In job interviews, Dr. Peter George is often asked if he always wanted to be a doctor.

His answer? No. 

“Growing up, I wanted to be a professional football player and a fireman and everything else,” he said. “But as I got into college and did my undergrad work, I went ahead and did the prerequisites for pre-med, mostly because I just wanted to see if I could do them at that point.”

And he said he realized he loved interacting with people and helping people solve problems. He majored in psychology as an undergrad and was debating whether to take the “long road” to becoming a doctor. 

“My grandmother said, ‘That time is going to go by whether you do it or not,’” George said. “I said, ‘You’re right.’ She goes, ‘Do what you want to do – what you enjoy.’ I picked medicine. I have never regretted it.”

He said as a doctor, people are very open, and in the doctor-patient relationship, they trust you with their information. 

“I feel privileged and honored to be able to sit with people and delve that deeply into their lives and help them feel better,” he said.

As chief medical officer for cardiovascular services at UnityPoint Health, George will provide clinical leadership and strategic direction for heart and vascular care across the UnityPoint Health footprint.

George, 59, joined UnityPoint in February and will practice in outpatient general, noninvasive and preventative cardiology. He previously served as the vice president of acute care services for OhioHealth, a nonprofit health care system. He also held administrative and clinical leadership roles within OhioHealth’s heart and vascular service line.

George is board certified in cardiovascular disease with a focus on outpatient general, preventative and noninvasive cardiology. He graduated from the Ohio State University College of Medicine and holds an MBA from the Ohio State University Fisher College of Business. He completed his cardiology fellowship at William Beaumont in Michigan, where he served as chief fellow in 1999-2000.

The Business Record sat down with George to learn more about his new role. 

This Q&A has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity and length.

You were the system vice president of acute care services at OhioHealth. How did that prepare you for this new role at Unity Point? 

I had been at Ohio Health for about 26 years, so I was in full-time practice there as a cardiologist for probably 18 years. I was in a large private practice that had been acquired by the hospital. We started our formal service lines in 2011, so I started in the heart vascular service line as an employed physician and one of the chiefs in the service line. In about 2017 I had the opportunity to apply for the vice president to run heart and vascular, which I did. I was in that position, running heart and vascular for about six years. And then about almost three years ago, the opportunity came up for this position, which was a larger position. It was running our acute care services. It was 10 inpatient services: anesthesia, critical care, radiology, emergency medicine, hospitalists and several others that were all in the system, inpatient services, and then what would be the equivalent of probably the chief medical officers here, we call them vice presidents for medical affairs. There, they reported to me as well. It was an attempt to take all of our inpatient services and put it under one roof. It was a really large position, probably too big for one person. This opportunity came up, and it was great to be able to come back to heart and vascular. It was an opportunity for me to help focus, do some clinical practice but also help build, hopefully, at the front end of the service line built here, both oncology and heart and vascular. It was a really nice opportunity for me, and that’s really what I’d like to be doing at this point in my career, is helping to build programs.

What was it about the UnityPoint position that attracted you?

No. 1, the culture of the place. I basically was cold-called by a recruiter who said, ‘We’re doing a national search for this position. Would you be interested?’ And when I heard UnityPoint, I had heard from other sources before, including some who work here, how great the culture was. I talked to some folks and then I came up to interview for two days. And everybody I met, first of all, was Midwest nice, which I’m used to, and I love the Midwest. So I really enjoyed that. They were all committed to really going this direction and building service lines here as a growth engine for not only the organization, but to focus on quality patient care, access for patients, everything that I’m really interested in trying to deliver, so it was just a good fit. And it was a time in my career where I was looking for an opportunity to focus on building programs, clinical pathways and patient care experience. 

When you say culture, what are you referring to?

I think the way people interact on a day-to-day basis, and when you’re a nonprofit health care organization like we are here, you’re not beholden to shareholders, you’re beholden to patients. You really want to deliver optimal patient quality, optimal patient care experience. And I like that environment better than a for-profit environment right now, where your focus is not always just on patient care, but it is here. And people here were very much committed to putting the patient at the center of everything they do. When I saw people interact with each other and interact with me during the two days of interviews, people were very down to earth, committed, hard-working with a little sense of fun mixed in too, which is important to have a little of that levity. Because what people do every day can be intense, but it’s nice when you have the opportunity to just socialize with one another and be together and treat each other as family. That’s what it felt like to be here. That culture was much more inviting and less sterile than I think you find a lot of places that are really, truly focused on finance and not as much on patient care.

