Robert Coleman has always tried to outperform himself and make a lasting impact on both health care and the patients he has served, first as a nurse and then in hospital administration. On April 3, he’ll be doing those things as the new CEO and administrator for Baptist Memorial Hospital-Golden Triangle.
On March 13, Coleman was tapped for the top position at the 323-bed hospital in Columbus. BMH-GT is one of the largest hospitals in the Memphis, Tennessee-based Baptist Memorial Health Care system.
Former CEO Paul Cade is transitioning to the CEO position at BMH-Memphis on April 3.
Coleman began his path in health care at Mississippi University for Women, earning his bachelor’s degree in nursing in 2003 and following the course of several family members and friends who had also chosen a career in health care.
He would stay in the Golden Triangle throughout the rest of that year as a nurse at Oktibbeha County Hospital before moving to Vicksburg with his wife to be a nurse at River Region Medical Center’s critical care unit. Working there, he began to informally take on leadership roles when the opportunity arose. It did not go unnoticed.
“I was taking on team leadership nurse roles to orchestrate different things and also planning and strategizing (care at the hospital),” Coleman said. “And I did that while I was working at the bedside in the critical care unit.”
That attitude would lead a supervisor to ask him to apply for a job as director of the hospital’s critical care units in 2005, where he would oversee the day-to-day operations of the unit until 2010.
Coleman joined the Baptist Health Care System administration first as an administrative director for emergency and critical care services at Mississippi Baptist Medical Center that same year until 2015, then as assistant vice president for Mississippi Baptist Health Systems until 2018, when he took over at Yazoo and Attala.
“I really liked it, really making a difference, you know?” Coleman said. “Working with people and providing the best results for the patients we’re serving, and how can we do it better. I really liked that challenge with health care.”
In managing care units and as VP for Baptist Health Systems, Coleman focused on growing Jackon’s and later Attala and Yazoo’s outpatient care by attracting optometrists, obstetricians, gynecologists and other private practitioners to locate on Baptist properties. In 2019, he led a kick-start of Attala’s outpatient care facility and helped open Yazoo’s rehabilitation and outpatient care center in 2021 to serve more patients at the hospital.
“These hospitals didn’t have a lot of outpatient services and I saw that as a huge opportunity for me with some of the connections I had with specialists in the Jackson market for so many years,” he said. “So I went in, used my networking with the relationships that I had in the Jackson market, and over the past three and a half to four years, I’ve been able to add probably around seven or eight specialists to these markets (Attala and Yazoo).”
Now that Coleman is packing up his desk and moving to Columbus, he said he needs to get his feet wet before he starts implementing any changes or improvements to the hospital.
“I don’t think the right thing to do is to go in there and make changes when you don’t even know about the team or what was being done,” he said. “The best thing for me is I’ll have a 90-day plan for myself to go in, meet and learn the teams and providers and employees. I’ll do a lot of learning, self reflecting on myself for what they’ve done. If there are opportunities (to grow), then we will work together as a team to figure those out.”
Coleman also noted the challenges facing many hospitals such as recruitment and sustaining staff, don’t appear to be an issue at BMH-GT because of the work of the hospital recruitment team. Currently, the hospital has a staff of more than 100 physicians and surgeons and 1,200 other staff.
Even still, Coleman has seen a shortage of medical technicians and other technical skilled labor and sees the goal of obtaining and retaining those staff at the hospital important to the vitality of any hospital.
“GTR has done a phenomenal job to be able to retain nurses,” he said. “The other big challenge is our technicians, technologists, those are hard to come by. There is an opportunity that we can look at there.”
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 41 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
