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Two very different ways to serve

How a practice administrator was influenced by a helicopter crash.

BY ZACHARY SMITH, MHSA

In February 2013, I was the director of Medical Support for the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit based in Okinawa, Japan. During a training mission in northern Thailand, one of our CH-46 helicopters clipped a tree while attempting to land on a mountainside and crashed in flames.

I was the casualty evacuation coordinator for the exercise. The following days were the longest of my professional life. My team was responsible for transporting the injured crew and moving the pilot, Maj. Brian Forney, who was in critical condition, from the crash site to Brooks Army Medical Center in San Antonio, TX.

Lt. Zachary Smith en route to Thailand in 2013.PHOTO COURTESY ZACHARY SMITH, MHSA

Drawing parallels

Since becoming a practice administrator nearly two years ago, I’ve discovered remarkable parallels between that brief but intense experience and my current daily challenges.

1. Craft a detailed plan. Casualty evacuation plans are drawn months in advance. Critical data, such as evacuation routes and key points of contact to be shared with all team members, are researched and compiled before the exercise starts. In like fashion, our leadership team at Evergreen Eye Center drew a detailed plan for our practice’s future. During several strategic planning meetings, we decided on our organizational philosophy; laid out a vision for the organization, including roles and responsibilities for management team members; and described how each department would contribute to the company’s overarching goals.

2. Trust your plan. When the helicopter crashed, we followed our plan, and executed it effectively, rescuing these four men and transporting Maj. Forney halfway across the world to a specialty burn facility. Similarly, Evergreen is striving to effectively carry out its plan despite various challenges. For instance, our department heads use the goals established in our strategic planning sessions to set more immediate quarterly goals. Our trust in the plan has resulted in better scheduling in our clinics, more efficient internal processes and greater customer satisfaction.

3. Know when to be flexible. Our first objective after the crash was to move the Marines from the crash site to a local hospital, but we could not get to them with our available resources. So, we adapted the plan and involved outside parties to help us extract the injured crew. We’ve also had to “adapt and overcome” at Evergreen to achieve our objectives. For example, we decided to move to a third-party payroll provider to upgrade over our internal system of interconnected spreadsheets. However, almost a year after this move, we still had some significant issues, so we switched providers again. Since then, our payroll process has been substantially easier and more manageable with far fewer errors.

Lessons learned

In responding to extreme circumstances, we can build character and grow in ways that lead to unexpected benefits later in life. I could not have anticipated how much the lessons learned during that helicopter crash would impact my approach to leading Evergreen Eye Center, but in retrospect it’s been profound. OP