DR . WHO
in the business of medicine and decided to get his Master ’ s in Business Administration from UofL in 2015 . After finishing his MBA , Dr . Boel served as the Board Chair for the Physician Governance Board until December 2020 , serving as the bridge between administrators and providers . Knowing that he was getting more invested in the administrative side and that the then-Chief Medical Officer was planning to retire , new doors began to open . In August 2019 , after 23 years with the group , Dr . Boel was named CMO of Clark Memorial Hospital .
“ One of the things that really helped is that I ’ ve been here for a long period of time . Leadership in the hospital and I already had a relationship of trust ,” he said . “ But I had to come into the role knowing that they were going to teach me a lot more than I was going to teach them . You can ’ t go into it thinking you have all the answers because you don ’ t .” When he came into this new role , he was juggling both his full-time practice as well as his CMO duties , which quickly became a challenge . In early 2020 , he switched to part-time with Jeffersonville Pediatrics and in December , he retired from the practice . Now , his days are filled with administrative duties , focusing on quality and patient care initiatives .
“ The biggest focus of my job is the quality aspect . Making sure that we are improving harms reductions , patient satisfaction , improvement of patient care and follow-up care . When the patient leaves the hospital , we still take care of them . So much of what happens inside the hospital walls is predetermined by what happens outside the hospital walls .” Something that was important to Dr . Boel when he saw patients was making connections with people , and he sees it as no different in his current role . “ One of the things that has been the most fun about this job is that I get to interact
with everyone in the hospital on some level or another . I work with a lot of really smart people that are really dedicated .”
While he ’ s in and out of meetings daily , he sets aside some time each day to focus on one department or facet of the job , looking at how he can help improve things or work on initiatives that leaders in their departments want to drive . Coming into his role as CMO in August 2019 , there was no way he could have imagined what was to come in the following year . He had about six months transition time between taking on the new role and beginning to plan for the impending pandemic . After hearing initial reports of COVID-19 cases overseas , Dr . Boel and his team started looking at how to prepare locally as early as December 2019 . “ We started down the path of preparedness because we knew it was inevitable ,” he said . “ Through discussions with CMOs at other facilities , we knew that COVID-19 was going to come to the US and to our front door , so we started making preparations early on .”
In January and February , those plans kicked into high gear in terms of PPE requirements , isolation policies , ICU patient care and so on . Even though guidance was changing daily in the first few months of the pandemic , his team was thoroughly prepared for what was handed to them . That comfort level quickly ran low when the second wave hit in the middle of 2020 . “ In the second wave , the challenge was just the sheer number of patients . As far as health care as a whole , we had to make a lot of different adjustments . We knew that whatever the health care industry didn ’ t get right the first time , we could not miss the second time around .” The other big concern was how many of their staff members were being affected outside the hospital , which changed the entire staffing model inside the
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