Amber Deardorff, the new president and CEO of Mary Greeley Medical Center, used to be a sprinter. But then she realized when she takes longer runs, it helps her “cope through the day-to-day” and figure out problems.

These days, Deardorff, who recently qualified for the Boston Marathon, sets the alarm for 4:45 a.m. to wake up for these runs, which she said have shaped her as a person and a leader.

“I don’t mind the suck,” she said. “Some of these running events, or some of the athletic events, it kind of sucks halfway through it and you spend hours in this … ick phase. And sometimes our careers are like that too. It’s just getting used to how you manage your own emotions in those times and being able to come through on the other end.”

In addition to running, Deardorff, 45, said she manages her emotions by being calm and letting herself reflect. 

“I really can go inside and I do a lot of prayer, I do a lot of self reflection,” she said. “In this role, particularly, I’m always on stage.”

She said she’s focused on making sure she gives each meeting her attention, regardless of the last meeting she had. 

“I need to be there for them, so that is what helps me reset myself,” she said. “And then I have an excellent support system at home, and I don’t know if I could do it without that.”

Deardorff began serving as the Ames hospital’s president and CEO Aug. 1, following a search process.

Deardorff succeeds Brian Dieter, who retired after 17 years in the role.

Deardorff joined the Mary Greeley staff in 2003 as a patient care technician. She served as a registered nurse in intensive care before joining the clinical applications systems team, which manages the electronic health records system and other applications. In 2017, she became part of the hospital’s administrative team, serving as vice president for clinical and support services. She was promoted to vice president, chief operating officer and chief nursing officer in 2023. 

The Business Record recently sat down with Deardorff.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Could you tell me about your career trajectory that led you to the CEO position?

I went to Iowa State University and I was in a kinesiology program so I always joke with our employees that I came to Mary Greeley because I had to. I had to do an 80-hour internship for that kinesiology program before I could graduate from Iowa State and I truly had all intentions of moving out west with my husband, but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my career at that point. And so I came here, and there was an opening in a cardiac rehab department, and so I interned there for 80 hours. And truly, that’s what opened my eyes to health care. I really started looking around to others in the community that also had health care jobs or experiences, started talking with them and decided, OK, there’s something pretty special about this field, so I can put off moving out west for another 18 months, or 24 months. 

I graduated from Iowa State University, and then enrolled down at Grand View to obtain my bachelor’s of nursing. I figured I should probably start working with patients to make sure this is something that I like and that would fulfill me long term, so I came to Mary Greeley in 2003 as a patient care technician. While I was in nursing school, I worked at the bedside as a nurse’s aide, and then once I graduated from Grand View, took my first position in the intensive care unit as a bedside nurse, worked all the different shifts, worked weekends, worked overnights, worked days, and it was great. I had small children, and the overnights, weekend[s] started to disrupt family life, so I just went online and looked for a position that would be daytime hours that I would be interested in here at Mary Greeley and there was an opening for an IT job. I was the one working with the clinical staff and making sure that the electronic health record matched what their workflows were.

It was about that time that Mary Greeley and McFarland Clinic decided to implement Epic [electronic health care records]. That’s when I became a leader of our Epic department and I did that for many years prior to my executive role. And then while I was in that Epic director’s position, the vice president at that time, her name was Lynn Whisler, I worked closely with her because she was over my department, and she came to me at one time and said, ‘Hey, I’m going to be retiring in the next few years. I think you might be a good successor for me.’ She really took me under her wing and started including me on some things. Helped me develop in areas that I might not have had an expertise in. When she retired, I applied for my first executive job here, and in 2017 was promoted to vice president of clinical and support services. And then Brian Dieter, who was CEO, he was also looking to retire, and said, ‘Hey, I think you might be a good successor for me, and let’s make sure you have the experience that you would need. If that does happen, if you are the right candidate, then we can transition you.’ It was at that time I was promoted to chief operating officer and then chief nursing officer as well.

It’s interesting how careful leadership has been about succession planning, and that provided mentorship and training for you as you navigated the system.

[It also provided] a safe place too, because you don’t know what you don’t know, and if you have a mentor around, then you can be a little vulnerable to ask questions if you’re not really sure. Or if it’s a new setting, you can just quietly take them aside and say, ‘OK, we talked about all this stuff in the meeting, and I don’t understand. Can you help me understand some of the laws or regulatory things that I just wasn’t exposed to in my current role or my previous roles?’

What does a bedside nurse do?

Nurses are at the bedside caring for the patients. We’re the ones interacting with the patients, their families, we help carry out the physician’s orders, certainly, we’re giving medications. We’re helping with any of the treatment plans. We help develop care plans for the patients at the bedside, and then we’re a part of that interdisciplinary team, so we have lab technicians, we have radiology staff, we have physical therapists, physicians, obviously, that whole complement of people helping that patient get better.

Do you think your experience as a nurse has helped you in your role as CEO to empathize with nurses and physicians?

