When Michael Young took the helm of Grady Memorial Hospital in 2008, he had a mandate to rehabilitate a massive medical system on the verge of collapse.
Young is expected to announce his departure from Grady Thursday, having largely turned around -- some would say saved -- a metro Atlanta medical safety net that was drowning in debt and struggling with antiquated equipment and dwindling government aid.
Young is expected to announce his resignation at a special Grady board meeting Thursday morning, Fulton County Commission Chairman John Eaves said Wednesday, confirming news first reported by Channel 2 Action News.
"He came in and resurrected the hospital and pointed it in the right direction," Eaves said.
Young took the helm of Grady in 2008 after a group of community and business leaders joined together to save the hospital. He cut more than 100 positions, dismissed management officials he thought had tolerated mediocrity, replaced outdated medical equipment and shut down some services.
In 2010 he brought Grady its first profit. He leaves the hospital in stable condition, but still struggling financially.
Young accomplished the turnaround with a no-nonsense style of leadership considered arrogant by some. He angered workers when he said Grady tolerated a culture of inefficiency. His bluntness upset public officials, some whom were responsible for helping to fund Grady. And some community leaders worried he was a tool of the Atlanta business community intent on ending Grady's mission of helping the poor.
"He came in with an arrogant attitude," said state Sen. Vincent Fort, D-Atlanta, a leader of the patient advocacy group called the Grady Coalition. "He created what I understand to be a hostile environment."
The executive had been on a short list of candidates for a job out of state, said Thomas Dortch, a Grady corporate board member and chairman of the Fulton-DeKalb Hospital Authority board of trustees.
"I could imagine many places around the country would be looking for someone like Mike Young," Dortch said.
Young was part of a larger transformation of Grady Memorial Hospital, a massive medical facility that largely serves the poor of metro Atlanta. In 2007, some of Atlanta's most powerful business and community leaders banded together to bring in a new nonprofit board that took control of the hospital, which was on the verge of closing its doors. The new board essentially replaced a politically appointed authority that had been criticized for not turning around the hospital.
With that change came a promise of $200 million in capital funding from the Woodruff Foundation, which helped Young implement vast changes in the century-old facility. The hospital put in a $40 million electronic medical records system and implemented a $12 million expansion and modernization of the emergency room and trauma unit. Young helped convince Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus to donate $20 million to expand Grady's stroke care.
Even before he formally took office, Young established that he would have a hands-on approach to the hospital's finances. For three hours in his room in the Embassy Suites in Buckhead, he sat in shorts and reviewed every check over $1,000 that Grady had issued to vendors for a week.
As Young plans his departure, Grady has been hit by a string of financial setbacks. DeKalb and Fulton counties have cut their funding by $3 million each, following a reduction in excess of $10 million in federal funding for indigent care. Grady has a budget of more than $700 million.
Still, Eaves said, "any objective observer would say the hospital is in better shape. Whoever his successor is has a solid foundation to build on."
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