Health Care Heroes 2009

Margaret Perryman has been working in health care ever since she graduated from college. She started out as a clinical laboratory scientist working in hospital labs, but later switched gears to hospital administration, pursuing an MBA at the University of St. Thomas.

By 1987, when she was hired as the president and CEO of Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare, she was ready to put the whole institution under her microscope.

Gillette had a lot of problems at the time, Perryman recalls.

“Expenses were greater than revenue,” she says. “Therefore, we were losing money big time. There wasn’t one giant hole, but rather a bunch of little holes. There were some problems with reimbursement, and there were probably more people in the organization than the revenue could handle.”

Gillette had always been a hospital for children with disabilities, but not many people in the Twin Cities seemed to know what its strengths were. Perryman sharpened the focus, repositioning the hospital to serve specific niches including brain injury, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, spina bifida, complex orthopedics, and craniofacial conditions. She sought out the most advanced treatments and technologies. Then she worked to get the word out.

“It wasn’t just that people didn’t know what we did,” she says. “We also weren’t doing a good job of telling people what we were doing. So we articulated the patient populations that we were established to care for, and then began to organize our work around identifying what those patients’ needs were. If we didn’t have the resources to provide that kind of care, we set up programs and services so that we did.”

Within about 18 months, the hospital wasn’t losing money anymore. Slowly but surely, public awareness of the hospital grew, and more physicians started referring their patients to Gillette. Revenues swelled from $8 million in 1987 to $128 million in 2008. All in all, Perryman has presided over about 20 years of steady growth.

“I’m a person who sees service to others as very important,” Perryman explains. “When people are at their sickest and have had the worst things happen to them, that’s when you meet those people in health care. The importance of having an organization that’s ready to help people through these tough times—well, that matches my personal expectation of myself.”