HMO boss thrives under crisis care.

• Position: George Stokes of Doctors Health Plan Inc. - Brief Article

You've met them before: Those upbeat managerial types who think catastrophes are exciting chances to prove their mettle and claim to enjoy trying times. If you haven't, check out George Stokes.

Stokes, 52, became president of troubled Doctors Health Plan Inc., a Durham-based health-maintenance organization, after his former employer, Kaiser Permanente, pulled the plug on its money-losing North Carolina operations. Doctors is in even worse shape. It has lost almost $35 million in the past three years and was blasted in 1998 by the state Department of Insurance for lax oversight, including failure to check physician credentials. It faced possible license suspension if it failed a follow-up audit in March.

Stokes, who says he's convinced that good medicine and good service are the keys to HMO success, wasn't ruffled by the follow-up audit. Far from it. It's the kind of challenge he likes. "I'm kind of happy we're having an audit, because it keeps the focus right there [on service and health care] right from the beginning."

All chest-thumping aside, lousy health care wasn't Kaiser's problem. It was reliance on company-owned clinics that drove up fixed costs and reduced flexibility. That system works in dense urban areas such as Washington, D.C., Stokes says, but not in North Carolina's more sparsely settled cities.

Still, as administrator, then executive director, of Kaiser's Triangle operations, Stokes helped turn his division from a $13 million loser in 1997 to break-even by the third quarter of 1998.

He had come to North Carolina as administrator of Kaiser's west Raleigh office in 1991 from Connecticut, where he started his Kaiser career as a medical-office administrator in 1988. He spent three years as Kaiser's Charlotte area adminstator and held other adminstative posts in Raleigh before becoming president of the Triangle region in March 1999.

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