In January 2004, Mike Duggan took over the Detroit Medical
Center, a health care system that had lost $500 million during the
previous six years, including $130 million in 2003. The available
time to turn the system around was growing short. “We basically
had about six months to get the place turned around,” Duggan
says. “The projection I was handed the day I started was that DMC
would be entirely out of cash by May 31 of 2004. That was the very
first thing our finance people handed me.” Turnarounds are nothing new to Duggan, the system’s president and CEO. The veteran
Detroit-area business leader has been helping perform them for
more than 20 years. But saving one of the largest hospital systems
in southeast Michigan is something above and beyond what even
Duggan normally encounters.
In the months prior to Duggan’s arrival, DMC had announced
plans to close the receiving wing of Hutzel Women’s Hospital,
which receives around 80,000 patients a year.
“A large number of them are poor, and Hutzel delivers 4,000
babies a year, many of them high-risk pregnancies,” he says. “So
the effect on the community would have been catastrophic.”
On top of the financial problems, the system’s talent base had
been depleted. Most of DMC’s upper and middle managers had left
the organization, leaving it without a clear sense of direction or
purpose.
Duggan needed to develop a plan to save DMC, find and cultivate
resources to make the plan happen, and along the way, get an
organization of nearly 12,000 people on board with the new vision.
