With a passion for rural health care and putting people first, Ellsworth County Medical Center CEO Andrew Bair has helped ECMC uphold its commitment to improving lives since he took the helm a little more than a year ago.

In a community where there’s a good chance the person in charge of your care knows you, that commitment is critical.

“In this organization, I talk quite openly about what we call ‘love-based care,’” Bair said. “We take care of these people because we love them. Now in a small organization … if you don’t know the person in front of you, there’s a high likelihood of someone that’s working on that very same shift shoulder to shoulder with you who knows this person and is probably part of their family. I think that brings a different level of joy to what it is we do.”

The joy is an important part of working and living in a rural community.

An Ohio native, Bair said he got his start in health care as a teenager when he took a job at a large hospital outside of Dayton in the kitchen. With an interest in art and early aspirations of making a career in commercial advertising, Bair said he initially thought that kitchen job would be his last stop in health care.

But being an art major in college was vastly different than creating art as a hobby. Bair returned to the same hospital, taking a summer job with the grounds crew and transferring to patient transport once the summer ended.

“I went up into the inpatient rooms and it was a 450-bed facility,” he said. “We’d get people either on a stretcher or in a wheelchair and take them to physical therapy, and I took them back and forth all day long. That’s what I did for three months.”

Bair enjoyed talking with the patients and soon the physical therapists asked him to take on more tasks — first cleaning treatment areas and then performing underwater ultrasounds and assisting in the gym. The experience made Bair realize how much he loved physical therapy.

“I thought I wanted to be a physical therapist and there were no physical therapy schools nearby, but there was a nursing school attached to the hospital,” he said. “I got in, and that’s how I got into healthcare.”

From there, Bair’s career has encompassed everything from home health to traumatic brain injury rehabilitation, acute psychiatry and substance abuse, to ER and ICU. After earning his initial associate degree in nursing, Bair completed a bachelor’s degree in nursing and a Masters of Business Administration.

In between the degrees and various job titles, Bair met and married Robin, his wife of 29 years. The couple raised six children together, all of whom are now grown and scattered around the country.

All of his experience has given him a unique perspective as a health care administrator.

“I just know what it’s like to work on the front lines, so that’s been a real benefit,” he said. “I enjoy talking with the clinical people about their challenges, I like helping them overcome some of their challenges and I know that I empathize with them with some of the things that happen.”

Being able to relate to his staff has been an important aspect of Bair’s first year at the hospital. He moved his office into the hospital, making himself available for staff concerns, ideas and more.

“I want to be able to be here to help them, or at least hear them out and find out what’s going on,” Bair said. “It’s hard to lead people that you don’t see.”

And with a staff of just 175 employees, Bair said cultivating that culture of care to ECMC has been the secret to the medical center’s success over the last year.

ECMC’s wound care and pain management clinics opened last year and are already set to expand hours of availability. The facility also offers an impressive array of technology and medical equipment for a hospital of its size with top of the line ultrasound and imaging equipment, and a 3D mammography service that comes in to do testing. A BioFire diagnostic incubator can identify bacterial and viral strains in a matter of hours, cutting down on the dispensation of unnecessary or ineffective antibiotics.

Bair said a dedicated management team and his predecessor laid the groundwork for the progress visible today.

“I believe that if you don’t take care of your technology, you’ll lose a physician’s trust in you as an organization to be able to do diagnostic tests,” Bair said. “And diagnostic testing is the lifeblood of a revenue source for a small facility. So, they did really well [with that] and now since I’ve been here, we’ve continued that.”

And at the end of the day, providing the best care possible is the only thing the really matters.

“We’re taking care of our family and our neighbors at their times of highest need and we’re going to help them navigate through that, and that is incredibly satisfying and worthwhile,” Bair said. “I think it’s sacred work.”

“I think that brings a different level of joy to what it is we do.”

Andrew Bair

Administrator, Ellsworth County Medical Center