Ingram’s February 2023

Administration

AMY CASTILLO AbilityKC The call to serve and to provide entrepreneurial leadership ran strong through Amy Castillo’s family as she grew up in rural Missouri— her grandfathers, brother, and father, have decades of law enforcement contributions to community devel opment. “Service and building com munities is at the core of our family,” says the CEO of Ability KC, a leading

KAREN ORR Providence Medical Center

Law school? Maybe. Accounting? Definitely a possibility. But Karen Orr found her true calling while she was taking night classes at Kansas City Kansas Community College. “I went to work for a large multi-specialty clinic in Wyandotte County,” she re calls, and “it was here that I met the person that would eventually become

comprehensive outpatient medical rehabilitation facility in Kansas City. “The core of my career, in line with my family’s, is centered upon building relationships and partnerships in the communities where we live.” Castillo was an exercise science and psychology major at the University of Missouri who went on to earn a master’s in exercise physiology from Baylor University, then her MBA, with emphasis in human resources and marketing from the University of Dallas. After working in direct patient care and leadership roles in health-care settings in Texas—including her own management and consulting group—she came back to the Kansas City area. She signed on with Cerner Corporation in 2007, eager to explore ways that technology innovation would drive healthcare going forward. She then took on leadership roles at Viracor-IBT Laboratories (now Eurofins Viracor) and HCA Midwest Health before joining Ability KC in 2016. That wasn’t long after the Rehabilitation Institute of Kansas City had merged with Children’s TLC; a year later, she was overseeing the organization and working with a leading team of ex perts in medical therapies, education and workforce development. Ability KC serves over 3,100 individuals annually, who are living with disabilities, facing challenging conditions or recoveries from illness or injury, including strokes, spinal cord and traumatic brain injuries and amputations. What defines Ability KC, she says “is the culture and team of experts that provide person-centered services, improving access to necessary care, education and work-force devel opment, building bridges between health care and quality of life.”

my nursing mentor. She, along with my family, provided the sup port and encouragement I needed to take that leap.” During her final clinical rotation, Orr says, she was assigned to the sixth floor at Prov idence Medical Center, home to patients in the oncology, joint and spine units. “I knew from my first day of clinicals that this was the place I wanted to be, I had found my forever home,” she says. “The staff on the sixth floor were all so amazing, I wanted to grow up and be just like them!” Through her educational evolution from RN to MSN to MBA at North Dakota-based University of Mary, Orr devel oped skills that led her to administration. “I had no intent of ever leaving the patient-care area,” she says, but when a chief nursing of ficer left unexpectedly, the CEO came calling. “I’m not sure I would have accepted the offer had he not said to me, ‘Our hospital needs you to do this.’ Providence had given me so much for so many years, I felt this was an opportunity to give something back, so I accepted. Upon his retirement, that same amazing CEO told me that it was time for me to take on the CEO role, so here I am.” The 221-bed med ical center she oversees is a $550 million enterprise that recorded nearly 5,700 patient discharges last year. Not exactly suburban, not exactly urban, Providence serves a challenged population in western Wyandotte County. “We do serve a challenged population, but these are the people of our community … and they need us to be here and to care for them,” she says. In doing so, she has found something more meaningful than just a career. “Providence is my home, and the staff here has become my family over the years.”

ROY JENSEN University of Kansas Cancer Center Roy Jensen has propelled the University of Kansas Cancer Center to national prominence through a mixture of vision, determination, collaboration and salesmanship. But don’t overlook his very wry sense of humor. Exhibit A: “I picked medicine because I loved the science and nothing else really appealed to me, besides basketball,” he says. “Medical school was my plan B. I was going to be an NBA lottery pick.” Google, alas, has made it immeasurably harder for Jensen to pull anyone’s leg—the NBA lottery began a year after he earned his M.D. from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. The cancer center, before merging into the University of Kansas Health System, drew him here from Tennessee with a career-defining challenge: Make this one of the nation’s leading centers for cancer research and treatment. That was more than 20 years ago, and while he’s been overseeing administrative affairs there, he’s also been behind an unprecedented fundraising effort in these parts. It took a decade, countless hours and millions of dollars, but the center achieved a key goal in 2012, with designation as a national cancer center

from the National Cancer Institute. It took another decade for Comprehensive Cancer Center status, which his team earned last summer. That work has been transformative for the region, but it wasn’t exactly the career he’d envisioned. “OMG, No! I like to tell people that I have become a fully-differentiated USELESS administrator (particularly when other administrators are in the room),” Jensen says. “I have never in my career seen anyone who wanted to be an administrator from the get-go who was worth a plug nickel. I firmly believe you have to know the ropes before you can effectively lead, and that you decide to be a leader when you come to the realization that everyone around you is telling you that for the good of the organization you need to step up to the plate.” Last year’s prize isn’t the end of his goals: “NCI Comprehensive status is just a mile marker,” he says. “KUCC’s journey won’t be over until we are widely considered one of the best cancer centers in the world and we can prevent or cure every cancer.”

27

I ngr am ’ s

Kansas City’s Business Media

February 2023