borgstrom did have differences. “There were times the city had issues with collection procedures … and had issues about unionization of the workforce,” he said. “That said, on balance the community worked through those issues and continues to work through those issues.”
Only food service workers are unionized at Yale New Haven Hospital’s two campuses.
A pandemic
Borgstrom and her decades of experience were tested when COVID-19 hit Connecticut in March 2020. She remembered a town hall on Zoom with 8,500 employees, “trying to reassure them.”
“One of the things COVID did was, it tested our ability as a reasonably large organization to pivot. And we pivoted magnificently well,” she said.
“Greenwich was the first hospital” to have a high number of COVID patients, Borgstrom said. “They were overrun. At one point Greenwich wasn’t doing anything except COVID and well-newborn deliveries, and those were terrifying. And it’s a relatively small hospital and they were under siege. And what we were able to do as a system is we moved: If they needed nurses, if they needed computers, if they needed respirators, we moved them from New London, we moved them from Bridgeport, we moved them from New Haven and it was real time. … We created an incident command group who managed and made real-time decisions and … I can’t think of a bad decision that was made.”
Borgstrom’s response went beyond Yale New Haven Health. When she received a Friday evening call in April 2020 from Kathleen Silard, CEO of independent Stamford Hospital, saying she didn’t know whether she’d have enough ventilators and other equipment to make it through the weekend. “I said, you know, Kath, I’ll get back to you, but we will figure out how to treat you as if you’re a member of the Yale New Haven Health System,” Borgstrom said.
By 10 p.m., a plan had been worked out with Bridgeport Hospital, St. Vincent’s Hospital, the ambulance companies and others. “What they did in a matter of a couple of hours was, they load balanced so that we never hit a crisis in any of the Connecticut hospitals that weekend or during the pandemic for that matter,” Borgstrom said.
Gov. Ned Lamont named Borgstrom, Hartford HealthCare CEO Jeffrey Flaks and Nuvance Health CEO John Murphy to lead the health system response team when COVID hit. “I found her to be an exceptional partner,” said Flaks, who began his career as an intern at Yale New Haven Hospital in 1992.
“I consider Marna a role model, an incredible values-driven principled leader,” Flaks said. “She’s a consummate professional and Marna is honorable to her core, and I believe she’s a very special and unique leader.”
Flaks said, “When we were responding to the unknown, when there was tremendous uncertainty, she has great wisdom, and she remains thoughtful and curious, and I found her to be a tremendous thought partner. She was so steady and she was so purposeful and always focused on the betterment of what was right for the community.”
Lamont said in a statement that when he became governor, “no one could foresee the enormous impact of COVID-19 on Connecticut.”
“In trying to navigate through this pandemic, I knew I had a friend who was an expert in the field to help me and our state respond, and that was Marna,” Lamont said. “She has been a partner since day one during some of the most trying times our state has ever seen. She offered balanced and thoughtful input and helped us most directly at our toughest moments. I wish her all the best on an extremely well deserved retirement.”
Jennifer Jackson, CEO of the Connecticut Hospital Association, said Borgstrom has “been a force behind the hospitals standing and working together, and that was immensely important during COVID.” Borgstrom was “instrumental in all the hospital CEOs in the state getting together [and she] set up a variety of groups so we would have shared learning,” she said.
“I don’t know of anyone in the health care field that has made a greater impact or is respected more than Marna Borgstrom,” Jackson said. “She’s just an incredible person and we’re all better for having worked with her. I’m just going to miss her terribly.”
Borgstrom has overseen the acquisition of the financially struggling Hospital of St. Raphael, incorporating it into Yale New Haven Hospital, then adding Lawrence and Memorial Hospital in New London and Westerly Hospital in Rhode Island to further the health system’s reach. Milford Hospital was purchased and became part of Bridgeport Hospital. Smilow Cancer Hospital was built.
In 2010, Northeast Medical Group, which numbers 130 medical practices from Westchester County, N.Y., to Westerly, was added to the health system.
Epic
But for Borgstrom, the expansion of the health system into an integrated whole would not have been possible without one mundane but important element: a unified electronic records system, known as Epic. She called that “probably the best decision I helped drive because, at that time, all the hospitals literally were on different systems. They didn’t talk to each other. Our business systems were different.”
She retold a story from the New York Times Magazine about a 39-year-old man who went to Westerly Hospital in severe pain. He had swallowed a breath mint, but the cause of his pain couldn’t be determined, and he was flown by helicopter to Yale New Haven Hospital, where he was finally diagnosed with a rare disorder.
To Borgstrom, the ability for doctors in New Haven to call up the patient’s medical records and prepare for surgery and other procedures before he arrived is what makes the increasing size of today’s health care systems
worthwhile.
“That’s the classic example of why, if you’re a patient, it makes a difference, that a system of caregivers can not only talk to each other, but they can share information in real time,” Borgstrom said. Doctors in New Haven didn’t need to repeat the diagnoses and tests that had been done at Westerly.
“Those things happen all the time. … That’s when I feel really proud of the work that we’ve been able to do, because it made a difference in that person’s life.”
Borgstrom regularly gives credit to her staff as highly professional but also the kind of people who, “if I had a free Saturday evening and I was going out to dinner, which I’m not doing these days, I would probably choose to go out with many of my colleagues as much as anybody else because I really enjoy their company. I enjoy their spouses. A lot of us have been to one another’s children’s weddings.”
Those relationships are important, she said, because “this is not something that is a job, it’s a way of life. And I have worked with really great people.”
As for her leadership style, Borgstrom said it’s important to be passionate and intelligent, but, even more, “you have to be real, because people have pretty good meters of insincerity. And I get a lot of things wrong and any leader is going to, but what people have to know is that you’re there for the long haul and that you’re going to fix, as best you can, what didn’t work and bring people along with you. And I think that, whether you’re a man or a woman, those are the kinds of things that I try to impart to people about what it takes to be successful.”
Also, she said, “I think that vulnerability is an enormously important asset, almost in any leadership position. … I’ve always believed that you have to lead with your heart as much as your head. This is not just a thinking business. This is a feeling business.”
She said one of the things she’s missed most during COVID is the hugs. Before the pandemic, Borgstrom was at Lawrence and Memorial Hospital when a nurse received an award. “I had never met her before. She comes up and hugs me. And I liked that. … It’s part of who I am.”