There’s a growing need for cardiovascular care, according to the announcement of your new role. Can you talk about that? Why is that the case? 

Well, I think it goes all the way back to some of the HMO work that was started in the ’80s and ’90s, where there were programs actually shut down for specialty care cardiology, because people at the time felt like we’re not going to need as many specialists. We’re going to have more of this be primary care-driven, and not as many specialists. The problem is, I don’t know that everybody accounted for the longevity that we have now too. People are living so much longer that a lot of things, whether it’s neurocognitive care or it’s cardiovascular care, really are needed in later stages of life as well, and we just don’t have as many physicians coming out in those subspecialties, including cardiovascular work. You’ll find that studies based on Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data show a shortage of cardiologists. We’re already starting to feel that with practitioners. Telehealth, for example, can really help bridge the gap. A lot of younger people that come out now are doing training in more urban areas, and they want to stay in more urban areas. It’s harder and more challenging to recruit folks for rural communities too and subspecialties. The telehealth market and visiting consultations are a way for us to really expand our level of subspecialty care into those markets in a good way to help keep people close to home.

Are there other factors that are contributing to the increased need? You mentioned age. I was also reading about lack of physical exercise among Iowans.

That’s true nationally. I think as things become more convenient, they also become less and less of a good way, lifestyle-wise, to prevent disease. In other words, if things are more convenient, you have to move less. It’s like when remote control TVs came out. Now you have smartphones and tablets that allow people to sit in one place and do a lot of business, whether they’re shopping for groceries, and then those are delivered, whether they’re playing video games. As things become more online-based, it leads to less movement, and that’s really important as we age. I mean, staying in motion, low-resistance training, those things are incredibly important as we age, because people can get a little bit more sedentary. In what we call this epigenetic view, you’ll find a lot of things are genetic in cardiology, like they are in other disease-based specialties. However, lifestyle plays a big role, so if you can do things like, don’t be a smoker, don’t drink too [much], exercise on a regular basis, watch your diet, get a lot of good sleep, treat things like BMI and obesity. If you can do those lifestyle modifications, we can cut health care costs probably in half in this country. 

What sort of technology are you using to prepare for the rising cardiovascular demand?

Telehealth is big. They have things coming on the horizon, like remote robotics, where you can perform a robotic surgery with remote controls at a distance. So you could have some of the surgeries that take place in maybe more rural hospitals in the future, without having somebody on site doing the surgery, but could be at a set of controls somewhere else. Those things are on the horizon in more of a mainstream way, but certainly telehealth right now, the ability to have a clinic visit, the ability to see EKGs, see imaging studies remotely and not have to be there on site. I could have somebody perform an imaging study on you in a more rural setting, and then read that from here in Des Moines and give you the results, and do that in the clinic, because I can do all of that with telemedicine now and not have to make you travel.

When is remote robotics going to happen?

That always depends on who you ask and when it’s ready for prime time. It’s coming. It’ll be there in my lifetime, for sure, but it’s just a matter of how quickly and how accepting folks are to utilize that technology. And I would say that for telehealth, pre-COVID, there was a lot more resistance to telehealth. Post-COVID, I think there’s a lot less because during the COVID era, we all, by necessity, had to be remote. People would do their appointments on telehealth, or they’d sit out in the parking lot before they could come into the office, and that kind of thing. So post-COVID, I think people are much more accepting of the telehealth modality, and in some cases, they prefer it. In some cases, people that had not been able to travel during COVID say, ‘I still don’t want to travel, and I’d like to be able to have an offering here that’s remote. I can just stay in my regular community and do my clinic visit from here.’

Part of your goal is guiding the strategic direction for heart and vascular care. What is your strategic direction?