Yes, 300%. You can have a little bit of empathy for what they’re experiencing on a day-to-day basis, because it’s not an easy job. Sometimes the patients are super sick, and sometimes it’s a very challenging situation. Sometimes you’re at the bedside when the patient is passing, or [when] they’re receiving really, really terrible news, and you’re the one there to help the patient cope through all of those things. So it is challenging, but I can’t think of a more rewarding career or profession. Bedside care is so rewarding, so incredible, because the impact that you have on those patients is long lasting.

What was one of the first things that you did or wanted to do when you became CEO?

Brian, our previous CEO, and our organization did so many great things, and so really coming into this role, I was committed to continuing that excellence. We will continue to focus on our patients and their experience and their safety. We know we can’t do that without a super engaged workforce, so I’ll continue to be dedicated and focused on those things. Then I think just as we look forward, recruitment of physicians, recruitment of our staff, that continues to be a struggle for health care, so how can we work with colleges to develop pipelines? How can we get students in our doors to have them experience our culture and what we do here?

Tell me about your plan to help combat physician shortages.

I think the plan is how do we ensure in the state of Iowa that we have the specialties needed? And I know University of Iowa, our governor, DMU [Des Moines University Medicine and Health Sciences], they are working on plans, but we have to be able to attract those students and physicians to our community. I just met with the Ames mayor yesterday, and we were just discussing, how can we attract some of these types of specialties into our community? What is our community lacking? How can we continue to be an attractive choice? Most people want mountains or oceans, and we have neither, and we have bad winters. Part of it is getting into elementary schools, high schools. We have big programs with that, trying to have health care days here, having them job shadow, but obviously that’s going to take awhile to see that pipeline. But we do know physicians that grew up in this area are probably likely to come back and stay in this area.

What is Ames lacking? How did that conversation with the mayor go? 

I don’t think it’s even lacking anything. It’s just Iowa State University being here, it’s tremendous. It brings all the sporting events. It’s multicultural. We have a good education center here. I think housing, just like any community, continues to be something we focus on. So how do we have the high-end houses that are offered for some of these more professional industries, and then we have students here, and we have all ranges in the salary scale, so how do we provide low-income housing?

How are technology and artificial intelligence changing the workflows in health care? 

This is where, if we have our crystal ball for the next five to 10 years, I think we’re going to see the most growth in AI and some of this technology. Technology has always been a very big part of health care, and I think it really improves our processes and outcomes. But AI in particular, we’re already starting to see it obviously in our business function. Where I’m really excited is helping the clinicians at the bedside. There’s a capability now called ambient listening. In a clinic setting, for example, you have this ambient listening, and it’s transcribing the note within the medical record, and then the physician would go in to review the note and accept it. Instead of this physician spending sometimes hours at the end of their day making sure that they’re documenting all their patient interactions, the systems within the room are doing it for them. They’re not saved. It’s not kept in any file until the physician saves it into the chart and reviews it. The technology is emerging. But getting that into a hospital room as well would help, which is all the documentation that our nurses and bedside staff do each and every day.

When are you hoping to implement that technology?

It’s on our roadmap, and once it’s available, and maybe a few other customers try it out, we will certainly be interested in something like that. 

What else is on your roadmap? What are your goals for the coming year? 

We have a pretty robust strategic plan, and we have four main, we call them Big Dot Goals. First and foremost is patient safety, and within that goal is no patient coming into our hospital should experience harm on our account. So looking at surgical site infections, catheter-associated urinary tract infections, falls at the bedside. A major focus of our organization and many other hospitals is how are we preventing patient harm? That is something that we do each and every day. It’s every department. We are all tracking harm within the organization. It’s the pursuit of zero. If you talk about the long term, it’s zero. For this year, we only had one event of harm. That’s still one too many.

Another goal is all about patient experience. When our patients come in, we want to make sure that they receive the very best care, safe care, and have a good experience as well. We’re working with each department on those experience scores. And then the third goal is all about our workforce. Our workforce is our employed staff, our physicians and then our volunteers. We want to make sure that they feel engaged in the work that they do. On day one, our new hires hear, ‘We want to make sure that you’re engaged in your work, and if you have any frustrations or if you have any ideas on how to improve your workflow, we have a system in place’ where they are able to make that change. It has to be systematic, and we can’t just have 1,500 employees making their own little individual changes, but we do have a really good program on how they can improve the work that they do each day. The final goal is all about the margin. We’re a nonprofit, but we want to continue to invest in our community, into this hospital, so we always say, ‘Hey, having a buck at the end of the day allows us to reinvest in the organization and our patients.’

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At a glance

Hometown: Templeton, Iowa 

Education: Bachelor of arts degree in exercise and sport science from Iowa State University, a bachelor of science degree in nursing from Grand View University and a master of public administration from Drake University 

Family: Husband and three kids

Hobbies: Running, hiking, snow-skiing, reading, cooking

Resides: Ames

Email: deardorff@mgmc.com

Editor’s note: This story was updated Friday, Dec. 12 to correct the spelling of Amber Deardorff’s name in one instance.