I’m in a getting-to-know-you phase with everybody in all the markets. What I’m doing right now, in the first 30, 60 days, is actually just trying to get around in person to all the markets, meet everybody, talk to the people who are on the ground and deliver the care about how they see the current state, what they feel like their opportunities are. But I think in the big picture, what we’d like to do is align a system strategy. So all of our markets, even though we want to modify those, sometimes for the local community, we’d like to all be aligned with a system strategy for UnityPoint Health and how we deliver care and the services we provide. In some ways, you can do that through tiering. For example, you can look at different hospitals in different communities, and say, in the large strategic picture of what should we be offering here, what makes sense in terms of services that we offer here versus that people might need to come to a Central Iowa location to receive, and that might be higher complexity surgeries or procedures in some cases. But again, we would like to put all of that together in a strategic plan to align all of our markets under a system strategy. What we don’t want to do is have people feel like we’re taking anything away from them. We want to make sure our patients have everything they need in their communities to be healthy and live healthy lives and have great outcomes. But understanding there might be some things that they might have to travel for, but we want to make those as convenient as possible.

In your time of listening, what have you observed and learned?

Well, there’s a lot of pride, which is fantastic to see. A lot of pride in how people deliver care here. Patient experience is incredibly important to everybody, even as we move through the financial piece of it, where people say, ‘Hey, we want to reduce our total cost of care. We want to reduce the burden on the patient to have to pay, and we want to do everything we can to make sure that we’re being good stewards of the finances as we deliver the care.’ But their experience, where they get their care, whether it’s Central Iowa or a more rural market, has to be consistent. I think people are excited for that prospect. I don’t have all the answers, but I think working with the teams, and in partnership with the teams we have some great minds here already. That means everybody, no matter where they enter our system, is going to get great care.

In your years caring for patients, what have you learned about heart care?

I think making it as simple and straightforward for people as we can. We get caught up sometimes as providers in the medical jargon. And when you’re talking to another physician, that’s fine, but when you’re talking to patients, you really have to speak in layman’s terms, and make sure that they actually understand what you’re saying to them. A lot of people, when they come into a physician’s office, it’s it can be anxiety provoking and nerve wracking, and a lot of times people nod their heads because they hear you’re saying something, but you want to make sure they’re absorbing what you’re saying to them and that you’re good partners with them in the care. So if people leave, you have to make sure that when they leave, they do understand, what is my diagnosis? What does that mean to me? What are you going to do to help me resolve my issues? And how does that follow up look in the long term? So I think communication is key. You cannot ever be resistant to somebody asking you questions. You have to be open minded, and you have to be understanding of their point of view and be empathetic to the fact that they’re coming in. They’re not supposed to be experts in the field. You’re supposed to be the expert in the field, and you have to allow people to ask questions. 

What are your goals in your position?

I think being the best doctor I can be in my clinical practice. I had gotten away from it for a little while and done more administrative work, so getting back to a little bit more practice time will be great for me, because I really missed that part of it. But then working as a team here with people, I’m really a proponent of the team approach. I think if you get multiple people in a room who are all good in their areas, you can almost solve any problems. So I’m really looking forward to working as a team with the folks here to just continue to optimize the care delivery. I know UnityPoint Health has been very supportive and supports the concept of creating a service line to organize our efforts and to put the patient at the center and make sure that care delivery is very consistent, no matter where you’re getting it.

What is your leadership style?

I think I’m pretty straightforward and open. I believe in being honest and transparent and answering every question. I don’t like to hide from anybody. So I’m an open book. I give everybody my cell phone number and say, ‘Call me anytime. Come to my office anytime.’ Physicians are very reasonable people, and they’re just driven people, and so if they ask you to do something, and you can do that, do it for them, and it makes sense to do it, I wouldn’t say no to that. If it has to be a no, then I believe in explaining why it’s a no and being very upfront with folks and letting them know that. Similarly, with patients, I think, trying to soften the blow for patients, you need to be diplomatic. But people want to hear the truth, and you’ve got to deal with them on that level and be very honest and open with them. And so you have to be tactful. It’s unfair not to arm people with all the information that’s there, whether they’re patients, whether they’re colleagues, whether they’re people that work on your team.

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At a glance

Hometown: Columbus, Ohio

Resides: West Des Moines

Family: Wife, Jodi, five adult children and four grandchildren

Hobbies: Reading historical fiction, playing handball, going to music and theater performances 

Email: peter.george@unitypoint.org